Ask HN: Why does archive.is track who reads submitted content via DNS

45 points

5 years ago

Does anyone know why archive.is tracks who has read an article. If we look at the HTML from archive.is we see they include an image link to a domain name that contains the user's IP address. Popular browsers not only run arbitrary Javascript by default, they also access image links by default. Thus the archive.is DNS server has a record of every time the page is viewed in one of these browsers (and the domain name is not cached). This includes the IP address of the person who retrieved the page.

    <img style="position:absolute" width="1" height="1" src="https://[ipaddr].[country].ABCD.1234567890.pixel.archive.is/x.gif">

It seems some HN commenters have a preference for sharing links to https://archive.is as a way of avoiding Javascript obfuscation of text (so-called "paywalls").

The text being obfuscated is public, available to anyone, not only to subscribers. It is not password-protected. The website developer using the "paywall" technique simply tries to annoy the user into subscribing by obfuscating the text using Javascript. This only works if the user runs Javascript from the website. Popular browsers, most of them funded by advertising, run arbitrary Javascript by default, however Javascript can be disabled by by anyone by simply changing default settings. Most users do not change default settings. Most users use the same small number of popular browsers.

When we refrain from running Javascript and accessing image links automatically, the web becomes more readable and less annoying. We can choose a browser that is simpler than the popular ones and does fewer things automatically without user input, e.g., running Javascript and loading images.

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