DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder’s identity in 2023. […] A Tumblr blog post apparently written by the Archive.today founder seems to generally confirm the emails’ veracity, but says the original version threatened to create “a patokallio.gay dating app,” not “a gyrovague.gay dating app.”
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Archive-today-Operator-uses-users-for-DDoS-attack-11171455.html:
By having Archive.today unknowingly let users access the Finnish blogger’s URL, their IP addresses are transmitted to him. This could be a point of attack for prosecuting copyright infringements.
I think you have a very severe misunderstanding of the Wikipedia Library, which I have access to and frequently use. The WPL allows active editors in good standing to access paywalled sources.
I can’t emphasize enough how absurd this comparison is. “Solar farms exist; building a Dyson sphere would be basically the same thing. Let’s get to work.” And the thing is: I wish you were right.
Edit: That said, if you ever need copyleft material, we do maintain Wikimedia Commons for media generally and Wikisource which is a transcribed digital library of free sources. Much narrower in scope than this, but I highly recommend them!
I am an active editor lol. I’m saying that the proposal is to establish something similar to TWL for media URLs. It would serve the same purpose for editors as a major complaint in the discussion was over addition of Archive.today links to bypass paywalls. Obviously developing this deal would take a lot of work but it is workable.
That’s not true. Anyone who meets the stats you mentioned may access TWL.
Indeed, that’s what makes it legally sound and prevents us from needing to relicense. We don’t need to license the content to copyleft for the thing to work.
Okay, then you’ll need to explain the annual emails I’ve gotten saying “Your application to the Wikipedia Library has been approved” after I apparently tripped and fell and filled out a manual form applying to the library every year.
It doesn’t seem selective once you meet the four aforementioned criteria, but you do need to manually apply.
The idea you’re talking about, meanwhile, is nonsensical and doesn’t address basically anything about the massive structural problems blacklisting archive.today imposes. I wholly support expanding out the Wikipedia Library, but even this pie-in-the-sky version of it falls too far short of what archive.today provides – and that’s just going forward in an ideal world where you can snap your fingers and make this fantasyland WPL happen as soon as archive.today is blacklisted.
The “backcatalogue”, so to speak, is what’s going to be the most catastrophic part of this by far. I spent years where my main focus was just on bringing dead sources back to life; I don’t know the full extent of how bad this is, but I know for damn sure what you’ve suggested (which won’t ever happen) undoes barely a fraction of the damage.
34 (mainly non–core Anglosphere newspapers) of the 121 platforms TWL can give you access to require an application. The rest you can access automatically, instantaneously right now as long as you meet the stats.
I mentioned that this (only) solves one (of two) major problems archive.today was used to solve: paywalls. This is also very workable; you already have major newspapers like Haaretz and WSJ available on TWL.
I also mentioned that the backcatalogue problem can be solved by running a different archiving service on the existing archive.today URLs we use.