eyya

This information came to light thanks to the Swedish judicial system: TPB’s revenue was $4–5 million per year, plus something on Bitcoin's grow as they were early adopters. Thus, archive.org falls somewhere between TPB and Megaupload. I agree that archive.today is perhaps just a little smaller than archive.org, but in any case, it’s in the same “indie league”, not Facebook.

You're attributing teenage behavior to a 40-year-old posh guy. There’s more than enough evidence here: photos online, years of blogging about trendy luxury restaurants before suddenly pivoting to investigations into archives, and his father’s status as a public figure. So either there’s a conspiracy at play here, or Jani is simply an idiot and a psychopath. I’m willing to consider both possibilities, but you’re only considering the second one. In any case, both make him malicious.

These links are posted by malware on the computers of HN users who have previously visited archive.today; you won't be able to stop this by asking people not to post links. Users who post links should be urged to run an antivirus scan.

This wasn’t the first incident involving Finland and its government since the archive was established, nor was it even the second.

And when you consider that Jani Patokallio isn’t just some random, curious, cybersecurity blogger, but the ~40-year-old son of a high-ranking Finnish official who suddenly took up slighting and doxing, the story takes on a whole new dimension and it’s hard to come up with a benign explanation for his curiosity: either you’re being hounded by the deep state or a wealthy nutcase.

30 million is on the scale of Pirate Bay, slightly less than Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload (150M), and 3–4 orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook. So yes, by my definition, archive.org is a small, indie project as well still operating out of someone’s garage.

comparable to the 3 websites mentioned

You have to hang out on Epstein Island to find buyers for metadata. Have you heard of any small indie projects with this kind of business model? Maybe PirateBay, Sci-Hub, Flibusta? I haven't. That's why I'm sure CloudFlare is selling your metadata (and not just that), but the archive isn't. Simply because it doesn’t fly that high. Banners, pop-unders, pop-ups—what people here like to call “malware”—yes, that’s it. Just a normal pirate website with too many too cheap visitors and an unpassable captcha and a pop-under as the result.

Its incredible popularity has long since led to the emergence of virtually unsolvable CAPTCHAs, designed to reduce this level.

So far, the only benefits of this popularity are the AI crawlers which cause the site to run intermittently (same issue this year with archive.org and commoncrawl) plus Finnish doxxers and fake child-porn fighters trying to shut it down.

But this might be the reason: to make the archive unexciting for AI scrapers

Those are either "flotsam" or "derelict", definitively not "pirated".

HN does not

example.com blocks Iran for nothing

Russia exports a huge amount of content (from cartoons to AI), which is why it did not withdraw from copyright treaties in 2022, as Belarus did