Ungated Version

August 8, 2023 9:41 AM

While we may not have a face and a name, at this point we have a pretty good idea of how the site is run: it’s a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe. from archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet
posted by chavenet (33 comments total)

This is a weird article. It's almost an attempted doxxing, and despite the appreciative conclusion, comes out with utterly unsupported statements such as "they clearly have a second source of considerable income that’s likely somewhat sketchy as well" - they demonstrate the first bit to an extent, but the latter is just completely out of the blue.
posted by Dysk at 9:55 AM on August 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

What an excellent summary! I don't think it's weird at all; it's a natural point of curiosity. I've certainly wondered who was behind it. I winced a bit at the mention of a plausible sounding name from 2012 history but then it could just as well be a pseudonym.

I love the idea that the site may be run by a Russian woman. Sci-Hub is run by a Kazakhstani woman. Both sites are crucial in making it easier to access information online.

I had no idea there was an archive.today blog!
posted by Nelson at 9:59 AM on August 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

I was relieved to find out I wasn't the only one who assumed these were somehow related to the Internet Archive! (And yet I was also confused whether, say, archive.is and archive.ph were the same thing.)
posted by mittens at 10:17 AM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

(archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 10:45 AM on August 8, 2023 [14 favorites]

sci-hub, archive.is & archive.org and anna’s archive are all constituents of a shadow net servicing knowledge needs that fall outside “the economy”. While we watch predatory enclosure of knowledge within ever more gated horti conclusi, and the profit-driven undermining of public knowledge institutions, it’s surprising to find such hardy hold-outs. Still, more and more, I feel tempted to make safety/back-up copies of the motley digital resources that are currently freely accessible: it definitely feels as though these shadow initiatives are unlikely to gain enough critical mass to ever be recognized/canonized…
posted by progosk at 11:48 AM on August 8, 2023 [21 favorites]

there are three legs on the stool of public access to information:

1. libraries
2. the public domain
3. pirate archives

all of these are necessary, but the third is the most important.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:52 PM on August 8, 2023 [22 favorites]

Nothing in this post substantiates the idea that the owner is a Russian citizen. "Russian speaker" might be more accurate but there are millions of non-Russian-citizen Russian speakers. In the current context the post reads like fuel for speculation about some kind of connection to Putin which would be unfortunate since we have zero evidence for this.
posted by derrinyet at 12:54 PM on August 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I am thankful to this mysterious pir8. There have been quite a few MeFi posts I would not have been able to read without their work.
posted by tovarisch at 1:04 PM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

3. pirate archives
all of these are necessary, but the third is the most important.

a previous thread on shadow libraires went predictably pear-shaped, but I still feel M. Böök is on point…
posted by progosk at 1:10 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

as of 2021 ads and donations covered less than 20% of expenses

Reselling someone else’s content for money is gross.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:11 PM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Nothing in this post substantiates the idea that the owner is a Russian citizen.

Changes in accepted donation methods, etc., in 2022 are a pretty strong indicator.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:36 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Reselling someone else’s content for money is gross.

I'm confused. Everything here was available for free online somewhere at some point, much of it still is, and 80% of the expense of hosting the archive is borne by the anonymous maintainer, so they're far from ever turning a profit. Of all the various ways to describe this, 'reselling someone else's content for money' seems neither very accurate nor very charitable.

There's a difference between soliciting donations to cover expenses and seeking to profit off other people's content. E.g. Metafilter hosts a lot of content contributed by others, and there's a big banner up there asking for contributions, but I'd hardly call this 'reselling someone else's content for money'. Archive.today is obviously farther along that spectrum than Metafilter, but they're still just making available content that was already shared online and doing so at a substantial loss.

If I were going to pick a target for this kind of criticism I'd be looking at Elsevier and other academic journal publishers, who are *actually* reselling someone else's content for money (and making a substantial profit that the content creators never see).
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 2:51 PM on August 8, 2023 [13 favorites]

I'm of mixed mind regarding grossness or lack thereof (mostly "When stated vaguely, yeah, gross; when in a specific case like this, often not so much"), but there is a difference between this and Elsevier (etc.) with regards to this: Elsevier is "reselling someone else's content for money (and making a substantial profit that the content creators never see)" with the consent of those creators.
posted by Flunkie at 3:09 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm confused. Everything here was available for free online somewhere

No, it was either behind a paywall, or was offered for free in return for (potentially) watching some adverts. Archive.today are taking a similar ethical stance to the Brave web browser: "Why watch ads which benefit the creators, watch our ads instead (which fund pirates)".
posted by Lanark at 3:23 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

with the consent of those creators

Fair point. I think academic publishing is still pretty gross for a number of reasons but it'd be a derail to chase that further here.

I guess just count me among those who see this and similar archives as a net public good and appreciate that they exist. In a perfect world they wouldn't be needed, but in this one they keep a lot of useful information from falling down the memory hole or disappearing into increasingly inaccessible walled gardens.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 3:23 PM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Why watch ads which benefit the creators, watch our ads instead (which fund pirates)"

uBlock Origin: why watch ads at all?
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 3:24 PM on August 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

Still, more and more, I feel tempted to make safety/back-up copies of the motley digital resources that are currently freely accessible: it definitely feels as though these shadow initiatives are unlikely to gain enough critical mass to ever be recognized/canonized.

If I find something useful that I have any doubts about, I now always try and save it via the Wayback Machine. Their browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome made this pretty seamless.
posted by ryanshepard at 3:55 PM on August 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

>"Elsevier is "reselling someone else's content for money (and making a substantial profit that the content creators never see)" with the consent of those creators."

Consent? Not really: academic researchers have no choice but to publish, if they want to have any institutional affiliations (and therefore funding), and those institutions have deals with companies like Elsevier, who suck up every drop of profit. The researchers generally make not a dime from knowledge gatekeepers selling access and still have trouble accessing the work of their contemporaries.

It's the same as when I have to "consent" to paying my landlord rent because if I don't, I sleep outside. The academic world is rebelling in a serious way. Authors are organizing to make their research open-access!

We're caught in the tension between (1) science (among other types of published info) flourishes best when there are zero access restrictions and (2) authors, like the rest of us, are forced to accumulate money in order to eat food and sleep in a bed. Under the current knowledge-gatekeeping model, access restrictions are high and author compensation has been falling below the bare minimum in many disciplines, if we look at recent trends.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 3:59 PM on August 8, 2023 [13 favorites]

Consent? Not really

I'm aware of the arguments, and in fact I'm sympathetic to them, but if "really" means "knowingly and legally", yes. Really.

The academic world is rebelling in a serious way.

Good; long overdue and I hope they succeed. But still yes. Really.
posted by Flunkie at 4:06 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah I don't love that archive.today is substituting publishers' ads with their own (in addition to undermining the paywall). I can't defend it and I think the comparison to Brave's sleaze is fair. I don't get too upset about it though. My guess is the ad revenue is pretty small on archive.today (in part because the site owner is anonymous; who is even willing to send them money?! The article says it's Yahoo Network ads but I bet that's not direct.). Also I'm OK with a little moral greyness in what is, afterall, an IP rights circumvention product.

the post reads like fuel for speculation about some kind of connection to Putin

Huh, I didn't get that all. My assumption is anyone with the international awareness and skills to build something like archive.today is probably not a Putin supporter.
posted by Nelson at 4:06 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Speaking cynically, quietly and persistently white anting journalism’s flailing attempts to be financially viable could benefit all sorts of people.
posted by zamboni at 5:31 PM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure those sorts of people have more direct and effective means of subverting journalism than providing workarounds for paywalls, though.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 5:49 PM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, god bless this person, but it's basically Napster for News. Let's not pretend it's anything other than stolen content from paywalled sites. Is that ultimately a social good? Probably. But it ain't a lawful enterprise.
posted by gwint at 6:18 PM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Eh, paywalls, etc are supposed to permeable. Plenty of journalists are using services like archive.today just like plenty of academics are using sci-hub.

Does anyone remember the shared login all the newsrooms used to use in the 00s? In the era before paywalls, where some newspapers were requiring a free login just for user retention / tracking purposes? It was some very simple login like "letmein / 123456" and was an open secret among newsrooms, a sort of professional courtesy. Until finally sites started shutting it down. I remember the shutdown itself was newsworthy but I can't find it now since Google is useless for anything predating 2019.
posted by Nelson at 6:36 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

I would personally like to see metafilter stop using archive sites for the purposes of bypassing paywalls. And, come on, comparing these archive sites to archive.org is ridiculous. They exist for entirely different purposes. Lots of valuable publications are having a very hard time. Look at what's been happening with National Geographic recently. Lets not undermine them further by attacking their subscription models.
posted by DarkForest at 7:51 PM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Since we are voting here, mark me down on team steal everything. The reason news is no longer profitable isn't because we are bypassing paywalls, it is because billionaire rent seekers like Bezos are siphoning all the money away.

For example, the comment above talks about the trouble National Geographic is having. They are owned by the fucking Walt Disney Company. Fuck 'em.
posted by Literaryhero at 8:17 PM on August 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

Why watch ads which benefit the creators...
In the case of academic papers, those ads don't benefit the creators, who make nothing from being published, all of that money goes to the publishers, who got the content for free. Fuck 'em.
posted by evilDoug at 9:54 PM on August 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, god bless this person, but it's basically Napster for News. Let's not pretend it's anything other than stolen content from paywalled sites.

Wait, all these sites don't have their content any more?

Oh they do, and we're using some bollocks RIAA/MPAA definition of theft, where copyright infringement is the same as taking someone's property away from them.

We're not pretending. The content is not stolen. It is copied without license, is all. That distinction is real and meaningful.
posted by Dysk at 11:22 PM on August 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

yeah i feel what's going on is that there's a false identification being made between words like "consent" and "creator" as used in their everyday senses and the more technical uses of those words under extant law. in the technical sense, "consent" is defined as acquiescence to a deal that can't be turned down without gross hardship, and "creator" is defined as the person or organization that got the maker of the work to give up their rights to that work.

when one defends the rights of creators to consent to use of their work, the statement appears to indicate the belief that the person who made a thing should have the right to decide how that thing gets used, with the implication that "creator" means creator in the everyday sense and "consent" likewise means consent in the everyday sense. however, we're dealing with the words "creator" and "consent" in the more technical sense. as a result, what they're saying is in practical terms more like "i think the people who coerced the person who made a thing into relinquishing their rights should get to decide how that thing is used, without regard to what the person who made the thing wants." which is a somewhat more controversial claim, or at least a somewhat more uncomfortable claim.

this has been your bombastic lowercase pronouncement for the day.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:13 AM on August 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

Again, I appreciate what this person is doing, but y'all are pretending that newspapers and magazines are paywalling their content because they're owned by Evil Giant Corp when in fact for the most part they are just trying to keep the lights on and pay their writers. The crisis in journalism was caused by Silicon Valley siphoning off the profitable parts of their business and readers no longer interested in paying for news. Another terrible result of this situation is that much of the well-funded, well-reported news costs money to see, while the fake, manufactured stuff is free. So yes, archive.today is a tiny bandaid trying to sort of "solve" this problem, but it is not sustainable.
posted by gwint at 7:30 AM on August 9, 2023

Thanks to someone on Mastodon I found the login I was thinking of: media / media, specifically on the Wall Street Journal. And more recently than I thought, 2017. Here's an article about it.

For years, one of the best/worst kept secrets in media circles was a login that unlocked the Wall Street Journal's formidable paywall. Username: media. Password: media.

The media-media combo served many purposes. For those on entry-level media salaries, or no salaries at all, it opened the doors to the magical world of the Journal, which currently charges about $200 for a yearly digital subscription. For subscribers, it was a quick, easy, mobile-friendly login to use when the site's wonky paywall system failed to remember you.

Note that the feature the article most talks about is specifically how it let media industry members not pay for access to the Wall Street Journal. Because seriously, who's got $200 when they're working as a stringer?

It's just one example but it's a good one for how journalism paywalls are understood in the industry to be somewhat permeable.

(I still think monetizing paywall bypass with ads is significantly more problematic. But like I said before, I suspect archive.today's revenue from that activity is very small and not the primary motivation for the project.)
posted by Nelson at 9:31 AM on August 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

y'all are pretending that newspapers and magazines are paywalling their content because they're owned by Evil Giant Corp when in fact for the most part they are just trying to keep the lights on and pay their writers

It can be both. They can be a struggling company barely able to make money, owned by a ridiculous wealth. Often the latter causes the former - wealth (whether an individual or a fund) buys paper, saddles it with the sales debt, and if it wasn't struggling before, it sure is now.
posted by Dysk at 11:10 AM on August 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

In Canada, for example, our largest newspaper chain is Postmedia, which is notorious for imposing a right-wing editorial slant on its newspapers. A US hedge fund bought a 66% stake in Postmedia in 2016; by 2020, the company had "cut its work force [by 38%], shuttered papers across Canada, reduced salaries and benefits, and centralized editorial operations in a way that has made parts of its 106 newspapers into clones of one another." During that same period it paid out $6.2M in bonuses to its top executives.

The "good" news is that the large conglomerates' share of newspaper revenue declined from 83% in 2010 to 54% in 2021. On the other hand, the industry is really struggling financially, and it's more dependent than ever on big platforms like Google and Meta, which are currently refusing to link to Canadian news outlets as a tax protest....
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:55 PM on August 9, 2023 [3 favorites]