(cache)Archive.is blog

After a lot of reading, I'm inclined to believe that the accusations against you are fabricated, but there's one thing I'm still not clear on: did you actually set up any code to send repeated random requests to an external site?

If so, I'm curious what your reasoning was, as I can't seem to think of a good reason. Even if was a significant threat, that still seems like an odd way to respond.

P.S. If you get the TV interview, could you link to a recording, pretty please? (Even if there's no English)

Anonymous

It was Patokallio’s blackmail from the beginning: if the 3Hz “DDoS” would stop, he wouldn’t hype the story via his friends in the media, even though hyping it was actually preferable for us than slowly sliding into inferno. We had to continue with the “DDoS” to keep annoying him, so he, thinking he was repaying us with harm, actually carried out a scenario that is a win-win-win for everyone: Jani got his advertising clicks which help him survive in overpriced Australia; Wikipedia got its pill from moral panic; we got vaccinated against the next WAAD (probably against Conde Nast too: after their covering the Wikipedia story, it would be a bit difficult to attack us as “yet another 12ft” without accusing Wikipedia in large-scale piracy).

The “changed page” with an Easter egg was supposed only to Patokallio’s eyes: it is the dead link linked from his blog, absent in archive.org (along with whole `lj.rossia.org`—why? someone’s petty revenge for Verbitsky’s “Anti-Copyright” book?), so he must rely on the archived copy to attack the very same archive. The dramatic reaction from Wikipedians, when Jani revealed it to them, was somewhat unexpected, but it did not change anything: they closed the referendum a few days earlier, the result would have been the same. They could have opened and won such a referendum without all this drama—just Patokallio old blog post’s propaganda, which is considered an “authoritative source” there, would have been enough.

This also reinforced the initial guess that it was Patokallio who was behind the media amplification of the “FBI story”: the very same Jon Brodkin of ArsTechnica—who seeded the “FBI story"—acted again as a Patokallio’s sockpuppet: he republished Patokallio’s blog posts instantly, while never wrote anything about us without Patokallio (e.g. on more newsworthy AdGuard/WAAD drama).

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?

Anonymous

I guess I have already addressed this in my previous messages.

The so-called “trustworthiness” never existed outside either that stock photo scam or in connection with the term “destroyed.” References to “trustworthiness” in public discussions of the archive could only arise when it was explicitly questioned. Previously—thanks to Jani Patokallio—only terms like “guerrilla” and “jews” and “FBI wanted” were used, leaving no space for a “trustworthiness” axis: the questions were floating not around whether it is “a trustworthness site or not”, but whether it is “a criminal pedo site or not”. Do you understand the difference between when say 2% are ready to believe the first thing and when 2% are ready to believe the second thing? The former can cause merely fluctuation in donations, the latter - deplatforming (and not only in tech infrastructure, think Durov story).
While the snapshots were indeed used in civil courts, this was only possible with my written statement—not merely based on some random page online. And yes, in such stories, you are dependent on my whim—whether I choose to assist you or not, as I am under no obligation to do so.
Do not reduce Patokallio’s activities to merely OSINT or doxxing. Publishing open or private information is not an issue at all—there is nothing inherently wrong with “information” part itself. The problem lies in the high density of buzzwords intended to provoke squeamish disdain among certain groups of readers—with quite high a coverage given the variety of those buzzwords—and in the dissemination of that propaganda in the media (and, yes, in the Wiki article, I initially missed that). It is not about publishing random names; it is about commenting on the ethnicity of each name (even that alone shifts the genre of his blog from “investigative journalism” to something else), about cherry-picking words. It is the same kind of preparation as WAAD registering the domain krimo-avocate.fr or his French child porn association. A serious existential threat to us, not comparable to the risk of losing a $2/week donor.

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.

Anonymous

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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

It seems people don’t read between the lines. They took what I wrote on finne troll for neuroslop.

So let’s say it plain.

There is a family. A big one. They move in politics and in the arms trade.

There is one man in that family who does something else. He doxes people on the internet. He does it to drive traffic to his little blog, packed with ads.

In other words, he is the fool of the family. No use to the real business.

He shames the family name and gets in the way of his father and his brother.

You don’t believe it?

He used to run a blog at patokallio.name. Now it’s called gyrovague.com. The name “Patokallio” is hidden in the sidebar. You have to click to see it. It’s not in the text at all. In the posts, even in quotes, he cuts the name out every time.

So the talk with the family already happened. It must have gone like this: live how you want, but you are not our brother, avoid using our name.

And now, in that position, the man has taken up doxing random internet projects just to make a little money.

Epic, isn’t it.

The finne troll published his response with “lightly redacted copy of the entire email thread”.

And guess what has been lightly redacted?

- “an OSINT investigation” on your Nazi grandfather who changed the name in 1944, will not vibecode a patokallio.gay dating app
+ “an OSINT investigation” on your Nazi grandfather, will not vibecode a gyrovague.gay dating app

That’s the sore spot. His grandfather seems to have been a real Nazi criminal, even by Finnish standards. We need to dig deeper.

Ladies and gentlemen,

In the autumn of 2025, I published a subpoena received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Since that day, I have been asked time and again: “And what happens next?”

Well, allow me to tell you.

I published that subpoena as an act of responsible disclosure. I did not maintain a so-called “canary page” - the kind some operators use to signal they remain free from legal gag orders. My circumstances were such that I was far removed from jurisdictions where such orders carry immediate, enforceable weight. Moreover, my site was never prominent enough to attract a dedicated cadre of volunteers who might vigilantly monitor such a page for changes. Thus, I resolved upon a simple principle: should any authority send me a legal instrument, I would publish it forthwith. And that is precisely what transpired.

I confess, I anticipated interest from no more than a handful of crypto-anarchists - the very same individuals who had previously urged me to implement a canonical canary page, yet who offered no commitment to actually watch over it.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the matter spilled into the mainstream news and reached million eyes.

But let us be clear: these were not news reports in any genuine sense. The standard refrain read, “We have reached out to the site’s operator and will update this story upon receiving a response.” Yet no journalist ever contacted us (only exception is Meduza, asking for an interview and a bigger article later). This was not investigative journalism; it was dissemination - pure and simple. A prepackaged narrative, delivered to newsrooms with the polite request: “Dear comrades, here is the truth - please publish it.”

Curiously, every one of these ersatz “news” pieces prominently cited a two-year-old blog post by a certain Jani Patokallio as its authoritative source - a rather odd choice, given that it was merely a personal blog entry by an unaffiliated third party. One might charitably argue it was a piece of enduring open-source intelligence. Very well, let us grant that. But then, why do nearly all the links within that “investigation” point exclusively to blog.archive.today? Why not cite the original sources directly? And more tellingly, there exist at least five other substantial OSINT analyses concerning archive.today. Why, then, did every journalist - seemingly in lockstep - select this one particular post? Unless, of course, they were not writing at all, but merely copying and pasting a ready-made text.

This raises a more troubling possibility: what if that link to the old blog post was not a citation, but a SEO backlink? What if Mr. Patokallio was not a passive observer, but the very author of the seed?

First of all, he had already attempted to promoute that very blog post in the media two years ago. On that prior occasion, it found a home only at Boing Boing and Gigazine. The second try achieved far wider circulation.

A cursory AI-groking into Mr. Patokallio’s background reveals a man no stranger to the shadowed corridors of media manipulation. He was instrumental in repackaging community-written content from WikiTravel into commercially published Lonely Planet guides under his own editorial imprint.

But that is merely the beginning.

The Patokallio family presents a profile of considerable geopolitical entanglement. His brother, Mikko Patokallio, serves as Senior Manager for Ukraine at the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), a Finnish NGO deeply involved in conflict mediation and Eurasian affairs.

Their father, Pasi Patokallio, is a career diplomat who has served as ambassador to Israel, Canada, and Australia. He is also a noted critic of the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, and his advocacy appears to have borne fruit: Finland withdrew from the treaty recently, paving the way for the mining of its 2,000-miles eastern border. He wrote an autobiography modestly titled ‘Me, guns and the world’

As for the family name itself - Patokallio - it was coined and officially registered in 1944, a year of profound realignment for Finland, as the nation shifted its wartime allegiance. In Finland, surnames can indeed be “registered” like domain names, securing exclusive rights to their use. One cannot help but wonder what prompted the adoption of a new name at such a pivotal historical moment.

Thus, we are not dealing with a mere hobbyist blogger who “saw a neat website and wrote a post,” as Jani Patokallio once claimed on Hacker News. This is the work of a member of a family with a shady Nazi-era story and deep roots in arms export, the Ukrainian conflict and information operations (Jani’s profile resembles more of Hunter Biden than an IT blogger) - a long-term, systemic interest in the archive project that may well prove more consequential, and perhaps more dangerous, than the attention of either the proprietor of luxuretv.com with his fake French child porn alliances or even the FBI itself.