Original post title was: Until further notice: archive.today/archive.is/archive.ph/… is banned from this community for apparently being a Russian DDOS tool linking to the /c/ukraine community which posted it. Also, from the Ars story: Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia. The reason it matters: It makes people suspect of anything hosted in Russia, which is frustrating because there’s a lot of valuable shit hosted there by people who are not necessarily from there, such as Alexandra Elbakyan, who has had many accusations tossed her way due to her websites association with Russia: In December 2019, The Washington Post reported that Elbakyan was under investigation by the US Justice Department for suspected ties to Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors. Elbakyan has denied this, saying that Sci-Hub “is not in any way directly affiliated with Russian or some other country’s intelligence,” but noting that “of course, there could be some indirect help. The same as with donations, anyone can send them; they are completely anonymous, so I do not know who exactly is donating to Sci-Hub. There could be some help that I’m simply unaware of. I can only add that I write all of Sci-Hub code and design myself and I’m doing the server’s configuration.”