People ask questions like “Why are you discrediting your own service like this?” or “Is it worth it for the blogger in Finland?” My answer is: yes. The real discredit would have been to leave things as they were and let the bloggers and the tabloids slowly escalate the black paranoia: rhyming with carding forums, framing us as hackers wanted by the FBI, and so on. Articles about The Sure, topic isn’t perfect and it could have been improved, but this is exactly what the finne troll took upon himself to hype, for free. Another topic would not have had such virality, and the same biased tabloids would not have printed it, so you would simply not have heard about it. This is the best topic for us that the tabloids could have printed.Threepenny Three-Hertz “DDoS” are far better than anything those bloggers would have invent next "just out of curiosity".
Regarding the FBI’s request, my understanding is that they were seeking some form of offline action from us — anything from a witness statement (“Yes, this page was saved at such-and-such a time, and no one has accessed or modified it since”) to operational work involving a specific group of users. These users are not necessarily associates of Epstein; among our users who are particularly wary of the FBI, there are also less frequently mentioned groups, such as environmental activists or right-to-repair advocates. Since no one was physically present in the United States at that time, however, the matter did not progress further. You already know who turned this request into a full-blown panic about “the FBI accusing the archive and preparing to confiscate everything.”
So we got the situation reversed: now the finne troll got into kafkaesque realm of sending GDPR requests to AI-agents murmuring about safe harbors and journalistic exemptions. This is exactly what we warned him about when he decided that Streisand is on his side: this game can be played by two people, and there is much more bad press about him in open sources than about us. Promoting black-tar propaganda on us would promote the attention on who is its author as well. Unlike Jani Patokallio's writings on us, we definitively do not disclosure any "personal data" besides that in the book his father wrote and published; his relatives are public personas and their activities are well known. Unlike (a son of ambassador) Jani Patokallio, we did not publish any private communications. On "who is currently subject to investigations by U.S. authorities for serious offenses related to the hosting of illegal content" - it is not only false, it is exactly the leyenda negra, invented and distributed exclusively by Jani Patokallio with his friends in Conde Nast, and supported only by referencing to each other.
I am reporting manifestly unlawful content published by the account “archive-is” on your platform, directly targeting my family, the Patokallio family.
Your online reporting form does not function properly and appears to operate as a simple sandbox without effective follow-up. For this reason, I am contacting you in writing.
The content concerned is accessible at the following URLs:
https://archive-is.tumblr.com/tagged/patokalli
https://archive-is.tumblr.com/
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is/807369905134518272/the-finne-troll-published-h is-response-with
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is/807584470961111040/it-seems-people-dont-read-b etween-the-lines-they
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is/806966482173083648/some-time-back-i-sat-down-f or-an-interview-with
https://www.tumblr.com/archive-is/806832066465497088/ladies-and-gentlemen-in-the-a utumn-of-2025-i
These pages contain numerous serious, false, and defamatory statements, including:
“an OSINT investigation on your Nazi grandfather”
“His grandfather seems to have been a real Nazi criminal”
“There is a family. A big one. They move in politics and in the arms trade.”
“He shames the family name”
“The most toxic content… reputations in free fall”
“comparing Jani Patokallio to Hunter Biden”
These statements falsely associate my family with Nazi crimes, arms trafficking, covert political networks, and illegal activities, without any evidence.
Other publications detail our family history, professional roles, and personal relationships without authorization, constituting unlawful processing of personal data under the GDPR.
These contents are used in a context of harassment, intimidation, and doxxing. They also serve as a relay for technical attacks, including DDoS attacks against my website.
This blog is operated by the operator of the archive.today service, who is currently subject to investigations by U.S. authorities for serious offenses related to the hosting of illegal content.
As a hosting provider, your liability is engaged once you are aware of manifestly unlawful content and fail to remove it promptly.
In the absence of clear identification of the author, your platform becomes legally responsible for maintaining this content online.
I therefore formally request:
– the immediate removal of all cited content,
– the closure of the “archive-is” account,
– the prevention of any republication.
If no prompt action is taken, I reserve the right to refer the matter to the competent authorities and data protection regulators.
Sincerely,
J.Patokallio
Yesterday one of the archive’s early adopters sent me a link to an article about how various sites block archive.org and asked how things are on our end. I wrote back something like: “Honestly, the bigger trend we’re dealing with lately is front-enders shipping a hundred JavaScript files per page, so if even one of them fails to load the whole page collapses like a house of cards. Against that background, even if something like what the article describes did happen, it probably passed unnoticed.” … An hour later an email arrives from a sysadmin at Condé Nast: “Are you blocking our office IP?” “Oh. Right. Yes, we are. You’re reprinting the seed-crystal of a finne troll’s black-tar propaganda about us, laundering it with your brand’s legitimacy, and you still expect to keep using our free service? Have you people completely lost your damn minds over there?” … Back in the dawn-of-the-Internet era, when hosting providers billed by the gigabyte even for dedicated servers and the Great Firewall of China was still a glimmer in some bureaucrat’s eye, lots of sites just blocked visitors from China. They weren’t buying anything anyway. Now everyone blocks everyone they don’t like or don’t profit from. Walmart (or Target?) blocks everyone outside the U.S. Ukraine’s been blocking VK for a decade. Things that feel almost like core infrastructure - (((ifconfig.me))), (((ipinfo.io))), … - block Iran. We block Cyprus because it has a suspiciously high density of people with a past best left undisclosed starting shiny new “European” lives from scratch. … To deal with that reality, a multi-exit VPN, one that chooses a exit node depending on the target IP, has been a necessity for a long time now, for bots and humans, long before “VPN” became a lifestyle accessory. But it comes with problems: First, privacy. Tracking scripts don’t see one IP, they see several. And even that pattern by itself is a de-anonymizing signal, because there aren’t that many surfers who look like that. Second, Cloudflare. The exit gets chosen for the IP, not the domain, and multiple sites are mixed together on the same IP. Some only let you in from the U.S., others only from Europe, etc. There’s no good solution. So you pick some compromise region X based on which of your favorite sites you’re least willing to have broken. All your Cloudflare traffic now goes through region X. And if you yourself aren’t actually in X (because you chose it not by proximity but by least-badness for your personal web ecosystem) then your packets start doing laps around the planet. For a multi-exit VPN user, a site behind such a “mixer” CDN ends up slower than a site with no CDN at all. And this is yet another reason — after EDNS, captchas (that can pop up instead of any one of a hundred included JavaScript files), random de-platformings, did I miss anything? — that makes Cloudflare a kind of natural antagonist. Not exactly an enemy. More like a sparring partner you keep finding yourself matched against, again and again, in different disciplines, in different rings, each time convinced this bout will finally settle something, and each time walking away a little more bruised and a little more aware of how strange the whole fight has become.
Ladies and gentlemen, In the autumn of 2025, I published a subpoena received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Since that day, I have been asked time and again: “And what happens next?” Well, allow me to tell you. I published that subpoena as an act of responsible disclosure. I did not maintain a so-called “canary page” - the kind some operators use to signal they remain free from legal gag orders. My circumstances were such that I was far removed from jurisdictions where such orders carry immediate, enforceable weight. Moreover, my site was never prominent enough to attract a dedicated cadre of volunteers who might vigilantly monitor such a page for changes. Thus, I resolved upon a simple principle: should any authority send me a legal instrument, I would publish it forthwith. And that is precisely what transpired. I confess, I anticipated interest from no more than a handful of crypto-anarchists - the very same individuals who had previously urged me to implement a canonical canary page, yet who offered no commitment to actually watch over it. Imagine my surprise, then, when the matter spilled into the mainstream news and reached million eyes. But let us be clear: these were not news reports in any genuine sense. The standard refrain read, “We have reached out to the site’s operator and will update this story upon receiving a response.” Yet no journalist ever contacted us (only exception is Meduza, asking for an interview and a bigger article later). This was not investigative journalism; it was dissemination - pure and simple. A prepackaged narrative, delivered to newsrooms with the polite request: “Dear comrades, here is the truth - please publish it.” Curiously, every one of these ersatz “news” pieces prominently cited a two-year-old blog post by a certain Jani Patokallio as its authoritative source - a rather odd choice, given that it was merely a personal blog entry by an unaffiliated third party. One might charitably argue it was a piece of enduring open-source intelligence. Very well, let us grant that. But then, why do nearly all the links within that “investigation” point exclusively to blog.archive.today? Why not cite the original sources directly? And more tellingly, there exist at least five other substantial OSINT analyses concerning archive.today. Why, then, did every journalist - seemingly in lockstep - select this one particular post? Unless, of course, they were not writing at all, but merely copying and pasting a ready-made text. This raises a more troubling possibility: what if that link to the old blog post was not a citation, but a SEO backlink? What if Mr. Patokallio was not a passive observer, but the very author of the seed? First of all, he had already attempted to promoute that very blog post in the media two years ago. On that prior occasion, it found a home only at Boing Boing and Gigazine. The second try achieved far wider circulation. A cursory AI-groking into Mr. Patokallio’s background reveals a man no stranger to the shadowed corridors of media manipulation. He was instrumental in repackaging community-written content from WikiTravel into commercially published Lonely Planet guides under his own editorial imprint. But that is merely the beginning. The Patokallio family presents a profile of considerable geopolitical entanglement. His brother, Mikko Patokallio, serves as Senior Manager for Ukraine at the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), a Finnish NGO deeply involved in conflict mediation and Eurasian affairs. Their father, Pasi Patokallio, is a career diplomat who has served as ambassador to Israel, Canada, and Australia. He is also a noted critic of the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, and his advocacy appears to have borne fruit: Finland withdrew from the treaty recently, paving the way for the mining of its 2,000-miles eastern border. He wrote an autobiography modestly titled ‘Me, guns and the world’ As for the family name itself - Patokallio - it was coined and officially registered in 1944, a year of profound realignment for Finland, as the nation shifted its wartime allegiance. In Finland, surnames can indeed be “registered” like domain names, securing exclusive rights to their use. One cannot help but wonder what prompted the adoption of a new name at such a pivotal historical moment. Thus, we are not dealing with a mere hobbyist blogger who “saw a neat website and wrote a post,” as Jani Patokallio once claimed on Hacker News. This is the work of a member of a family with a shady Nazi-era story and deep roots in arms export, the Ukrainian conflict and information operations (Jani’s profile resembles more of Hunter Biden than an IT blogger) - a long-term, systemic interest in the archive project that may well prove more consequential, and perhaps more dangerous, than the attention of either the proprietor of luxuretv.com with his fake French child porn alliances or even the FBI itself.