Ask HN: Who owns archive.is, and why are they trustworthy?

27 points

6 years ago

I understand the need for anonymity when you're doing this due to the sheer amount of abuse reports, fake and real DMCAs, etc.

But why do people trust it? How do you know the pages you're archiving haven't been tampered with selectively to change history? This is just out of sheer curiosity, and I am not saying they do this.

This is made further interesting because of the following:

- Analytics from various Russian providers, instead of self-hosted (FYI: I consider GA to be equally privacy-violating as Metrika or Mail.ru)

- Large amounts of reverse proxies off questionable or bulletproof hosting providers

- Indefinitely doing this can't necessarily be cheap either at scale, who is paying for this?

- Demanding tracking or else blocking your access to the site, blocking any resolver that doesn't send the first 3 octets of your IP to them (edns-client-subnet)

- Explicitly tracking you in odd ways: they repeatedly load pixels/do DNS preconnect/preload from wildcard subdomains containing a cookied number, IP, country, tracking IDs. View any archived page and ^F "pixel.archive.is"

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