Other archival services are transparently funded. Archive.is must cost at least $10000 a month to run. I haven't seen any evidence it is run by the NSA. I also haven't seen any evidence that it isn't. Who else would have the motivation to burn millions of dollars on it while taking no credit?
Readit News
Also last I heard it was only $3k a month.
kinda a nonstarter, eh?
> I also haven't seen any evidence that it isn't
You can say that for any conceivable cause. It means nothing. Why NSA? why not CIA? MI6? China Security? Some rich guy in Indonesia?
> must cost at least $10000
citation needed, but also is not high enough to suggest it needs to be state run
Apparently because it runs NSA software (Apache Accumulo) that is hardly used by anyone else
Probably not? FSB could make more sense if we were to postulate on a theory
This is probably on par with the theories that DDG is run by Mossad but their admins are on HN and could probably suggest how that rumor started because I honestly don't know.
Regarding Archive.is, aside from the embedded link to mail.ru nullified by uBlock and refusing to answer DNS queries from CloudFlare it just seems like an archive site to me. One advantage to running something like archive.is would be getting an almost rss-like submission of interesting links which could just as easily be obtained by monitoring HN, Reddit, Tweeter and related sites. They can only archive public sites and the only exception is their ability to get around some pay-walls. I think their admin may be on HN and I may have interacted with them on here yesterday when they corrected something but I will let them answer if that is truly the case.
I suppose another theoretical advantage would be redirecting that mail.ru link for targeted IP addresses or user-agents to infect someone. This could potentially tie into why one might want to block Cloudflare as CF may detect the bait-and-switch links and/or make it harder to target someone with a 0-day/NIT?
The 3 letter agencies and agencies with no name already have unfettered access to all public content and most private content along with secure chat communications, emails, bank transactions, corporate transactions and so much more. If anything I would expect state agencies to very much dislike all the archive sites as they can interfere with government influenced media narratives meaning one can see when news articles are edited or retracted or otherwise memory-holed... So maybe that could be the angle, that they can archive sites that talk about specific narratives for specific countries and potentially purge content for specific countries. Has anyone witnessed and created a snap-shot of this occurring?
This is all theory of course but I have no evidence of a conspiracy. I will continue to use archive.is until there is evidence as it is one of the few ways to make sites readable for me.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center