Macroexpanded: Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 - Jan 2026 (69 comments)

I cannot make head or tail of this but it's more fascinating than the usual internecine bloodbath.

> I find the measures taken by the .is webmaster, especially the dedication to setting up countless fake accounts for each persona, to be very intriguing.

This seems like a smart thing to do if you had exposed your real name somewhere and wanted to cover it up.

> Finland (where gyrovague is from)

They should probably review existing case around how Finnish courts treat the journalistic exception in the context of citizen's journalism (as he relied on that at least as one of the reasons): https://tuomioistuimet.fi/hovioikeudet/ita-suomenhovioikeus/...

Of course facts are different, but at least two Finnish court seem to require a lot more reasoning from the controller in the context of citizen journalism compared to traditional media when they want to invoke the journalistic exception. No clue which side this would fall into.

I would assume so. I can see from my browser history that i succesfully submitted captures to archive.today on 7th of January, but failed to do so starting from 12th of January. IIRC they contacted gyrovague around the 10th so seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Applies to VPNs as well. Tried first with a VPN located in Finland and it gets endless captcha loop, then with a Swedish VPN which let me through to the front page after solving one captcha.

I’d give it a high probability, especially when the CAPTCHA loop is the bit of the site that causes the DDoS and the fact that the admin seems to consider all Finns nazis.

I think there are multiple hurdles that make a new competitor very unlikely.

The first one is money. You need lots of it to run such an operation (servers, IPs, paying to bypass all these paywalls, etc.).

The second one is the legality, as no one wants to be hunted by the FBI, especially not for running a website that is also losing money.

I didnt flag the article, but anecdotally, I was initially unable to load the article at all. It mentions how it ended up in an adblock list. The article makes it sound like this is a good thing, as it stops the DDOS, but it isn't preventing people from loading the page directly. That may be true for people using an adblocking extension, but my adblocking DNS seems to be blocking it based on that same list. I had to manually tweak my dns-based adblocker to allow the domain in order to read the article.

Not here, though. The exact code:

  fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s="+Math.random().toString(36).substring(2,3+Math.random()*8),{ referrerPolicy:"no-referrer",mode:"no-cors" });

"no-cors" means the request will not be preflighted, but also that JS will be denied access to the body. But the body doesn't matter here — the attack only requires the request be sent.

But more to the point, so long as the request meets the requirements of a "simple request", CORS won't preflight it. GETs qualify as a simple request so long as no non-CORS-safelisted headers are sent; since the sent headers are attacker-controlled, we can just assume that to be the case. In a non-preflighted request, the CORS "yes, let JS do this" are just on the response headers of the actual request itself.

Since GETs are idempotent, the browser assumes it safe to make the request. CORS could/would be used to deny JS access to the response.

Things are this way b/c there are, essentially, a myriad of other ways to make the same request. E.g.,

  <img src="https://gyrovague.com/?s=…">

in the document would, for all intents and purposes, emit the same request, and browsers can't ban such requests, or at least, such a ban would be huge breaking change in browsers.

[dead]

> somehow

robots.txt. It is that simple.

That's explained in the article itself

When I read the original article it doesn't really feel like the Finnish guy is even an activist. He seems to be just a curious nerd who wrote one article about this topic (who's behind this big site that everyone uses) and about a whole load of completely unrelated and non-activist topics like why did Japan stop building subway lines. Then his blog gained some traction because of the reporting around the FBI threats.

The article is also really appreciative of archive.today. It doesn't feel like a hit piece at all.

Yep, I have heard of many such cases and I know someone affected personally. For someone who refuses to take down the personal information of others this is extremely hypocritical.

Please, let's not re-fight WWII on HN.

We know that the impact from that time is far from worked through, but to the extent it shows up here, commenters should make the effort not to fall back into war mode.

You're welcome on HN, and so are the users you disagree with—but you all (i.e. we all) need to stay within the site guidelines when discussing tough stuff. These include: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. This comment is not just for the user I'm replying to but everyone else who's expressing strong feelings below. It's amazing, and totally human, how alive these feelings are after 80+ years, but at the same time, 80+ years of distance should give us the ability to relate to each other a little bit better than our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were able to.

> Finland was one of Germany's most important allies in the attack on the Soviet Union, allowing German troops to be based in Finland before the attack and joining in the attack on the USSR almost immediately.

I wonder, why on earth would Finland have any hostility towards the USSR in 1941? It beggars belief!

OTOH, after trying to conquer Finland in 1939-1940 Russians definitely have no moral right to judge Finns.

Could it be that Germany was the only nation willing to help Finland fight the Soviets?

From Wikipedia

> Interim peace > ... > Defensive arrangements were attempted with Sweden and the United Kingdom, but the political and military situation in the context of the Second World War rendered these efforts fruitless. Finland then turned to Nazi Germany for military aid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_in_World_War_II

Isn't that the same hand twice?

I do believe the opposite, although I feel that rabinovich is somehow tied to other personas.

This thing is blurry, shady and I hope it will draw some more OSINT eyes on it. I am now curious.