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).

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.

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?

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.

• First, it was not a page you saved; it was a page me saved, moreover from a social network’s webpage me controlled - so I could as well alter the original. That “reputation” is at least no worse than Reddit’s. Second, we do delete/alter pages (see the question about whistleblowers), although we try to minimize that impact. If you need stronger consistency guarantees, you should develop something on a blockchain: Arweave has done something like that. However, it would hardly be compatible with maintaining a clearnet website.
   
• Of course there is some CSAM, as on any user-generated content website. On Twitter, for example, or on Quora. I know this because many CSAM pages reported to us (and deleted) originate from those platforms, not from chans or .onion websites. And those are not ephemeral pages quickly uploaded and screenshotted — they have been there for years; some of them are still there.
   
• Tone of our texts about Jani is a parody of his texts about us: what it might look like if Jani wrote about Jani, we call him “finne” as often as he calls us “guerrilla russian jew”. And we see him (and you?) being unhappy reading that and attempting to take it down, by sending same requests to the same people at Automattic.
  
  It is not about “political positions” at all (who cares on that shit?), it is about preparing the media landscape before sending bogus legally-looking PDFs to the critical infrastructure, just as well as my texts and the whole drama—thanks to “DDoS” promoted to media by himself—might create him problems on border crossing or when approving a loan at a bank. That’s the idea—why threaten to start involved in a scandal under your real name when you know nothing about your opponent, and in your “investigation” you cherry-pick Russian and Jewish names among others solely to include the words “russian” and “jewish” into the text (and then into friendly media, wiki article, etc)? Or to write that “the service does NOT accept crypto” just to slip “crypto” into the text, at least that way? I used to perceive Jani’s texts as merely satirical until serious media started treating them as an authoritative source; then it stopped being funny.

thanks!

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

1. 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).
    
2. 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.
    
3. 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.

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?

Thanks for warm words

Oh, 11 years ago… it is probably not actual anymore

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).

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.

That’s basically “keep calm and serve a freeloading ingrate”.