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Mar. 19th, 2026<br>09:05 am<br>A bit more on the topic of “web archives and news media”:<br>The Tehran Times website has been up for only a few minutes a day in recent weeks (I don’t know if this is related to the military action or to new Western sanctions against Arvan Cloud—since, at least, the edge nodes aren’t in Iran), so web archives are essentially the only place where you can read it 24/7. There’s also a Telegram channel, but it lacks longreads.
New media outlets (the substack generation) are reluctant to link to old media because they can’t add referral IDs and earn a percentage of sales, like in e-commerce and adult industries. Archives, of course, don’t pay either, but some authors prefer linking archives anyway, just to spite greedy tabloids, much like it was on Gamergate. There’s probably a niche here for something like Readly—a site that republishes other’s articles behind its own paywall and pays revshare.
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Feb. 25th, 2026<br>05:49 am<br>By the way, to save everyone from the usual round of naïve questions (“do you store IP addresses?”, ...), to dispel a few comforting illusions about what Terms of Service actually mean, and to give you a glimpse into what it feels like to run, moderate content, and support a website, we highly recommend Kevin Nguyen’s novel New Waves.<br>It’s a sad, sharp, and often very funny story about a website that differs from ours in only one key respect: it promised not to preserve content, but to delete it on a schedule. As you might guess, that promise becomes the most fragile and consequential part of the whole enterprise. The book captures something that anyone who has worked behind the scenes of an internet platform will immediately recognize: the gap between what users imagine, what policies declare, and what operational reality demands.<br>We doubt Kevin was OSINTing us—or even knew we existed—when he wrote it. And yet the parallels are striking. In fact, there are more accidental coincidences there than in some stories written by people who explicitly tried to study us.<br>If you want to understand not just how platforms present themselves, but how they actually function under pressure—read or listen it. It won’t answer every question, but it might help you ask better ones.
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Feb. 22nd, 2026<br>07:23 am<br>On growth limits, finances, and why OSINTers focus on seemingly random, yet interconnected people:<br>The "startup" logic seems straightforward: if you have users, buy more servers, grow, invest. Add a paywall or a donation button with sad eyes to cover costs.<br>So, what's stopping you?<br>The lack of reliable financial infrastructure.<br>This isn't about post-2022 Russian sanctions or allegations of facilitating illicit activity via PayPal. It's about the impossibility of reliably exchanging or transferring significant sums within a predictable timeframe without falling victim to a scam (on lower-level services) or triggering an AML check (which often feels like a scam in itself). If there is a delay, the service dies. If you accumulate too many donations on PayPal, you get flagged, and your account is frozen for six months. If you transfer funds to or from a crypto exchange, your bank account may be locked, forcing you to travel thousands of kilometers to resolve it (it was fun during COVID, trying to navigate vaccine mandates). Going 100% Monero (or even Bitcoin) is impossible: donation volumes are significantly lower in crypto, and there are many expenses in fiat. All kinds of intermediaries and small underground fintech companies come to the rescue, but there is a limit to relying on them: how much can you really trust them? Over time, it only gets worse: exchange fees and the risk of losing the entire transaction amount keep growing.<br>The names and pseudonyms that catch the attention of OSINTers (and probably the FBI, given their interest in "who paid and where") are not fully random. They often belong to these fintechs: the names used on their credit cards, for example. These are the names of both managers and "drops", sometimes used unwittingly. Among them are those who worked honestly but are now resentful that OSINTers exposed their names in the context of archives and "piracy," effectively preventing them from creating new ventures. Then there are those who ran away with the money (including some of ours) and are now actually on the run from police and creditors, obsessively scrubbing their data from the web.<br>Managing the finances of even a small project like ours would require a full-time specialist. Hiring one, in turn, requires a reliable monthly income. Just one fuck-up by this person could kill the project. And while bracing for that fuck-up, we would have to aggressively solicit donations just to pay their salary.
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