The ‘small sin’ of wielding your userbase as a botnet is only palatable for HN’s readers because the site provides a desirable use to HN’s readers. If it were, say, a women’s apparel site that archived copies of Vogue etc. (which would see a ton of page views and much more effective takedown efforts!) and pointed its own DDoS of this manner at Hacker News, HN would be clamoring for their total destruction for unethical behavior with no such ‘it’s just a evil for so much good’ arguments.

Maintaining ethical standards in the face of desire for the profits of unethical behavior is something tech workers are especially untrained to do. Whether with Palantir or Meta or Archive.today, the conflict is the same: Is the benefit one derives worth compromising one’s ethics? For the unfamiliar, three common means of avoiding admitting that one’s ethics are compromised: “it’s not that bad”, “ethics don’t apply to that”, and “that’s my employer’s problem”. None of those are valid excuses to tolerate a website launching DDoS attacks from our browsers.

1) The act of archive.today archiving stories (and thus circumventing paywalls) is arguably v low level illegal (computer miss-use/unauthorized access/etc) but it is up for interpretation whether a) the operator or the person requesting the page carries the most responsibility b) whether it's enforceable in third party countries neither archive.today or the page requester reside in

2) DDoSing a site that writes something bad about you is fundamentally wrong (and probably illegal too)

Just my 2 ¢, not that it really matters anymore in this current information-warfare climate and polarization. :/

I think you're missing that circumventing paywalls is unlawful in most parts of the world.

i had no clue which one was active. It was, for me, just a checkbox at the time. This thread prompted me to go check and tweak appropriately.

Correction: they can log host names/IPs, not URLs. The path of any given URL is part of the HTTP header, invisible to onlookers (assuming HTTP and assuming HTTPS is uncracked).

So to simplify, the DNS provider has a map of IPs to Domains visited, while the other hand an ISP has a map of IP addresses to identities.

To even cross-reference the data, the ISP and the DNS provider would need to partner, and violate their privacy guarantees.

At the very least it's obvious that using a separate DNS provider than your ISP's provides additional anonimity by decentralizing your traffic. Although this comes with a tradeoff, having 2 providers increases the odds of partial leaks.

This analysis is so overkill for your personal traffic that it borders tinfoil territory, if we are in a professional setting and are discussing the competitive data of a company or that of thousands of users, then this level of scrutiny is merited, but as-is, separating your DNS provider from your ISP is already very marginal and a bit paranoid. Evaluating the DNS providers to such an extent that a huge security company with good legal standing would somehow qualify as unsafe, for the traffic of one user, I stress, is paralyzingly over-engineering the security of an infrastructure that has already been secured such that users don't need to know what a DNS and how to configure it in order to have safe and private internet.

Imagine going to the bank and asking the teller for a withdrawal but not disclosing the amount and coming up with a mechanism to withdraw without anyone from the bank knowing what you withdrew. Sure, it increases your security, but also come on, what are we doing here?

Quad9 behaves exactly as I expect a DNS to work, in the sense that I only remember I use it when the topic of DNS pops up.

Apparently, respond to me with inane thoughts, to which I patiently reply.

> You sufficiently devolved the conversation by feeling it worth voicing “I don’t know why different people willingly use different things”.

Also, let's appreciate the irony of your message here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47464134#47477847

https://megalodon.jp/2026-0219-1634-10/https://archive.ph:44...

This is an archive of an Archive.is archive of a blog post. The first sentence of the post says “ Jani Patokallio was a woman of exceptional intellect…” This was changed, it originally had someone else’s name (see second paragraph). So, who knows what other archived pages were changed?

Unless you're arguing that the response by archive.today retroactively justifies the behaviour of Jani Patokallio, which would be a bizarre take.

It's problematic because it's childish and pointlessly degrades the user experience.

Archive.org is awful. It allows site owners and random third parties to edit old archived pages.

Archive.today does not.