I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet.
I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune.
If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire.
Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.
How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that.
And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.
The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.
Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess.
Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.
Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.
You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.
You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model.
You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive.
But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
You do understand that was an example, right? Did you know there are other websites you can download? Anna has one that is pretty big and full of information. I’m pretty sure the AI labs know about it too.
the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
The Internet Archive isn’t a single zip download. You understand you can pick and choose what you want to download, right? And also, that it was just another example of many?
But the Internet and IA aren't controlled by you. They may be censored or taken down without anyone going near you, but not the local model (as long as you have access to electricity and your hardware doesn't break before you have access to replacements).
It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.
This is exactly why I believe LLMs are fundamentally divergent from the trajectory of internet service path we have been on. It allows us to create space and disconnection from an otherwise tethered experience.
But you cannot train an open weight model by yourself, and maybe there could some distributed training net ran by thousand of volunteers around the world in the future, but until we get there we will still be tied to BigCo (American, Chinese or wherever in the world) decisions.
You would need institutions to do this? What do we have besides global megacorps with the resources for this? Universities perhaps training models for their local catchment?
Maybe not from the start, but definitely since the EU sunk its teeth into it. We can look forward to ID-controls for everything online, and monitoring of what we write. Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three.
The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other).
At least we now know that the EU and China are closer in terms of ideology and control than we first thought. It is sad, but such is life.
Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three.
If there's one thing that distinguishes leftist regimes it corporate friendly property law policies to enable free markets.
The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other).
That sounds better to me? Civil society spaces shouldn't be for making money and vice versa. Surely we can't look at what's happened to twitter where you basically get corporate sponsorship for rage baiting on the internet and think that's an improvement? The most effective political action recently has been hyperlocal neighbourhood groups getting mad and turning up to data centre meetings en-masse and letting local representatives know that they are all know where they live. Spouting off on the internet has been weaponised to force people into inaction and is easily corralled as there are so few of these mega platforms and they're easy to buy and manipulate centrally.
Maybe not from the start, but definitely since the EU sunk its teeth into it. We can look forward to ID-controls for everything online, and monitoring of what we write.
Yes, they just made a big step in that direction by requiring age verification on social media for everyone :(
Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three.
That is not happening though. But they are building the machinery to do things like this.
The real things that kill the internet is tech bros who learned you can make money with the internet and ofcourse AI which will make sure the internet becomes bots who communicate with other bots.
Let me add a few more layers just for some fun and profit :-D
Here[0] is an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page which archives the original article about internet censorship of an archive site that might require an archive of an archive site to read (given that people of spain cant now view archive.is in the first place or might have some difficulties doing so)
"Temporarily Offline Internet Archive services are temporarily offline. " What did you DO
It seems that all of internet archive was down and I don't think that it was because of me (I hope), maybe just some other issues and some sort of just a chance that internet archive got offline at the exact same time that I had shared this thing here.
but when I had opened up hackernews and I read your comment, I genuinely felt myself also as what did I DO.
It is back again now for what its worth, whew what a relief but folks please remember to donate to internet archive for its posterity :-)
Works fine for me, also Spain, Vodafone as the ISP.
Edit: eeh, that's a different site than the one mentioned by the submission, why it wouldn't work?
Edit2: Also, the error is wrong and server-side. If your ISP is trying to block the website, you'll get either a tls error that the certificate isn't matching, or for non-https sites you get redirected to the scary "You're contributing to something illegal blah blah".
The one-world government and the CIA are loving all this FUD being spread about archive.is. No, don't access information we don't want you to! Because of... uh... DDOS, that's it!
I live in Spain and can still enjoy access to this site. This is enforced by major ISPs (Vodafone among others), so anyone sane just opts for a local ISP (if they have a choice)
That superuser thread from 2018 (it's ECH now not ESNI) isn't much help
Although I do like the comment at the bottom that states the problem as disabling SNI not encrypting it. Encrypting SNI/ClientHello is over complicated, which is why ESNI was flawed and (allegedly) why Cloudflare disabled it. The solution to the plaintext SNI problem is to not send SNI (I don't send it unless necessary)
There is an alternative non-TLS method of encrypting traffic, per packet, that allows hosting multiple websites on the same IP. I use it in the homelab. It proves that TLS and SNI is not the only way
There's also a popular archive of www content that does not require SNI. It's older and larger than Cloudflare
The problem with software like Firefox is that it automatically sends SNI to every website no matter if SNI is required or not. The superuser thread mentions a Firefox add-on that no longer works. If Firefox is open source then why not just edit the code and recompile
Clearly, Mozilla is not going to provide a solution. It would rather add support for ESNI and then ECH as opposed to giving users an option to diable sending SNI
Mozilla is pro-surveillance advertising, Cloudflare is pro-surveillance advertising
Fortunately, not every HTTPS website is hosted on a shared IP, not every HTTPS website requires SNI. And popular web browsers derived from Mozilla and Google are not the only user agents
A couple of ways to not send SNI
1. Use an SSL client, e.g., openssl s_client, bssl client, etc.
2. Use a local forward proxy, e.g., stunnel, haproxy, etc.
Even if Cloudflare enables ECH across all the websites it controls, and we have been waiting for years, there is still the issue of SSL termination by Cloudflare. For many of those sites, all the TLS traffic, not just the SNI, is available as plaintext to Cloudflare and to whomever Cloudflare, a US corporation, may or must share it with
Differs by the ISP you have, I've seen DNS manipulation, IP filtering, hostname filtering, and HTTPS interception so far. Obviously most websites use TLS today so it mostly "fails" so people see certificate errors rather than their scary "You're contributing to breaking the law blah blah blah". Sometimes just straight up timeouts, resets, or generic connection failures.
Nor on Vodafone for me, 3rd biggest ISP in the country. Guess that leaves us with Orange or possibly Digi as the second one that maybe actually has implemented the block?
Orange is not blocking it on my fiber yet but it is on my mobile connection.
The strange thing is I use the same DNS on both (which exits on my fiber connection, even when I'm on mobile), so they must be blocking it another way.
Since a few months archive.is is "unstable" from Spain. I thought the reason is the ISP but sometimes by just reloading it works...
Can anybody shed some light?
Since a few months archive.is is unstable regardless of where I connect from, Spain or not. Are others not seeing the same thing? Maybe 20% of the times I try to use it the servers aren't responding.
They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news in Economist / FT / WSJ / WashingtonPost etc...
Well except paying $300 a month
It looks like the WSJ is available for $2/mo or the WaPo for $2.50 mo. You probably don’t need all of them simultaneously as they frequently cover the same topics, including pretty much all of the big news stories - subscribe to one for a year then switch to another. And even if you aren’t subscribed to all of them you are still contributing in a small way to keeping good journalism alive.
My reply was to help the grandparent commenter who said "They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news". If you already have multiple paid news subscriptions that are working great for you, you can ignore my suggestions. Edit: Ah, you were the grandparent commenter who said "They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news."
Is that sarcasm, or do you really need 20 of them? I'm an avid news reader, and there is no way I could get through even a fraction of that number of news sources daily.
And isn't most major news covered by every one of the biggest news sources - one great source can accommodate the vast majority of news topics for someone, especially if they are on a tight budget.
Fucking sucks, what's the alternative for people without money or people who the papers/businesses don't allow them to do subscribe because of the country they're from/in?
Tried searching for the submission article or even a mention of this event on their websites but I found nothing. Are you sure these are actually faithful replacements of everything that archive.is/.today unlocks for people? It's a lot of paywalls they remove, lots of stuff isn't reported elsewhere.
"Note: archive.org, or web.archive.org, run by the Internet Archive and the most-used web archive on Wikipedia, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today. Please keep using archive.org"
"those archive sites" could be read two ways, and I read it as "sites which automatically archive the Internet" the first time. This is compounded by the fact that archive.org is the only one I knew existed until now, and I kind of assumed these were alternate domains or something.
I was been there. I mean socialist fantasy and everyone was equally poor except party members. It is astonishing to watch this shit happening in different countries with different cultures during long period of time. But with same end. And it is not prosperity. This time in Berlin as recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-election-housing-cris...
Instead of the eyes of their own politicians? Are their goals to actually effect change in Germany or to disparage Germany in the eyes of the global press?
Almost every German politician, most of the police and half the population of Germany speaks English, even though it shouldn't be used for official business. It's no barrier.
Half of everyone in Germany can speak English. It's mandatory to learn in schools. In Berlin that percentage is even higher. So it's no obstacle. And they don't want to limit the visibility of the protest to only Germany.
Germany is one of the more native-language-enforcing countries in Europe. I've been to Slovenia and half of everything is actually written in English, unlike Germany or France where everything's written in the local language.
You mean Spain the fastest growing European country by many metrics? Not sure, we're here, been chilling all summer, time to get back to work now :) What happened to the country you live in?
Spain’s youth unemployment is the highest in Europe. I hope it’s improving, but economically Spain has not recovered post-2008 in line with others in the EU.
No, that's not it. Instead it's the right-wing "geniuses" running the government that have been a major cause of this. The NCP and Finns Party keep making a mess of things in the name of their ideology.
Countries grow in secondary matters and the primary ones (civilization) remain unattended.
And by the way, when something "grows fast", do not misunderstand the indicator... Ethiopia had a 13% annual growth recently; Guyana has a 16% annual growth at this time: you are not thinking that "life is good there" and "Miami videoclip vibes everywhere", right?
According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
Spain was isolated due to it's political Allignment in the 40's, things changed a lot from 1954 on wards when they realized they had a friend in there now that the enemy was the USSR.
Spain did not got hit by WW2 cause it was absolutely destroyed by a civil war beginning 1936. After that a dictatorship of 40 years and when it opened all industry got hit cause it was heavily protected and could not compete in open markets, add to that most of the working industries were cheaply sold to friends of the dictatorship who were, and some of them still are, in power positions.
a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.
By what metric? Because Spain is sixth also by population, and I have the feeling you are using total GDP as scale. Using that, China is the richest economy, and India is the third richest country in the world. Meanwhile Switzerland and Singapore (really rich in reallity) are below 30th, and below Nigeria or Pakistan.
By per capita GDP we Spain are not even 6th, because Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland... are above us and also above Germany, UK or France.
You can still get arrested in spain for saying a joke about Luis Carrero Blanco being Spain's first astronaut.
Luis Carrero Blanco, was the fascist dictator Francisco Franco's right hand man, his car war blown several stories into the air by ETA freedom fighters, hence the joke.
This censorship mechanism comes from 2011, when it was created under the Spanish Socialist Party's government lead by Zapatero. There was a lot of backlash, but the Intellectual Property Comission (also known as "Comisión Sinde") was never dissolved under the next governments' rules.
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar
It is maybe worth looking at the overlap between La Liga / Movistar directors, and former government officials. The Venn diagram has more overlap that one would like to see
And just to add some more context, the Second Section (Sección Segunda), which is part of the executive branch, was created because time after time judges concluded that downloading movies from the internet was perfectly legal[1]. So the PSOE's gov at the time (with Zapatero being president) created a law that just sidesteps judges altogether, and bans access from the executive branch.
As far as I know regarding La Liga's censorship it's due to a commercial court judge in Barcelona; meaning a single local Judge has given the green light to block the internet in a whole country.
It started around 2008 when they had one of the most permissive landscapes in Europe with pressure by the US using the Special 301 whatchlist. Then Obama increased the pressure with Zapatero and after a couple of tries the timeline you describe was set in motion.
I goddamn hate this constant bombardment on medias of this "They say it is to protect the kids".
I was talking with my 60+ and 80+ family and they were like "yes, this is bad, but it's needed to fight pedos or terrorists", but that's obviously nonsense because anybody who doesn't want to get caught can still run its own encryption trivially.
So no, any pedo or terror or crime ring nowadays knows how to encrypt their comms.
This only really ends up hurting the general public safety.
I understand it to be a stand off between western special services on behalf of the media empires, and some random russian… criminals? their own intelligence or adjacent criminals? Just randos on a mission?
Russia doesn't produce content that anyone wants to pay for. So piracy is no economic loss for Putin. Secondly Russia's economy is going down the drain and the population definitely needs distraction from the war. Bread and circuses.
Access to information feels to me like a human right. Blocking that by any means (legal blockade, price unrealistic high) feels like an infringement on a Human Right.
I know this isn’t the way the world works yet, but a Human can dream.
Idealistically, I agree with access to information. But how do you square that (and I don’t have a solution) with the proliferation of misinformation used to manipulate the population or the access to dangerous information such as building bombs and bio weapons?
That knowledge is already available and generally people don’t build bombs or bioweapons. Otherwise they could still go to university and learn all that if they so wish
It is available, and searching for it is a good way to end up on a list. It is hilarious how you gave “go to university” as an option, as if all universities were accessible to anyone and taught classes on this.
I also couldn’t help but notice you completely glossed over the much more important point of misinformation for manipulation.
Misinformation is unfortunately also available. And contrary to "information to build bombs and bioweapons", it's doing actual harm. To societies, economies and above all, to individuals.
Societies don’t have the right to decide what is and isn’t false information and prevent people from accessing or spreading it. (They think they do, and that’s a problem.)
Fighting misinformation has to happen through establishing and maintaining trust, and providing trusted counters to misinformation. Establishing trust requires alignment with the people you want to trust you.
Interference (as opposed to participation) in the free flow of information and the process by which truth is determined is a great evil.
Ok but what about "being directly interfered with by foreign actors"?
This is what's happening right now in Spain. Foreign interference (Ceuta, Dept. Of Homeland evidence...), followed up by foreign social media manipulation campaigns.
Currently, it looks like these campaigns will replace the current government.
Is it a threat to democracy if citizens gather facts from foreign actors when their domestic government attempts to suppress those facts? On a general level, not speaking to this situation in particular. Just curious.
The domestic government holding a monopoly on information is a threat, and foreign information can be a relief, yes.
Foreign misinformation is also a threat, and domestic government shutting it out can also be a relief.
So you have to ask yourself, where are we? Is Spain (or any European country that is not currently bootlicking, for that matter) a dictatorship that needs Freedom messages in a bottle from the USA, or is the USA directly subverting their democracies with espionage?
Why did the USA give millions to Morocco earlier this summer? Why did the Dept. of Homeland (so espionage) produce decade old evidence of corruption in a former administration that would be linked to the current one, at this precise time? Just asking questions here.
All nations are under pressure to hide information from their citizens, whether it’s for covering up political scandals or suppressing political opposition. If you give them the tools, they will eventually use them. So you can’t give them the tools.
The democratic way to fight misinformation is with public trust, a well educated population, and by publishing true information to counter misinformation. Anything less treats citizens as children who can’t be trusted to form their own opinions.
Beautiful on paper, in practice you surrender national security to foreign actors.
I agree on the philosophical part, letting our governments act opaquely under the veil of national security, inevitably leads them to turn on their citizens. But total transparency will be exploited by foreign powers (likely with domestic cooperation), until those that once defended it are removed from power.
Who decides what is misinformation? The state? The ministry of truth? That is the problem with this sort of wishful thinking.
used to manipulate the population
The media industry manipulates opinions via TV channels and newspapers and has done so for the last 50 years. Heck, some states have their own TV channels like the BBC, France Info (France) , SVT (Sweden) which is completely ironic since the state funds them and there is no way to know how neutral these are.
dangerous information
Dangerous information is a misnomer. You could print out how to build an atom bomb and give the step-by-step instructions for free in entire neighborhoods and no one will be able to build it because you need the right expertise and the materials to create one.
Same with bio-weapons unless you think you can develop these in your kitchen after work?
Secondly, we are back to the same problem. Who decides what is "dangerous information" and how far would you be willing to go to contain it? Censor social media? Censor private messages? What about emails? Textbooks? Listening devices in all homes? Cameras that you can't turn off in your toilet in case you pass information to someone else while taking a crap?
I find your argument to be in extreme bad faith. Instead of steel manning the argument, you are repeatedly straw manning it.
Certainly you can understand that deliberately lying about, for example, areas where the science is overwhelming such as vaccines or climate change, is misinformation. I explicitly said I don’t have a solution, your introduction of a “ministry of truth”, “wishful thinking”, censorship and surveillance are your own fabrications, not part of my argument.
If access to information is a human right, as opposed to access to slop, then the best avenue to upholding it this decade is to block most of the internet.
It's beneficial, both practically and spiritually, to society if people can learn about the world around them. That is difficult using the internet we have now due to commercial slop, state-sponsored slop, populist slop, and AI slop.
Apparently all of south western europe blocks half the internet in the name of football. Besides Spain there's also Italy, France, Portugal and surprisingly the UK somewhat.
Your comment has got me genuinely intrigued. Would you care to elaborate how football has anything to do with the internet at all? (I'm writing this from northern Europe & as someone who has been avoiding football like the plague most of his life)
The TV rights holders for football matches want to block pirate streams by any means necessary. Spain appears to be the worst, people get arrested in the UK for profiting off streams (so far, but the communication is pretty aggressive towards consumers too), I don't know about the other countries mentioned.
Wow, that's insane! If TV right holders actually got their way, it would enable them to control how a match is framed, and manipulate how the match is perceived at a country-level. Surely everybody watching should be able to see the same match being played, regardless of who controls the camera? The situation you describe sounds like a recipe for corruption and exploitation!
The UK’s premier league tv rights are worth a little bit over £1bn/yr. The rights holders are tv companies who also run most of the UK’s domestic telecoms, so they lobby incredibly hard and effectively to have pirate match streaming sites blocked.
At least in theory the blocking in EU has to go through a judge.
Blocking itself is ofcourse not at all controversial in Europe. Aside from some free speech maximalists people have no problem with shutting down criminal operations.
It's been on HN a couple times. They block cloudflare during matches because most "pirate" live streams are on there. That means you can't do any work that depends on a legit site that uses cloudflare. Or watch non football content if it's hosted in the wrong place.
They block cloudflare during matches because at least one pirate livestream was on there at least once. These blocklists only ever grow, and rarely shrink. Obviously, pirate livestreams are not on there any more, since it's blocked and for-profit pirates aren't stupid.
There was a case at the highest court in Spain where LaLiga[0] sucessfully claimed that illegal streaming was causing hundereds of million of euros in damages. They essentially petitioned for mass blocking of IPTV, causing Cloudflare, NordVPN, ProtonVPN and a few others to get caught up in a sloppy and stupid dragnet. Whenever there is a football match on, a not-so-small chunk of the internet becomes unavailable. After the match is over, it works again.
I think I should add that Cloudflare (based on USA) doesn't refuse to block those IPTV, but they require the block mandate to come through a United States court.
La Liga believes that this is pointless, by the time that has happened the match would have been over weeks ago. So they asked a Spanish judge to allow them to compile a list of IPs and send them to the Spanish ISPs to block them. Of course the ISPs are forced to comply.
Well, behind these Cloudflare's IPs is not just IPTV, but a lot of legitimate webpages.
Well, behind these Cloudflare's IPs is not just IPTV, but a lot of legitimate webpages.
Which was horrible and had lots of collateral damage when these blocks were initially implemented, but when you were affected, you wrote a complaint that the website been collaterally blocked, and the next time they did the "match blocks", the website was no longer blocked.
Now years after, nothing of value is blocked during the games, at least for me on Vodafone, I don't even notice the blocks anymore (besides hearing the neighbors screaming during the matches themselves).
It's a horrible idea in general, and clearly against both our "European Values" and Spanish constitution, as we should have access to a free internet which clearly isn't true. But on the other hand, it's important to reflect the situation as it is right now, in the real world, rather than lamenting about what was.
Official docker registry, Kagi image search, and several blogs that I read were still blocked for me the last few nights at least. I'm using a local ISP, but I think they in turn operate over Orange.
Sadly I don't care at all about football. So I can't even boycott the football league that should not be named to make any difference...
France has blocked Polymarket since the World Cup in June.
This was requested by the state gaming license authority, which sanction the betting business in France. Most of the business benefits the “Federation française des jeux”, the state gaming company.
Officially this was done out of concern for the safety of the French citizens.
Fun fact I learned in Spain recently. They block Cloudflare Edge IPs during soccer games. Took me a long time to figure out why I was having intermittent outages.
Personally, I welcome this. Archive.today has been blocking my country from using the site for years and for no good reason. Maybe if enough countries block the site, someone more reasonable will build an alternative.
Spaniard here, it's interesting that I haven't noticed any disruption with archive.is in the last weeks. Just checked today and though that it might be iCloud relay, but i don't have it enabled. I'm only using Google's DNS and am too lazy to try with my ISP ones.
Compare this to the absolute mayhem with the soccer matches blocking that will bring down an inordinate amount of legitimate sites during a match.
Not sure what are the technical measures they are deploying in one case or the other but I suspect that when Telefonica is involved they bring the big guns.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit we can trace back to real people, while archive.today is owned by who-knows-who and they have engaged in DDoS attacks and tampering with archives. They have revealed themselves untrustworthy.
Unwall looks nice, and I hope they stick around. There’s been a number of these paywall bypass apps over the years, but only archive.is has survived over time.
https://archive.is/2YdN9
This is so funny.
An article about internet censorship of an archive site that requires an archive site to read!
That’s Brilliant! :D
I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet.
I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune.
If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire.
Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.
How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that.
And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.
Chaotic coincidences,
because the empire is too large to control all of its interests.
Could have been avoided - too much money to be made in the various stages of it not being avoided.
The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.
Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess.
Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.
To your point: it takes 1-3% of a population to upend things…based on historical reference.
Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.
You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.
It’s already fairly realistic to get 2022 era frontier models running on prosumer hardware, which is pretty good for freedom.
You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive.
But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
You do understand that was an example, right? Did you know there are other websites you can download? Anna has one that is pretty big and full of information. I’m pretty sure the AI labs know about it too.
The Internet Archive isn’t a single zip download. You understand you can pick and choose what you want to download, right? And also, that it was just another example of many?
But the Internet and IA aren't controlled by you. They may be censored or taken down without anyone going near you, but not the local model (as long as you have access to electricity and your hardware doesn't break before you have access to replacements).
It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.
This is exactly why I believe LLMs are fundamentally divergent from the trajectory of internet service path we have been on. It allows us to create space and disconnection from an otherwise tethered experience.
But you cannot train an open weight model by yourself, and maybe there could some distributed training net ran by thousand of volunteers around the world in the future, but until we get there we will still be tied to BigCo (American, Chinese or wherever in the world) decisions.
You would need institutions to do this? What do we have besides global megacorps with the resources for this? Universities perhaps training models for their local catchment?
For a number of years, pc publications around these parts actually shipped snapshots of websites on the bundled CD-ROM.
You couldn’t snapshot all, but you could definitely get a taste :)
In a zoo humanity lays protected. These beings used to roam earth as the apex predators and destroyers of their ecosystem and their species too.
I love the way people romanticise this hippie utopian idea of “The Internet” like it wasn’t originally built by, and for, the US Military
The tech and some of the infrastructure was, but the cultural phenomenon that people are nostalgic for was not, that sprang up organically.
Maybe not from the start, but definitely since the EU sunk its teeth into it. We can look forward to ID-controls for everything online, and monitoring of what we write. Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three.
The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other).
At least we now know that the EU and China are closer in terms of ideology and control than we first thought. It is sad, but such is life.
If there's one thing that distinguishes leftist regimes it corporate friendly property law policies to enable free markets.
That sounds better to me? Civil society spaces shouldn't be for making money and vice versa. Surely we can't look at what's happened to twitter where you basically get corporate sponsorship for rage baiting on the internet and think that's an improvement? The most effective political action recently has been hyperlocal neighbourhood groups getting mad and turning up to data centre meetings en-masse and letting local representatives know that they are all know where they live. Spouting off on the internet has been weaponised to force people into inaction and is easily corralled as there are so few of these mega platforms and they're easy to buy and manipulate centrally.
Yes, they just made a big step in that direction by requiring age verification on social media for everyone :(
That is not happening though. But they are building the machinery to do things like this.
The real things that kill the internet is tech bros who learned you can make money with the internet and ofcourse AI which will make sure the internet becomes bots who communicate with other bots.
Let me add a few more layers just for some fun and profit :-D
Here[0] is an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page which archives the original article about internet censorship of an archive site that might require an archive of an archive site to read (given that people of spain cant now view archive.is in the first place or might have some difficulties doing so)
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimel...
(If someone is perhaps interested and wants to see me talk more about what this is, then please read the blogpost that I had made for more info: https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...)
"Temporarily Offline Internet Archive services are temporarily offline. " What did you DO
It seems that all of internet archive was down and I don't think that it was because of me (I hope), maybe just some other issues and some sort of just a chance that internet archive got offline at the exact same time that I had shared this thing here.
but when I had opened up hackernews and I read your comment, I genuinely felt myself also as what did I DO.
It is back again now for what its worth, whew what a relief but folks please remember to donate to internet archive for its posterity :-)
[ERROR] The number of receivers has reached limits.
Brilliant indeed!
"502 Bad Gateway" (I'm in Spain)
Works fine for me, also Spain, Vodafone as the ISP.
Edit: eeh, that's a different site than the one mentioned by the submission, why it wouldn't work?
Edit2: Also, the error is wrong and server-side. If your ISP is trying to block the website, you'll get either a tls error that the certificate isn't matching, or for non-https sites you get redirected to the scary "You're contributing to something illegal blah blah".
There’s a whole network of “archive.<something>” sites under the “archive.today” umbrella. I’ve seen .is .ps .md .ph and .at, at least.
Here you go, this should work: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimel...
(an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page, might take some time to load though)
(this uses htmlpipe, something I have made :-D)
This is working fine for me in spain so far....
”archive dot is” is a part of the same DDoS network of sites. Don’t use them!
Feel free to link the whole article through a different site
https://unwall.app/reclaimthenet.org/spain-blocks-archive-to...
https://web.archive.org/web/20260920061809/https://reclaimth...
Vs
https://archive.is/2YdN9
One has paywall, one doesn't...
Sorry man, people will keep DDoSing some random guy's blog. It's a service problem lol
The funny thing is the blog is hosted on wordpress.com, so it's tantamount to trying to ddos Google.
Yeah, the archive guy should just leave the blog alone instead of triggering Streissand effect lol
The one-world government and the CIA are loving all this FUD being spread about archive.is. No, don't access information we don't want you to! Because of... uh... DDOS, that's it!
Thanks for confirming that archive.today is indeed an intelligence operation. The information you have publicly provided is very helpful. :)
archive.today and archive.is are alternative domains of the same website
I live in Spain and can still enjoy access to this site. This is enforced by major ISPs (Vodafone among others), so anyone sane just opts for a local ISP (if they have a choice)
How is it enforced? IP or DNS?
According to this site https://bandaancha.eu/articulos/gobierno-tiene-lista-web-ofi..., they use SNI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication)
Enabling ESNI in Firefox should be a countermeasure (encrypted SNI extension of the TLS so that hostname is no longer sent in plain text)
https://superuser.com/questions/1346634/modern-browser-with-...
It's not magic. archive.is has no HTTPS record, so ESNI cannot be used.
That superuser thread from 2018 (it's ECH now not ESNI) isn't much help
Although I do like the comment at the bottom that states the problem as disabling SNI not encrypting it. Encrypting SNI/ClientHello is over complicated, which is why ESNI was flawed and (allegedly) why Cloudflare disabled it. The solution to the plaintext SNI problem is to not send SNI (I don't send it unless necessary)
There is an alternative non-TLS method of encrypting traffic, per packet, that allows hosting multiple websites on the same IP. I use it in the homelab. It proves that TLS and SNI is not the only way
There's also a popular archive of www content that does not require SNI. It's older and larger than Cloudflare
The problem with software like Firefox is that it automatically sends SNI to every website no matter if SNI is required or not. The superuser thread mentions a Firefox add-on that no longer works. If Firefox is open source then why not just edit the code and recompile
Clearly, Mozilla is not going to provide a solution. It would rather add support for ESNI and then ECH as opposed to giving users an option to diable sending SNI
Mozilla is pro-surveillance advertising, Cloudflare is pro-surveillance advertising
Fortunately, not every HTTPS website is hosted on a shared IP, not every HTTPS website requires SNI. And popular web browsers derived from Mozilla and Google are not the only user agents
A couple of ways to not send SNI
1. Use an SSL client, e.g., openssl s_client, bssl client, etc.
2. Use a local forward proxy, e.g., stunnel, haproxy, etc.
Even if Cloudflare enables ECH across all the websites it controls, and we have been waiting for years, there is still the issue of SSL termination by Cloudflare. For many of those sites, all the TLS traffic, not just the SNI, is available as plaintext to Cloudflare and to whomever Cloudflare, a US corporation, may or must share it with
*disable
Differs by the ISP you have, I've seen DNS manipulation, IP filtering, hostname filtering, and HTTPS interception so far. Obviously most websites use TLS today so it mostly "fails" so people see certificate errors rather than their scary "You're contributing to breaking the law blah blah blah". Sometimes just straight up timeouts, resets, or generic connection failures.
It also doesn't seem to be enforced on my Movistar connection, which means the single biggest ISP is opting out?
Nor on Vodafone for me, 3rd biggest ISP in the country. Guess that leaves us with Orange or possibly Digi as the second one that maybe actually has implemented the block?
Orange is not blocking it on my fiber yet but it is on my mobile connection.
The strange thing is I use the same DNS on both (which exits on my fiber connection, even when I'm on mobile), so they must be blocking it another way.
The order only went through on Friday so presumably the ISPs will take some time to catch up.
Since no court was involved, the accusation that the user is trying to access an illegal website is itself an illegal accusation.
Does archive.is have problems? I tried this article with it and it didn't work:
https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/burned-out-and...
Error: Invalid InterceptionId.
Since a few months archive.is is "unstable" from Spain. I thought the reason is the ISP but sometimes by just reloading it works... Can anybody shed some light?
Since a few months archive.is is unstable regardless of where I connect from, Spain or not. Are others not seeing the same thing? Maybe 20% of the times I try to use it the servers aren't responding.
Avoid those archive sites like the plague. They are not trustworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news in Economist / FT / WSJ / WashingtonPost etc...
Well except paying $300 a month I guess.
It looks like the WSJ is available for $2/mo or the WaPo for $2.50 mo. You probably don’t need all of them simultaneously as they frequently cover the same topics, including pretty much all of the big news stories - subscribe to one for a year then switch to another. And even if you aren’t subscribed to all of them you are still contributing in a small way to keeping good journalism alive.
I am already subscribed to 2 papers in my own country at ~$50 total since one comes in print once a week.
Just a matter of priorities.
My reply was to help the grandparent commenter who said "They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news". If you already have multiple paid news subscriptions that are working great for you, you can ignore my suggestions. Edit: Ah, you were the grandparent commenter who said "They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news."
its under 15$ a month...
Each. For over 20 of them.
Is that sarcasm, or do you really need 20 of them? I'm an avid news reader, and there is no way I could get through even a fraction of that number of news sources daily.
And isn't most major news covered by every one of the biggest news sources - one great source can accommodate the vast majority of news topics for someone, especially if they are on a tight budget.
How do you know which ones Hacker News is going to link to?
Except you cannot know if the system has tampered with the content you think is genuinely from those sites.
Fucking sucks, what's the alternative for people without money or people who the papers/businesses don't allow them to do subscribe because of the country they're from/in?
Use sources such as PBS, NPR, etc. - they are available globally, and there are non-US-based sources if readers prefer.
Tried searching for the submission article or even a mention of this event on their websites but I found nothing. Are you sure these are actually faithful replacements of everything that archive.is/.today unlocks for people? It's a lot of paywalls they remove, lots of stuff isn't reported elsewhere.
At the bottom of that page FYI -
"Note: archive.org, or web.archive.org, run by the Internet Archive and the most-used web archive on Wikipedia, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today. Please keep using archive.org"
What’s your point? archive.is and archive.today are the same service.
My ISP blocks both and I’m not even in Spain.
"those archive sites" could be read two ways, and I read it as "sites which automatically archive the Internet" the first time. This is compounded by the fact that archive.org is the only one I knew existed until now, and I kind of assumed these were alternate domains or something.
You get the right to say this when you make a better one. Otherwise, you're just telling people to stop accessing information.
Did they find a La Liga game on it or something?
Modern Spain is having patchy record with digital age. Earlier:
1. Blocked Telegram with a court order, reinstituted after public backslash
2. Blocks Internet and Cloudflare during La Liga matches
3. Prime minister Pedro Sanchez from Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has demanded the end of anonymity in Internet
They say it is to protect the kids, but likely it is to find out who watches La Liga without a premium subscription.
What happened to Spain? They didn’t get hit by WW2 and yet…are a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.
PSOE happened
But then again, discussing politics hardly ever gets less divisive here or elsewhere.
The fault in that comment is to be unsupported by arguments.
Otherwise, there would be no divisiveness in fairly assessing measures in Economics.
I was been there. I mean socialist fantasy and everyone was equally poor except party members. It is astonishing to watch this shit happening in different countries with different cultures during long period of time. But with same end. And it is not prosperity. This time in Berlin as recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-election-housing-cris...
Why are the protesters in Berlin holding signs in English?
Because they want to have the eyes of global press on Germany
Instead of the eyes of their own politicians? Are their goals to actually effect change in Germany or to disparage Germany in the eyes of the global press?
Almost every German politician, most of the police and half the population of Germany speaks English, even though it shouldn't be used for official business. It's no barrier.
Half of everyone in Germany can speak English. It's mandatory to learn in schools. In Berlin that percentage is even higher. So it's no obstacle. And they don't want to limit the visibility of the protest to only Germany.
Germany is one of the more native-language-enforcing countries in Europe. I've been to Slovenia and half of everything is actually written in English, unlike Germany or France where everything's written in the local language.
Since the end of the Civil War in 1939, Spain has spent roughly 65% of the time under Right/Far-Right rule and 35% under Left/Center-Left rule.
Since 1978 Spain has spent 100% of the time under left rule.
You mean Spain the fastest growing European country by many metrics? Not sure, we're here, been chilling all summer, time to get back to work now :) What happened to the country you live in?
Spain’s youth unemployment is the highest in Europe. I hope it’s improving, but economically Spain has not recovered post-2008 in line with others in the EU.
Don't worry. Finland has taken over with the highest unemployment and will likely soon have the highest youth unemployment.
Probably because in Finland you are provided housing and money even if you don't work.
No, that's not it. Instead it's the right-wing "geniuses" running the government that have been a major cause of this. The NCP and Finns Party keep making a mess of things in the name of their ideology.
You're absolutely right, and that's a load-bearing point. If we just kill the unemployed people, there will be low unemployment.
Countries grow in secondary matters and the primary ones (civilization) remain unattended.
And by the way, when something "grows fast", do not misunderstand the indicator... Ethiopia had a 13% annual growth recently; Guyana has a 16% annual growth at this time: you are not thinking that "life is good there" and "Miami videoclip vibes everywhere", right?
According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
My grandparents would routinely call the 40s "The years of hunger" so you can guess which way it went.
Spain was isolated due to it's political Allignment in the 40's, things changed a lot from 1954 on wards when they realized they had a friend in there now that the enemy was the USSR.
Spain did not got hit by WW2 cause it was absolutely destroyed by a civil war beginning 1936. After that a dictatorship of 40 years and when it opened all industry got hit cause it was heavily protected and could not compete in open markets, add to that most of the working industries were cheaply sold to friends of the dictatorship who were, and some of them still are, in power positions.
That is completely false.
By what metric? Because Spain is sixth also by population, and I have the feeling you are using total GDP as scale. Using that, China is the richest economy, and India is the third richest country in the world. Meanwhile Switzerland and Singapore (really rich in reallity) are below 30th, and below Nigeria or Pakistan.
By per capita GDP we Spain are not even 6th, because Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland... are above us and also above Germany, UK or France.
Is being 9th in (nominal) GDP rating now is mentioned as "even"? 90% of the world is behind Russia.
Which just proves GDP is a low IQ metric to measure how good a country is to live in.
I certainly would rather live places like Mallorca or Donostia than in many places that are ahead of Spain in the silly GDP game.
Speaking of low IQ, it's pretty amusing to read that someone thinks that Spain came out unscathed from the events of 1930s and 1940s.
You can still get arrested in spain for saying a joke about Luis Carrero Blanco being Spain's first astronaut.
Luis Carrero Blanco, was the fascist dictator Francisco Franco's right hand man, his car war blown several stories into the air by ETA freedom fighters, hence the joke.
ETA terrorists*
Calling ETA freedom fighters in 2026, disgusting.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Asesinatos_cometidos_por...
And yet they were the only ones blowing up fascists. Every time it's not the moderate progressive democrats who lead the resistance. Shame that.
I was referring to the people who sent Blanco to space as freedom fighters. I don't know what modern day ETA is up to.
They did make a good launching pad for him.
Russia low GDP is actually not true. In real terms is bigger than Germany's.
GDP just measures how expensive things are.
This censorship mechanism comes from 2011, when it was created under the Spanish Socialist Party's government lead by Zapatero. There was a lot of backlash, but the Intellectual Property Comission (also known as "Comisión Sinde") was never dissolved under the next governments' rules.
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
Right. First case was performed by the executive branch of the State. Second one by the justice branch.
It is maybe worth looking at the overlap between La Liga / Movistar directors, and former government officials. The Venn diagram has more overlap that one would like to see
Telefónica is what we call a "cementerio de políticos".
And just to add some more context, the Second Section (Sección Segunda), which is part of the executive branch, was created because time after time judges concluded that downloading movies from the internet was perfectly legal[1]. So the PSOE's gov at the time (with Zapatero being president) created a law that just sidesteps judges altogether, and bans access from the executive branch.
[1] See also: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada
As far as I know regarding La Liga's censorship it's due to a commercial court judge in Barcelona; meaning a single local Judge has given the green light to block the internet in a whole country.
It started around 2008 when they had one of the most permissive landscapes in Europe with pressure by the US using the Special 301 whatchlist. Then Obama increased the pressure with Zapatero and after a couple of tries the timeline you describe was set in motion.
Thanks MPAA and RIAA as usual.
The attempts to end anonimity and to end cash flow are ideological and pretty surely did not come from the USA.
USA had nothing to do with this.
Spain and the EU have always been perfectly capable and willing to do this kind of internet blocking and censorship without USA telling them to.
You notice how nothing even remotely close to this kind of forced ISP blocking happens in the US? It is wildly illegal.
Explain the 301 watch list pressure.
Both can be true
I goddamn hate this constant bombardment on medias of this "They say it is to protect the kids".
I was talking with my 60+ and 80+ family and they were like "yes, this is bad, but it's needed to fight pedos or terrorists", but that's obviously nonsense because anybody who doesn't want to get caught can still run its own encryption trivially.
So no, any pedo or terror or crime ring nowadays knows how to encrypt their comms.
This only really ends up hurting the general public safety.
I'd built something which can allow people to archive archive.is pages on archive.org.
https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...
This could perhaps be used for this purpose.
I have submitted it on hackernews once again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49773417
(Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574562)
This is a welcome development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
That's not a reason to censor it at the state level.
Why not?
Why is it? You don't get to censor important sources of information and then literally just cite "why not?" as the reason.
The linked wiki page lists the reasons. You can't just say these are not good reasons without saying why
Which one of them justifies the government putting you in prison for accessing the information?
“Protecting democracy” or something Orwellian like that
archive.is protects democracy and that's why it must be illegal to access?
I understand it to be a stand off between western special services on behalf of the media empires, and some random russian… criminals? their own intelligence or adjacent criminals? Just randos on a mission?
Russia doesn't produce content that anyone wants to pay for. So piracy is no economic loss for Putin. Secondly Russia's economy is going down the drain and the population definitely needs distraction from the war. Bread and circuses.
Access to information feels to me like a human right. Blocking that by any means (legal blockade, price unrealistic high) feels like an infringement on a Human Right.
I know this isn’t the way the world works yet, but a Human can dream.
Idealistically, I agree with access to information. But how do you square that (and I don’t have a solution) with the proliferation of misinformation used to manipulate the population or the access to dangerous information such as building bombs and bio weapons?
That knowledge is already available and generally people don’t build bombs or bioweapons. Otherwise they could still go to university and learn all that if they so wish
It is available, and searching for it is a good way to end up on a list. It is hilarious how you gave “go to university” as an option, as if all universities were accessible to anyone and taught classes on this.
I also couldn’t help but notice you completely glossed over the much more important point of misinformation for manipulation.
Almost everyone is on many lists. Has it helped?
Misinformation is unfortunately also available. And contrary to "information to build bombs and bioweapons", it's doing actual harm. To societies, economies and above all, to individuals.
Societies don’t have the right to decide what is and isn’t false information and prevent people from accessing or spreading it. (They think they do, and that’s a problem.)
Fighting misinformation has to happen through establishing and maintaining trust, and providing trusted counters to misinformation. Establishing trust requires alignment with the people you want to trust you.
Interference (as opposed to participation) in the free flow of information and the process by which truth is determined is a great evil.
Ok but what about "being directly interfered with by foreign actors"?
This is what's happening right now in Spain. Foreign interference (Ceuta, Dept. Of Homeland evidence...), followed up by foreign social media manipulation campaigns.
Currently, it looks like these campaigns will replace the current government.
This is a direct threat to democracy.
Is it a threat to democracy if citizens gather facts from foreign actors when their domestic government attempts to suppress those facts? On a general level, not speaking to this situation in particular. Just curious.
Weird way to frame this argument as a question.
The domestic government holding a monopoly on information is a threat, and foreign information can be a relief, yes.
Foreign misinformation is also a threat, and domestic government shutting it out can also be a relief.
So you have to ask yourself, where are we? Is Spain (or any European country that is not currently bootlicking, for that matter) a dictatorship that needs Freedom messages in a bottle from the USA, or is the USA directly subverting their democracies with espionage?
Why did the USA give millions to Morocco earlier this summer? Why did the Dept. of Homeland (so espionage) produce decade old evidence of corruption in a former administration that would be linked to the current one, at this precise time? Just asking questions here.
All nations are under pressure to hide information from their citizens, whether it’s for covering up political scandals or suppressing political opposition. If you give them the tools, they will eventually use them. So you can’t give them the tools.
The democratic way to fight misinformation is with public trust, a well educated population, and by publishing true information to counter misinformation. Anything less treats citizens as children who can’t be trusted to form their own opinions.
Beautiful on paper, in practice you surrender national security to foreign actors.
I agree on the philosophical part, letting our governments act opaquely under the veil of national security, inevitably leads them to turn on their citizens. But total transparency will be exploited by foreign powers (likely with domestic cooperation), until those that once defended it are removed from power.
Who decides what is misinformation? The state? The ministry of truth? That is the problem with this sort of wishful thinking.
The media industry manipulates opinions via TV channels and newspapers and has done so for the last 50 years. Heck, some states have their own TV channels like the BBC, France Info (France) , SVT (Sweden) which is completely ironic since the state funds them and there is no way to know how neutral these are.
Dangerous information is a misnomer. You could print out how to build an atom bomb and give the step-by-step instructions for free in entire neighborhoods and no one will be able to build it because you need the right expertise and the materials to create one.
Same with bio-weapons unless you think you can develop these in your kitchen after work?
Secondly, we are back to the same problem. Who decides what is "dangerous information" and how far would you be willing to go to contain it? Censor social media? Censor private messages? What about emails? Textbooks? Listening devices in all homes? Cameras that you can't turn off in your toilet in case you pass information to someone else while taking a crap?
I find your argument to be in extreme bad faith. Instead of steel manning the argument, you are repeatedly straw manning it.
Certainly you can understand that deliberately lying about, for example, areas where the science is overwhelming such as vaccines or climate change, is misinformation. I explicitly said I don’t have a solution, your introduction of a “ministry of truth”, “wishful thinking”, censorship and surveillance are your own fabrications, not part of my argument.
If access to information is a human right, as opposed to access to slop, then the best avenue to upholding it this decade is to block most of the internet.
It's beneficial, both practically and spiritually, to society if people can learn about the world around them. That is difficult using the internet we have now due to commercial slop, state-sponsored slop, populist slop, and AI slop.
The Western world currently views free college education as bad “socialism,” so I am not hopeful.
Apparently all of south western europe blocks half the internet in the name of football. Besides Spain there's also Italy, France, Portugal and surprisingly the UK somewhat.
Your comment has got me genuinely intrigued. Would you care to elaborate how football has anything to do with the internet at all? (I'm writing this from northern Europe & as someone who has been avoiding football like the plague most of his life)
The TV rights holders for football matches want to block pirate streams by any means necessary. Spain appears to be the worst, people get arrested in the UK for profiting off streams (so far, but the communication is pretty aggressive towards consumers too), I don't know about the other countries mentioned.
Wow, that's insane! If TV right holders actually got their way, it would enable them to control how a match is framed, and manipulate how the match is perceived at a country-level. Surely everybody watching should be able to see the same match being played, regardless of who controls the camera? The situation you describe sounds like a recipe for corruption and exploitation!
The UK’s premier league tv rights are worth a little bit over £1bn/yr. The rights holders are tv companies who also run most of the UK’s domestic telecoms, so they lobby incredibly hard and effectively to have pirate match streaming sites blocked.
There was a movement in the US over the past decade or so for media companies to buy up ISPs for the sole purpose of being able to apply blocking.
At least in theory the blocking in EU has to go through a judge.
Blocking itself is ofcourse not at all controversial in Europe. Aside from some free speech maximalists people have no problem with shutting down criminal operations.
How do you know it's illegal if a judge hasn't ruled? In parts of Europe it's illegal to call someone's operations illegal if a judge hasn't ruled it.
In this case a judge who clearly does not use the internet for anything has ruled.
It's been on HN a couple times. They block cloudflare during matches because most "pirate" live streams are on there. That means you can't do any work that depends on a legit site that uses cloudflare. Or watch non football content if it's hosted in the wrong place.
They block cloudflare during matches because at least one pirate livestream was on there at least once. These blocklists only ever grow, and rarely shrink. Obviously, pirate livestreams are not on there any more, since it's blocked and for-profit pirates aren't stupid.
There was a case at the highest court in Spain where LaLiga[0] sucessfully claimed that illegal streaming was causing hundereds of million of euros in damages. They essentially petitioned for mass blocking of IPTV, causing Cloudflare, NordVPN, ProtonVPN and a few others to get caught up in a sloppy and stupid dragnet. Whenever there is a football match on, a not-so-small chunk of the internet becomes unavailable. After the match is over, it works again.
[0] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...
It doesn’t just last for a match, sometimes they start at 00:00 and take the entire day.
I think I should add that Cloudflare (based on USA) doesn't refuse to block those IPTV, but they require the block mandate to come through a United States court. La Liga believes that this is pointless, by the time that has happened the match would have been over weeks ago. So they asked a Spanish judge to allow them to compile a list of IPs and send them to the Spanish ISPs to block them. Of course the ISPs are forced to comply. Well, behind these Cloudflare's IPs is not just IPTV, but a lot of legitimate webpages.
Which was horrible and had lots of collateral damage when these blocks were initially implemented, but when you were affected, you wrote a complaint that the website been collaterally blocked, and the next time they did the "match blocks", the website was no longer blocked.
Now years after, nothing of value is blocked during the games, at least for me on Vodafone, I don't even notice the blocks anymore (besides hearing the neighbors screaming during the matches themselves).
It's a horrible idea in general, and clearly against both our "European Values" and Spanish constitution, as we should have access to a free internet which clearly isn't true. But on the other hand, it's important to reflect the situation as it is right now, in the real world, rather than lamenting about what was.
Official docker registry, Kagi image search, and several blogs that I read were still blocked for me the last few nights at least. I'm using a local ISP, but I think they in turn operate over Orange.
Sadly I don't care at all about football. So I can't even boycott the football league that should not be named to make any difference...
Portugal only has DNS blocks on piracy sites, which are extremely easy to circumvent. I don't think that block is football-related.
France has blocked Polymarket since the World Cup in June.
This was requested by the state gaming license authority, which sanction the betting business in France. Most of the business benefits the “Federation française des jeux”, the state gaming company.
Officially this was done out of concern for the safety of the French citizens.
Gambling is quite regulated in France, it’s not new.
torrent some popular movies on an American home ISP and you may get some nasty letters too
every economy protects its crown jewels to a degree which seems excessive to its neighbors
It is no coincidence that a lot of piracy is now hosted in Russia.
Fun fact I learned in Spain recently. They block Cloudflare Edge IPs during soccer games. Took me a long time to figure out why I was having intermittent outages.
Not only Cloudflare. They block IP Ranges of many CDNs during the matches.
Which blocks docker hub images. You cant fetch an image during a match.
Personally, I welcome this. Archive.today has been blocking my country from using the site for years and for no good reason. Maybe if enough countries block the site, someone more reasonable will build an alternative.
Brilliant! I cannot have this service, so I am happy that others cannot have it as well. You make me sick.
The full list of webs blocked by copyright issues can be downloaded from the web of the Spanish government here:
https://www.cultura.gob.es/dam/jcr:919c6bd2-17b2-43d1-98f5-d...
Incredibly helpful of the Spanish government to compile a list of free media sites :D
Lies are for free, while the truth is behind paywalls. This is not going to end well.
Edit: why is it that Billionaires just fund fake news. Are there no "white hat" billionaires that could fund an opposition to that?
Not just paywalls - sites have also tried ads, although those don’t have great results either. But I agree with your overall point.
White hat people aren't allowed to become billionaires.
Spaniard here, it's interesting that I haven't noticed any disruption with archive.is in the last weeks. Just checked today and though that it might be iCloud relay, but i don't have it enabled. I'm only using Google's DNS and am too lazy to try with my ISP ones.
Compare this to the absolute mayhem with the soccer matches blocking that will bring down an inordinate amount of legitimate sites during a match.
Not sure what are the technical measures they are deploying in one case or the other but I suspect that when Telefonica is involved they bring the big guns.
very socialist from them!
Isn’t that site the one the maintainer is known for altering pages or something?
I feel like archive.today is as important as webarchive is. Not only for uptime redundancy, but also redundancy in what they capture.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit we can trace back to real people, while archive.today is owned by who-knows-who and they have engaged in DDoS attacks and tampering with archives. They have revealed themselves untrustworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...
IA doesn’t bypass paywalls when archiving, so it’s the only option we have for that, imperfect as it is.
Regardless, they are not “as important” and you should exercise caution. In addition, they are not the only option, there is also https://unwall.app.
Unwall looks nice, and I hope they stick around. There’s been a number of these paywall bypass apps over the years, but only archive.is has survived over time.
Ahhh crap. I noticed that earlier today. Archive.today blocks some DNS providers like CloudFlare and I thought I had ended up on the wrong DNS again.
Time to fix that by running a real DNS and not just a forwarder though.
Edit: Hmm it seems like they are not just blocking at DNS level :(