from Hacker News

Paywall removal sites mysteriously redirect to Kremlin-controlled media outlet

by bentobean on 4/3/25, 2:19 PM with 2 comments

  • by Ukv on 4/3/25, 3:52 PM

    To my understanding, those paywall bypass sites used archive.today, and archive.today started redirecting them to RT based on referer header.

    > The most likely explanation is “either a prankster, or that Russian hackers have actually compromised these sites,” said Matt Pearl, who previously worked at the National Security Council, and is now the director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    Seems more likely to me that the archive.today owner (supposedly "Denis Petrov") was either worried that explicitly advertising as a "paywall bypass" may attract legal attention/blocks, or just didn't want those services "freeloading" off his archive.

  • by gnabgib on 4/3/25, 2:26 PM

    Related:

    Tell HN: Archive.is/ph/md/etc. is redirecting me to HTTPS:// rurtnews – com (30 points, 7 days ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43490423

    Removepaywall.com Redirecting to RussiaToday (4 points, 6 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43504057