archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet

By Jani Patokallio, August 5, 2023, on Gyrovague

What It Is

An OSINT investigation into who runs archive.today (originally archive.is, also archive.md, archive.ph, etc.) — a widely-used web archiving service that, unlike the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, has no opt-out mechanism and stores everything permanently with limited exceptions for law enforcement and illegal content.

Origins & Domain History

• Domain archive.is registered May 16, 2012 by "Denis Petrov" from Prague, Czech Republic
• Archive.today domain followed in 2014; numerous variants (archive.li, .ec, .vn, .ph, .fo, .md) registered since
• "Denis Petrov" is a common Russian name — likely an alias
• Same contact info used for sketchy domains: carding forums, piracy sites, many with German keywords
• Dead ends: denispetrov.com, denis.biz, petrov.net all led nowhere useful

The Masha Rabinovich Lead

• Stack Exchange investigator Ciro Santilli linked an archive.today LinkedIn-scraping account's profile picture to "Masha Rabinovich" in Berlin
• "masharabinovich" appeared in a 2012 F-Secure forum post complaining about archive.is being blacklisted
• Same username on Wikipedia: told off for adding excessive archive.is links, used Czech ISP fiber.cz
• Early Wikipedia edits included "Russian passport" and "Belarusian passport" pages
• Masha = common Russian diminutive of Maria; Rabinovich = Ashkenazi Jewish surname

The volth Connection

• Early GitHub captures from archive.today linked to a now-deleted account "volth"
• Fluent Russian speaker, contributed extensively to NixOS (which archive.today uses for its infrastructure)
• Domain volth.com dates to 2004 but original Espinosa family owners appear unrelated

Infrastructure

• Runs Apache Hadoop + Apache Accumulo on HDFS
• Text content replicated 3x across two European datacenters; images 2x
• At least one datacenter hosted by OVH (France)
• 2012: ~10 TB, ~€300/month
• 2014: ~€2,000/month
• 2016: ~$4,000/month
• 2021: ~500 million pages archived (~1,000 TB; Internet Archive is ~40,000 TB by comparison)
• Scraper uses a modified version of Chrome, cycling through a botnet of IP addresses to evade blocking
• Paywalled content accessed via logins obtained by "unclear means" (constant replenishment needed — once publicly asked for Instagram credentials)
• Perpetual domain troubles: operator predicted "one trouble with domains per year and each fifth trouble will result in domain loss"
• Users currently redirected to archive.md

Funding

• As of 2021: ads + donations covered <20% of expenses; donations ~€6,000
• PayPal deactivated ~2022 (creator couldn't top up account — implying Russian location)
• Creator complained about cross-border payment difficulty across "the Iron Curtain"
• Current donations: Liberapay and BuyMeACoffee
• Creator skeptical of cryptocurrency — not supported
• Ads: Yahoo network, mobile only (not desktop)
• On good days ads "almost cover expenses"; on bad days, kicked out of ad networks due to NSFW archived content
• Contradiction: "almost cover expenses" vs "<20% of expenses" — suggests significant undisclosed income

Operator Profile (Author's Assessment)

• One-person labor of love
• "A Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe"
• Constantly fighting: domain registrars, anti-scraping mechanisms, copyright enforcement, skittish advertisers, international sanctions on Russian citizens
• Has a second source of "considerable income that's likely somewhat sketchy"
• By staying anonymous, avoided legal battles like Sci-Hub's Alexandra Elbakyan faced
• Creator acknowledges the site is a "weak tool" that is "doomed to die"
• Bus factor of one; semi-legal status means no foundation or legal entity can ensure continuity

Conclusion

The author characterizes the site as a "one-man battle against entropy" — thanking "Denis/Masha/whoever" for over 10 years of persistence and linking to BuyMeACoffee. All images in the post feature the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt.

Comment

One anonymous commenter notes btdig.com still exists and is run by the same person.

Tags: archive, archive.is, archive.md, archive.today, copyright, internet, internet archive, library