I almost forgot… June Maxam — NorthCountryGazette.org — the first “victim” of low-frequency “DDoS” — Jani Patokallio's perfect doppelgänger. Or maybe just another manifestation of the same demonic force in our dimension: travel book author, publisher, editor, gonzo blogger, curious “cybersecurity” “researcher”, and… serial doxxer (she actually did time for doxxing her neighbors). Only one thing that sets her apart from Jani Patokallio: her curiosity wasn’t aimed at other websites, it was aimed at her own visitors. If she spotted a “suspicious” (meaning: not from her county) IP in her weblog, she’d fire off a cybersecurity report to the provider and all their upstream peers, accusing them of something along the lines of an “armed intrusion into a secured facility”, yes, from a particular IP address. In both sheer chutzpah and the effectiveness of her complaints, she outdid WAAD with its pedo-zoophilia theatrics (though she never quite reached the final boss level: those gorgeous PDFs with official-looking crests, rambling for ten pages about how “servers at IP address X are storing 100,000 illegal bitcoins”; really, what can you do when an L1 support tech, eyes shining, has already grabbed the angle grinder and is heading for your server rack?) Not bad for a lady in her 70s. She even managed to wear out Archive.org. NorthCountryGazette.org wasn’t blocked there because of content issues, it’s blocked so that “Save Now” won’t even bother accessing robots.txt. The whole saga played out on Twitter. That “DDoS” basically saturated her ability to read logs and blast out her nasty PDFs.
It turned out pretty well. The hype around “the site that's been banned from Wikipedia for the fifth time” is better than “the 12ft.io analogue that's about to be caught by the feds” Why didn't you write about such events earlier, folks of the tabloids? I don't expect you to write anything good, because then who would read you, but there was plenty of dramas, wasn't there? Because there was no Jani to nudge you? I guess I'll scale down the "DDoS".
Since we are a service for latecomers, we have to debunk a couple of myths for latecomers (the list will be updated, and the answers will be supplemented and rewritten, then I will add the results to the FAQ).
First, here we're talking about the West, and that's far from 100%, and probably not even 50% of users. There's a lot of Japan and Korea, and there are no paywalls there at all.
Second, some support for news sites only appeared during COVID, because of COVID itself and the demise of projects that actively used the archive (jeuxvideo, taringa, etc.).
Before that, practically all news was archived in an unreadable form, with all the modal pop-ups saying “subscribe to our mailing list” and so on.
When asked to fix it, we replied, “Well, your sites are crap, so we accurately archive them as we see them, and anyway, there's nothing interesting there. Make normal sites first.”
So, we started cleaning up with COVID, and as it ended, all sorts of moral dilemmas arose, and these are far from just formal issues of legality, copyright, and jurisdiction.
There are also more serious questions, such as whether it is ethical for us to participate in the dissemination of news in the absence of something like COVID?
You may argue that there is a war going on right now (and point to any war), but this is rather a negative example: if the free dissemination of news during COVID can be interpreted as a blessing, many publishers removed their paywalls back then, but it is impossible to explain participation in the dissemination of military propaganda in the same way.
In short, supporting news sites is like carrying a suitcase without a handle: you should drop it, but in the absence of other big categories of users (jeuxvideo, etc.), this would be tantamount to refusing to support Western users (which may not be a bad thing, see question #1).
So it's not so much a selling point as a current point of rendezvous with users from certain locations.
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