Worth noting … the feds are coming for archival sites.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to unmask the operator of Archive.is, also known as Archive.today, a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.
The FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows, seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” The subpoena tells Tucows that “your company is required to furnish this information.”
The subpoena is supposed to be secret, but the Archive.today X account posted the document on October 30, the same day the subpoena was issued. The X post contained a link to the PDF and the word “canary.”
“If you refuse to obey this subpoena, the United States Attorney General may invoke the aid of a United States District Court to compel compliance. Your failure to obey the resulting court order may be punished as contempt,” the document said. It gave a deadline of November 29.
The FBI really wants people having discussions that are limited to just the headline I guess…
Even if legal attacks don’t work, I’ve noticed a few sites I read articles from have paywalls that are no longer bypassable by archive.is, and so I’m kind of at a loss as to how to link them, except maybe by copying the text myself. But that has a number of disadvantages, such as, copied text is not an authoritative source because most people can’t verify it wasn’t altered. It’s usually not a problem reading it myself because all the text shows up in the rss feed, but what’s lacking is a way to share it.