The drama has reached the point where it seems we have found a way to accept tax-deductible donations in the US, and German TV is asking for a 15-minute interview.
And someone says: “admit that it turned out badly,” ha ha.
By the way, to save everyone from the usual round of naïve questions (“do you store IP addresses?”, …), to dispel a few comforting illusions about what Terms of Service actually mean, and to give you a glimpse into what it feels like to run, moderate content, and support a website, we highly recommend Kevin Nguyen’s novel New Waves.
It’s a sad, sharp, and often very funny story about a website that differs from ours in only one key respect: it promised not to preserve content, but to delete it on a schedule. As you might guess, that promise becomes the most fragile and consequential part of the whole enterprise. The book captures something that anyone who has worked behind the scenes of an internet platform will immediately recognize: the gap between what users imagine, what policies declare, and what operational reality demands.
We doubt Kevin was OSINTing us—or even knew we existed—when he wrote it. And yet the parallels are striking. In fact, there are more accidental coincidences there than in some stories written by people who explicitly tried to study us.
If you want to understand not just how platforms present themselves, but how they actually function under pressure—read or listen it. It won’t answer every question, but it might help you ask better ones.
In a response you said: "I would understand your claim if you wrote that you unsubscribed from recurring donations. But why should I—or anyone else—be interested in your use of a free utility?" Maybe you shouldn't be interested, except that my concerns seem to be shared by lots of other people — and by Wikipedia, which says you are no longer trustworthy. Maybe you don't care about that either, but if you don't care what users or Wikipedia or any of its users think then why did you bother setting up archive.today in the first place?
Wikipedia is more than just a lesbian SJW politbüro trying to hide behind a hypernym. Wikignomes (actual content writers) love us for neat features like accordion unfolding or joining multi-page content into a single page, while WMF tries to distance itself from copyright issues and always remained silent. All of this has low priority for many reasons; for example, it seems that this is the only site that actively uses the archive whose bosses have never reached out to us to ask anything or negotiate anything (the only contact is GreenC who is not even allowed to run their WaybackMedic on WMF servers). So it’s mutual.
Why bother setting up: to watch over some pages changing over time. The mistake was to release a free service to the public, it must be paid (or by-invite) from the beginning. There are way too many free users.
anyway, what's your relations to verified.lu?
The same as to the Olympic ice skater: Patokallio’s cherry-picking.
Better ask Patokallio why he wrote on verified.lu and ignored the ice skater, and how that logic got propagated to become an authoritative source? And how should we treat those who spread this (including Wikipedia), realizing that it is either satire or provocation? With flattery, perhaps?
The archive does host a lot of CSAM though - not to impugn the work of the archive, but whenever somebody seems to report CSAM to the archive, pages are merely hidden rather than fully removed (eg with a vpn). A user complained on x a while ago about the archive not removing CSAM when reported and some archived pages (like smutty.***) contain potentially hundreds of CSAM. Have you at least considered looking yourself and removing any CSAM you see?
CSAM in user (not, for example, NCMEC’s) reports is often not actually CSAM, but merely a magic word they expect will prioritize their messages. It is not uncommon for users to claim copyright on their “CSAM.”
Many Smutty’s pages reported by authorities have been removed, so I assume they have reviewed everything. Total removal of whole Smutty is sort of an OSINT case, not a CSAM one.
I wanted to say I still support you on liberapay, but now I see I stopped paying about a year ago when my card somehow stopped working. Oops. Maybe you should set a paywall, lol. (No, I love that you don't.) Your site is great even with all the recent drama. You and that girl that does Sci-Hub are two heroes of the internet that everyone somehow also pretends to hate. Of course in the ideal platonic world your site would not be necessary, but here we are.
thanks!
Well, then let me chim in: I cancelled my weekly Liberapay donations to you in January after all of the DDoS nonsense. Why should I continue to donate to you after you've just destroyed all trustworthiness you had?
I guess I have already addressed this in my previous messages.
I have used and like archive.today, but the knowledge that when I use it, my browser is hijacked to DDoS some guys website — or that archive.today has been altering screenshots of pages — makes me question whether I can trust your service any more. Why should I continue to use it?
Well, I would understand your claim if you wrote that you unsubscribed from recurring donations. But why should I—or anyone else—be interested in your use of a free utility? The less you use it, the better it works for the rest, the more time I have for developing new features. It’s already answered as the first question in a new work-in-progress FAQ
I want to take a moment to share another story. This is the second time the archive has been called an “internet notary,” and the previous case also led to retrospective changes.
There’s a fairly widespread scam going around (and it may still be active): stock photo agencies send claims to small website owners, demanding, for example, $9,000 for alleged copyright infringement. If the victim contacts a lawyer, the lawyer often jumps at the opportunity to increase both GDP and overall happiness index, saying something like: “Give me $1,500, and I’ll negotiate with the agency to settle for $3,000”.
These scammers have started using the archive as an “internet notary,” adding statements like: “Even if you delete our protected image, we have notarized proof in the archive,” effectively turning us into their unwitting accomplice.
Right now, this should be the group most disappointed. Aren’t you one of them?
I get your perspective is different and its true that the site has been unfairly maligned for a long time. I guess my perspective is different because I've been using the site for over a decade, and I have deeply appreciated what you are doing, I've donated in the past. Your site is a valuable resource precisely because it often contradicts the narrative of those 'noble' sites. It may feel like a thankless effort, it likely is but its relevance shows its not a lost cause. Thanks for those years.
Thanks for warm words
in /post/111781148156/are-some-ips-blocked-to-reache-your-site you mention the block
Oh, 11 years ago… it is probably not actual anymore
out of curiosity what was the reason for blocking small netblock in Poland ?
Which one? the blocks are mostly AS-based, not country.
In general, many media company offices are blocked; not only because of this drama, we have dramas almost daily (they just lack their own finn to broadcast): in Poland, Wyborcza employees actively bypassed paywalls on competing news outlets and at the same time wrote complaints to Google on 3rd party browser extensions related to archive (the same asserting nobility through a scapegoat).
The entire reason your site was valuable is because of its credibility as a third party archival site. There's a reason the U.S. govt wants to find anything they can to discredit you; because it threatens them to have an objective resource that you can reliably point as proof something was on the Internet or was changed. With this DDoS shit and editing pages you have completely destroyed the site's credibility, & for what? bafflingly self-induced sabotage. Now you've given an excuse not to care.
Well, look at the attitude of the articles and discussions before the “DDoS” (or even FBI) story. Was it significantly better? The bias was there already.
Myself, I am not happy with this pivot toward being a pirate site where noble websites offload their shit to notorious, making them even more noble and us more notorious.
The drama just incised an existing abscess that would have burst eventually anyway, while you suggest petting and powdering it.
For us it is definitively better, for nobles — not so. Don’t you consider their actions as “self-induced sabotage”?
Yet another improvement: in the absence of tabloid dramas (yet presence finne troll blogs), it was easy for attackers like WAAD to depict us as a “child porn” website: they just put into their report much more various (dis)info overwhelming our media presence. A “website banned on Wikipedia” must be not a “child porn” one at least, while the finne troll’s initial discourse and its dissemination by tabloids was open—not to say crafted—for such interpretations, heavily contributing to increasing trust in letters from WAAD, June Maxam and other trolls (the conflict with the finne troll lies in this, not in his disclose of anything sensitive; that has now been corrected by finne himself, and even better than if he had simply deleted his post). It’s not about number of people read the blog. It’s about what someone who’s never heard of us would see first after getting a WAAD-letter. For example, if they check Wikipedia’s article, or whatever AI tools show them first. If the quotes come from the finne blog, she’ll likely believe the letter, there are also Russian Carders, German Jews, FBI and so on, right? If “this site was used on Wikipedia for years and then got banned for some rant” she likely won’t. The default reputation baseline—thanks to Jani Patokallio’s compilations—was around a “russian” “jew” “shady” “underground” “guerrilla” “carder” “child porn” “FBI wanted” website, not “a wholetrusted internet notary”, as you try to depict.
If you think this is all paranoia and conspiracy theories, consider the fact that WAAD registered a French association whose sole activity, after a year spent in the cold, was to launch a barrage of complaints against us. Trolls are patient operatives, they do play the long games.
Also stop fucking coping about how this was actually "worth it" and a good thing. Take some responsibility for the position and importance you had, and how utterly useless your entire handling of this has been even in pursuit of whatever retributive goal you had in mind. Have you ever heard of the Streisand effect? You do realize that by tying the downfall of the site to that guy's blogpost, now people will have to talk about it as context for what you did? Just own it and admit the mistake.
That’s basically “keep calm and serve a freeloading ingrate”.
On growth limits, finances, and why OSINTers focus on seemingly random, yet interconnected people:
The “startup” logic seems straightforward: if you have users, buy more servers, grow, invest. Add a paywall or a donation button with sad eyes to cover costs.
So, what’s stopping you?
The lack of reliable financial infrastructure.
This isn’t about post-2022 Russian sanctions or allegations of facilitating illicit activity via PayPal. It’s about the impossibility of reliably exchanging or transferring significant sums within a predictable timeframe without falling victim to a scam (on lower-level services) or triggering an AML check (which often feels like a scam in itself). If there is a delay, the service dies. If you accumulate too many donations on PayPal, you get flagged, and your account is frozen for six months. If you transfer funds to or from a crypto exchange, your bank account may be locked, forcing you to travel thousands of kilometers to resolve it (it was fun during COVID, trying to navigate vaccine mandates). Going 100% Monero (or even Bitcoin) is impossible: donation volumes are significantly lower in crypto, and there are many expenses in fiat. All kinds of intermediaries and small underground fintech companies come to the rescue, but there is a limit to relying on them: how much can you really trust them? Over time, it only gets worse: exchange fees and the risk of losing the entire transaction amount keep growing.
The names and pseudonyms that catch the attention of OSINTers (and probably the FBI, given their interest in “who paid and where”) are not fully random. They often belong to these fintechs: the names used on their credit cards, for example. These are the names of both managers and “drops”, sometimes used unwittingly. Among them are those who worked honestly but are now resentful that OSINTers exposed their names in the context of archives and “piracy,” effectively preventing them from creating new ventures. Then there are those who ran away with the money (including some of ours) and are now actually on the run from police and creditors, obsessively scrubbing their data from the web.
Managing the finances of even a small project like ours would require a full-time specialist. Hiring one, in turn, requires a reliable monthly income. Just one fuck-up by this person could kill the project. And while bracing for that fuck-up, we would have to aggressively solicit donations just to pay their salary.
Since we are a service for latecomers, we have to debunk a couple of myths for latecomers (the list will be updated, and the answers will be supplemented and rewritten, then I will add the results to the FAQ).
It turned out pretty well.
The hype around “the site that’s been banned from Wikipedia for the fifth time” is better than “the 12ft.io analogue that’s about to be caught by the feds”
Why didn’t you write about such events earlier, folks of the tabloids? I don’t expect you to write anything good, because then who would read you, but there was plenty of dramas, wasn’t there?
Because there was no Jani to nudge you?
I guess I’ll scale down the “DDoS”.
Hi. The site doesn't work for me at the moment, only displaying a loading circle. I'm fearing it may have been blocked in my country out of nowhere, for some reason (I live in France), so I would at least like to know for sure.
If it isn't what I think the problem is, then whatever else is happening I hope gets fixed. I've been a fan of the site for a while, and I would be sad to no longer be able to use it.
fixed
I almost forgot…
June Maxam — NorthCountryGazette.org — the first “victim” of low-frequency “DDoS” — Jani Patokallio’s perfect doppelgänger. Or maybe just another manifestation of the same demonic force in our dimension: travel book author, publisher, editor, gonzo blogger, curious “cybersecurity” “researcher”, and… serial doxxer (she actually did time for doxxing her neighbors).
Only one thing that sets her apart from Jani Patokallio: her curiosity wasn’t aimed at other websites, it was aimed at her own visitors.
If she spotted a “suspicious” (meaning: not from her county) IP in her weblog, she’d fire off a cybersecurity report to the provider and all their upstream peers, accusing them of something along the lines of an “armed intrusion into a secured facility”, yes, from a particular IP address.
In both sheer chutzpah and the effectiveness of her complaints, she outdid WAAD with its pedo-zoophilia theatrics (though she never quite reached the final boss level: those gorgeous PDFs with official-looking crests, rambling for ten pages about how “servers at IP address X are storing 100,000 illegal bitcoins”; really, what can you do when an L1 support tech, eyes shining, has already grabbed the angle grinder and is heading for your server rack?)
Not bad for a lady in her 70s.
She even managed to wear out Archive.org. NorthCountryGazette.org wasn’t blocked there because of content issues, it’s blocked so that “Save Now” won’t even bother accessing robots.txt. The whole saga played out on Twitter.
That “DDoS” basically saturated her ability to read logs and blast out her nasty PDFs.
I’ve told you a little about the history of our relationship with Cloudflare above; now let me tell you about archive.org and how did it happen that people started to confuse us.
We created a service similar to Megalodon, which was already quite popular in Japan. First, we had to choose a domain zone. Not the USA or the EU (the current horrors hadn’t happened yet, but SOPA and PIPA was already being planned), and not the Caribbean, where a registrar’s server could crash and take months to recover. Libya (.ly) was fashionable at the time, but Gaddafi had just been killed. So Iceland seemed interesting: there were bearded sysadmins in parliament, they created Mailpile. Then we looked at which single-word domains were available.
When we started, archive.org didn’t have a “Save Now” function, so our features didn’t overlap at all. Even our names are different, just homonyms: archive.org is a noun, while we are a verb: “archive.is/today” was intended as an imperative, like “Save Now!”
Then two things happened. First, archive.org introduced its “Save Now” feature. Second, when we finally started communicating—around 2020—Mark mentioned that they come from a background of left-wing activism (this isn’t a secret; their biographies are public; I just hadn’t looked into them until it was brought to my attention).
By that time, Gamergate and various other scandals had already occurred. With few small exceptions, the right tended to preserve pages, while the left wanted to delete them. That was my aha moment: no collaborations were possible here. And so we became a kind of dialectical pair: we won’t delete what they delete, and vice versa, even when politics isn’t involved.
This is what’s driving us in this direction, toward the role of a smaller archive.org. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know yet.
I notice that searching a blocked page (I.e imagefap which was pointed out as being blocked on by someone on twitter some years ago) you can’t access any pages (blocked by the NCMEC). But searching the page on the onion version works completely. Is this intentional? Seeing as some archived results might be illegal
It is intentional, as people (incl. the police) sometimes asking to access to blocked (or unedited - with all the original ads and bugs) content. It is easier to direct them to .onion than to implement user accounts with different access levels and maintain it.
We don’t stand out among .onion sites with that. If problems arise, there will be two .onion sites, with a secret/dynamic domain for the uncensored site.
Hello? Do you remove any archives that contains the names of whistleblowers? I had feared for their safety.
Some got hidden/replaced. They are from Snowden epoch, not recent.
About Wikipedia, I promised to write when the referendum there ended so as not to influence it:
I notice that if a page is taken down (for example: /hdPc9), adding “/embed” next to the to the URL (/hdPc9/embed) still displays the content. Is this intentional, or is it an oversight/bug or something else?
It seems like a bug. It’s strange that an article about Apple computer ended up being censored. Thanks for letting know, I’ll take a look!
UPD: everything what was submitted by a particular user got censored (mostly pedo-content)
UPD2: it could be intentional as well. I recall Scribd behavior: removed content is still accessible via embed codes, so the feature might be modeled after them.
btw you feds are retards that can't censor shit. you'll never be able to censor the epstein files. lemme tell ya something 'bout the internet. Once it's on the internet, it stays there forever. Dedicated people will ensure that and will retaliate with lulz. ever heard 'bout lulzsec and anonymous? gonna be pretty bad for you glowniggers. oh and a little imageboard where nothing is beyond its reach. you better watch out. you're next.
Oh….
i think i understand now. it's either a fed running this or the actual creator pulling a kamikaze after being compromised by the feds.
Why?
If I were you, I would presume “sold to Anthropic” instead of “compromised by the Fed”
Well, everyone has their own bubble here.
What's your favourite type of furry porn to crank it to?
A NixOS joke?
People ask questions like “Why are you discrediting your own service like this?” or “Is it worth it for the blogger in Finland?”
My answer is: yes.
The real discredit would have been to leave things as they were and let the bloggers and the tabloids slowly escalate the black paranoia: rhyming with carding forums, framing us as hackers wanted by the FBI, and so on.
Articles about The Threepenny Three-Hertz “DDoS” are far better than anything those bloggers would have invent next “just out of curiosity”.
Sure, topic isn’t perfect and it could have been improved, but this is exactly what the finne troll took upon himself to hype, for free. Another topic would not have had such virality, and the same biased tabloids would not have printed it, so you would simply not have heard about it. This is the best topic for us that the tabloids could have printed.
Regarding the FBI’s request, my understanding is that they were seeking some form of offline action from us — anything from a witness statement (“Yes, this page was saved at such-and-such a time, and no one has accessed or modified it since”) to operational work involving a specific group of users. These users are not necessarily associates of Epstein; among our users who are particularly wary of the FBI, there are also less frequently mentioned groups, such as environmental activists or right-to-repair advocates.
Since no one was physically present in the United States at that time, however, the matter did not progress further.
You already know who turned this request into a full-blown panic about “the FBI accusing the archive and preparing to confiscate everything.”
So we got the situation reversed: now the finne troll got into kafkaesque realm of sending GDPR requests to AI-agents murmuring about safe harbors and journalistic exemptions.
This is exactly what we warned him about when he decided that Streisand is on his side: this game can be played by two people, and there is much more bad press about him in open sources than about us. Promoting black-tar propaganda on us would promote the attention on who is its author as well.
Unlike Jani Patokallio’s writings on us, we definitively do not disclosure any “personal data” besides that in the book his father wrote and published; his relatives are public personas and their activities are well known.
Unlike (a son of ambassador) Jani Patokallio, we did not publish any private communications.
On “who is currently subject to investigations by U.S. authorities for serious offenses related to the hosting of illegal content” - it is not only false, it is exactly the leyenda negra, invented and distributed exclusively by Jani Patokallio with his friends in Conde Nast, and supported only by referencing to each other.
I am reporting manifestly unlawful content published by the account “archive-is” on your platform, directly targeting my family, the Patokallio family.
Your online reporting form does not function properly and appears to operate as a simple sandbox without effective follow-up. For this reason, I am contacting you in writing.
The content concerned is accessible at the following URLs:
https://archive-is.tumblr.com/tagged/patokalli
https://archive-is.tumblr.com/
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is/807369905134518272/the-finne-troll-published-his-response-with
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is/807584470961111040/it-seems-people-dont-read-between-the-lines-they
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is/806966482173083648/some-time-back-i-sat-down-for-an-interview-with
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is/806832066465497088/ladies-and-gentlemen-in-the-autumn-of-2025-i
These pages contain numerous serious, false, and defamatory statements, including:
“an OSINT investigation on your Nazi grandfather”
“His grandfather seems to have been a real Nazi criminal”
“There is a family. A big one. They move in politics and in the arms trade.”
“He shames the family name”
“The most toxic content… reputations in free fall”
“comparing Jani Patokallio to Hunter Biden”
These statements falsely associate my family with Nazi crimes, arms trafficking, covert political networks, and illegal activities, without any evidence.
Other publications detail our family history, professional roles, and personal relationships without authorization, constituting unlawful processing of personal data under the GDPR.
These contents are used in a context of harassment, intimidation, and doxxing. They also serve as a relay for technical attacks, including DDoS attacks against my website.
This blog is operated by the operator of the archive.today service, who is currently subject to investigations by U.S. authorities for serious offenses related to the hosting of illegal content.
As a hosting provider, your liability is engaged once you are aware of manifestly unlawful content and fail to remove it promptly.
In the absence of clear identification of the author, your platform becomes legally responsible for maintaining this content online.
I therefore formally request:
– the immediate removal of all cited content,
– the closure of the “archive-is” account,
– the prevention of any republication.
If no prompt action is taken, I reserve the right to refer the matter to the competent authorities and data protection regulators.
Sincerely,
J.Patokallio