“THE INFORMATION SOUGHT THROUGH THIS SUBPOENA RELATES TO A FEDERAL CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED BY THE FBI,” the subpoena says. “YOUR COMPANY IS REQUIRED TO FURNISH THIS INFORMATION. YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFINITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.”

American FBI forgets that Canada has not yet been annexed by the United States. They’re not required to do shit, they don’t even go here.

Also why are subpoenas always in all caps? Why are you yelling at me? Learn to write. Most of us are taught how to use upper and lower case letters early in elementary school, this isn’t a sign that needs to be bold, stop being so annoying.

[–] john_brown@hexbear.net 26 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

I'm familiar with a similar situation where a forum was hosted on a Chinese server that has a bunch of Americans on it talking about a security hole in their company. FBI did a sad attempt at hard man interviews with some of the Americans and got nothing so they sent a subpoena to the webmaster demanding they turn over all logs and the webmaster just replied asking if they bothered to figure out where the server was. I think the FBI are just fundamentally bad it their jobs.

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

are they bad or are they gretzkying that people comply even though they don't have to?

[–] john_brown@hexbear.net 15 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I guess that's possible, but I think if they're resorting to that it would generally be because they're bad at their jobs. I suspect if they didn't suggest and plan terrorist attacks for their patsies, they'd rarely catch anybody other than the most inept of criminals.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I wonder what their plan to proceed is once they've found out that the project is run by the child of some Russian oligarch (just speculating here). Their subpoena isn't even to the same continent as the datacenter.

Freeze their mastercard?

[–] john_brown@hexbear.net 10 points 5 months ago

brump we have the best sanctions, jack

[–] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 2 points 5 months ago

probably comes down to whether they have a "send subpoena" button

or it could be graft on the part of agents.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sending all caps letters to webmasters probably just works a considerable amount of the times.

[–] cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 5 months ago

the FBI are just bad at their jobs

They're gonna make so much kiddie porn and prove. You. Wrong.

[–] Evilphd666@hexbear.net 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

[–] unaware@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

speech-r trump-drenched

[–] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 19 points 5 months ago

American FBI forgets that Canada has not yet been annexed by the United States. They’re not required to do shit, they don’t even go here.

I'm sure they do plenty of business in the US, though, so I don't think the feds would have trouble turning the screws if they needed to. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong!

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 11 points 5 months ago

Tucows is a Canadian-American company on the NASDAQ. So this explains why the FBI tried them first before going more international and knocking on OVHs door.

They also seem to have a pretty laissez-faire approach to who they provide services to (all the nazi sites).

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 2 points 5 months ago

Also why are subpoenas always in all caps? Why are you yelling at me?

Legal intimidation mostly. It's parlour tricks. Same reason the cops shout.

[–] ClathrateG@hexbear.net 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Invoking GamerGate is hilarious

[–] Wheaties@hexbear.net 6 points 5 months ago

As the header to a paragraph that admits it's "used to save snapshots of articles or government websites that are likely to change or be deleted", no less. Trying to hide the fundamental utility of this website.

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 29 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Wouldn't an archiving service be improved by utilizing a federated, decentralized model? A large decentralized network of archiving servers that can not only A) act as redundant backup for archived sites but also B) act as different points of entry for the archiving process.

The whole reason you're attempting to archive things like this is for both freedom of access and also preservation of information, right? Having that kind of service in a centralized form seems like a huge problem.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 27 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Not many people can mirror what is probably a couple of petabytes.

And ensuring preservation and availability across unreliable nodes is pretty difficult, requires considerable redundancy. How many people are willing to do that especially when it's legally difficult?

edit: and how many people would keep their mirrors up when FBI/Europol start cracking down on people hosting mirrors.

edit: There seems to have been an effort to decentralize internetarchive on dweb. But I'm not sure how serious dweb is, it seems to have been a vehicle to promote crypto (the blockchain kind) at least in part.

I also found out that KDE (the linux desktop) is funded by big meat (Tönnies), through Blue Systems. They sponsor dweb too. Just random aside.

[–] Wheaties@hexbear.net 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Essentially the same built-in problems that crypto has. The model works for blogging, like twitter and reddit clones. It's just not the right set up for frequent requests or a huge amount of storage.

That being said, I hope a few of the mirrors are exploiting the current geo-political climate. Canada may eventually fold, but a server in Russia or China ought to be well enough removed.

[–] ClathrateG@hexbear.net 23 points 5 months ago

The issue with that is you need volunteers with the infrastructure to run the nodes, and each one would be subject to as much legal liability and the person running a centralised service

[–] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 28 points 5 months ago

The subpoena, which was posted on X by archive.today on October 30, was sent by the FBI to Tucows, a popular Canadian domain registrar. It demands that Tucows give the FBI the “customer or subscriber name, address of service, and billing address” and other information about the “customer behind archive.today.”

[–] cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

We should really get rid of them.

Electorally I mean.

[–] Ram_The_Manparts@hexbear.net 6 points 5 months ago

Oh fuck I'm gonna vooot

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The site owner should opensource their code before that happens so that it is fundamentally useless. A dozen copies will go up the moment it goes down.

[–] Trying2KnowMyself@hexbear.net 10 points 5 months ago

The code itself, while useful, is probably less useful than the archived data. Unless each copy has both, and new snapshots can somehow be shared between them, it’s still a pretty massive loss.

[–] chgxvjh@hexbear.net 8 points 5 months ago

volth is behind archive? I remember seeing them in the nixos github community.

[–] Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

The FBI* can idi na'huy.

[–] Saymaz@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 4 months ago

Lmao, what do they mean by 'infamous'? The person is doing a public service.