In this corner, we have techie and blogger Jani Patokallio. A couple of years ago, on one of his blogs – not his travel blog, the other one that he posts to even less often – he wrote about the Net-archiving service archive.today and its anonymous founder. The post was generally positive – to give you an idea, he called archive.today “a one-man battle against entropy” – but in the process he named a couple of that one man’s known aliases. It got a little notice, from Boing Boing for instance, but nothing big.

And in this corner, we have that one man behind archive.today. For lack of a given name, I’ll be calling him Guppy.

Before I go on: I hadn’t heard of Jani Patokallio before yesterday, and I’ve used archive.today on occasion.

Guppy and his archive got a subpoena from the FBI via his domain registrar late last year. That drew some media attention, which in turn made some journos interested in Guppy’s identity.

…not interested enough to do their own research, maybe, but someone found and linked to Patokallio’s now-two-year-old post.

Guppy flipped his shit, and not in a way that would help his legal cause, benefit his fellow netizens, or spite the copyright police. He flipped his shit in the worst way, trying to DDOS Patokallio’s blog for the crime of being cited by mainstream media. And he did it by embedding malicious JavaScript in archive.today itself.

(According to Patokallio, Guppy tried using a spurious GDPR complaint first, and got nowhere.)

Guppy has a blog of his own, on Tumblr, and he recently tried to explain why Patokallio’s blog was so odious it had to be buried. He complained that only one of the news outlets covering the FBI story had successfully gotten in touch with him before noting that they’d linked to Patokallio:

… 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?

Translation: “This small-time blogger is actually the MASTERMIND OF A MASS-MEDIA CONSPIRACY!!!!“

Journalists copy each other’s sources all the time, and this is often what that copying looks like. Heise cited Patokallio’s guess that Guppy is Russian (and another, unlinked and unattributed “investigation from 2024” that guessed Guppy’s from New York). Outlets that cited Heise (like Ars Technica and 404 Media) also copied Heise’s source, if they cited a source for the “who is Guppy?” side angle at all. And the next batch of journos cited Ars Technica or 404, and copied their sources…

But wait, there’s more!

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.

Translation: Patokallio used to work for Lonely Planet and Wikitravel.

Also: Guppy trusts Grok. For fuck’s sake.

Guppy then tried to blame Patokallio and his family for the war in Ukraine and the land mines along the Finnish-Russian border, but not before insinuating that his grandfather was a Nazi war criminal… a claim that he’d later repeat more plainly.

And Hunter Biden got namechecked as well, for some reason.

But wait, there’s more!

Patokallio’s blog has a one-column theme, so although his name is near the top of the sidebar, readers have to click on a hamburger button to see that sidebar. According to Guppy’s latest, that proves he’s an embarrassment to his politically-connected family and a financial failure who has to resort to “doxing” poor innocent DDOS-users to draw more traffic to his ad-filled blog.

(I run uBlock Origin, so I didn’t see any ads. After temporarily disabling it, I still didn’t see any ads.)

Guppy also claims to believe that Patokallio is manually hiding that sidebar “every time” he posts. Unless Guppy has to manually add the top banner and frame to every page archive.today has ever stored a copy of, he provably knows better and is just bullshitting at this point, if he ever wasn’t.

In summary, archive.today is run by a damned fool, who’s using it as a vector for malware and can only semi-coherently and unconvincingly explain why. I’ll have to bear that in mind the next time I’m tempted to use his service.