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by Jordan-117 120 days ago
Silently? It tells you right there in the article: "Nora [last name redacted]". Maybe they could add a more fulsome explanation in an editor's note but it seems pretty obvious in context.

If AT is appropriating some random person's name as an alias, it seems helpful to report on that publicly in order to expose the practice and help clear up the misinformation.
1 comments
Smartchat 120 days ago
Silently. Last article. Not today's.

One with title 'Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site'

I'll try to add the link with comment edit:

This has Nora's name https://web.archive.org/web/20260210195502/https://arstechni...

The current version has not

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Jordan-117 120 days ago
Even if they did, so what? There's nothing wrong with a news article removing personal information as a precaution. It's light-years away from altering the content of an archival snapshot in order to target someone else.
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Smartchat 120 days ago
Well, that's the only name they removed, even though it didn't stand out among the other names in the investigation. Secondly, it's ironic to do so in an article tagged "Streisand Effect" so perhaps we're witnessing part of the performance. And thirdly, it's strange to blame AT for removing... the same name, and not blame Ars. Immediately accusing... AT of double standards and hypocrisy.

I am lost here. It is definitively an organized defamation campaign.

“You are guilty simply because I am hungry”

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Jordan-117 120 days ago
Seems more like Ars trying to avoid piling more attention on the name of a person that isn't actually involved.

And again, the accusation against Archive.today isn't just that they removed their "Nora" alias from a snapshot, but that they replaced it with the name of the blogger they were quarreling with. There's no defensible reason to do that outside of petty revenge (which tracks with the emails and public statements from the Archive.today maintainer).

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Smartchat 120 days ago
> Ars trying to avoid piling more attention on the name of a person that isn't actually involved.

Oh, yes, by removing the name in the context of "Streisand Effect".

> petty revenge

How does it "revenge"? Was it a porn page? Or something bad?

It is likely to be just a funny placeholder name of the same length to come in mind.

--

We could find good and bad motives for both AT and Ars.

The bias against AT was here apriori. Paywall-story for CondeNast, russophobia for the rest.

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Jordan-117 120 days ago
They apparently did a find + replace across their database to change the Nora alias to the blogger's name. So any archives of content referencing her would instead point to him, muddying the waters and blaming him for anything she was accused of. Like I said, petty.

The porn smear threats came later, via email.

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