Slashdot Mirror
The Wayback Machine is Deleting Evidence of Malware Sold To Stalkers (vice.com)
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a service that preserves web pages. But the site has been deleting evidence of companies selling malware to illegally spy on spouses, Motherboard reported Tuesday. From the report: The company in question is FlexiSpy, a Thailand-based firm which offers desktop and mobile malware. The spyware can intercept phone calls, remotely turn on a device's microphone and camera, steal emails and social media messages, as well as track a target's GPS location. Previously, pages from FlexiSpy's website saved to the Wayback Machine showed a customer survey, with over 50 percent of respondents saying they were interested in a spy phone product because they believe their partner may be cheating. That particular graphic was mentioned in a recent New York Times piece on the consumer spyware market.
In another example, a Wayback Machine archive of FlexiSpy's homepage showed one of the company's catchphrases: "Many spouses cheat. They all use cell phones. Their cell phone will tell you what they won't." Now, those pages are no longer on the Wayback Machine. Instead, when trying to view seemingly any page from FlexiSpy's domain on the archiving service, the page reads "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."
In another example, a Wayback Machine archive of FlexiSpy's homepage showed one of the company's catchphrases: "Many spouses cheat. They all use cell phones. Their cell phone will tell you what they won't." Now, those pages are no longer on the Wayback Machine. Instead, when trying to view seemingly any page from FlexiSpy's domain on the archiving service, the page reads "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."
The Wayback Machine obeys robots.txt, even retroactively. If a site puts up a robots.txt file, archive.org will remove old versions of the site.
with robot.txt i read that this causes wayback to remove *all* previous references to site. Correct me if i'm wrong :)
See https://archive.org/about/faqs...
If you want to delete your site from the wayback machine, all you have to do is ask them. They are not obligated to keep any page in the archive, whether it contains "evidence" or not. You can also exclude ia_archiver user agent in your robots.txt, which will prevent your site from being indexed in the first place. This way you will not even have to ask them.
It wasnt malware, in the American language it would be called something like a "analytics's and management platform, with realtime reporting and active asset monitoring and protection"
They're not historians.
"Old man yells at systemd"
It is very annoying, but that's how it works. The worst is when a site that is owned by an entity who goes out of business is preserved by the wayback machine, but then another entity gets the domain, puts up a robots.txt and there goes all the history.
For all the good it is doing, it would be so much better if it did not apply robots.txt retroactively. It doesn't even make sense, robots.txt says "bots stay out", which is not nearly the same as "bots, forget whatever you had visited in the past"...
As already commented in this thread and in other previous ones, the Wayback Machine reacts to robots.txt restrictions by deleting all the records retroactively. Even though I might personally prefer a different behaviour, this is undoubtedly a very honest approach: deleting all the collected information after the first indication that the given site/person might not want it! Quite a few sites should learn something from them.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Having a pre-existing relationship doesn't make anything more or less stalkery.
https://archive.fo/flexispy.co...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Regardless of legality, putting spyware on your significant other's phone is stalking, plain and simple, and is a sure sign of an abusive relationship.
I'll just go out on a limb here and say that I'm sure this law varies state to state.
... how do you "stalk" someone you are already married to?
Gee, I dunno, maybe you could "intercept phone calls, remotely turn on a device's microphone and camera, steal emails and social media messages, as well as track a target's GPS location".
Great, now all we need is a Wayback Wayback Machine Machine!
If you mistrust your wife so much that you feel like you need to install software on her phone to spy on her, what you should be thinking about is not whether this is legal because you technically part-own the phone. You should be thinking about getting a divorce. You're obviously unhappy, and your paranoia and controlling behavior is probably not making her life any better, either.
If you think your partner is cheating isn't that enough to end the relationship? Why go to the effort of obtaining proof?
If you find out your partner isn't cheating, how does that resolve the feelings that made you suspect infidelity in the first place?
Considering the statistics on cheating (roughly half of both married men and women will admit to researchers they have cheated on their spouse at least once), the odds are very much in the favor of truth not paranoia if you think your spouse is cheating.
Once you get to that point it doesnâ(TM)t matter who or how often or whatever unless youâ(TM)re in one of those shitty places that require a reason for divorce.
Thank God for no-fault divorce.
â"happier now after dumping that bitch
Would hiring a private investigator also be considered abusive stalking?
There are significant legal and financial ramifications to being married to a cheating spouse, and one thing you have to have is proof. But, I guess you feel that only those able to afford a private investigator deserve justice.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
even after the domain owner's insolvency
Don't sell the domain?
Domains expire even if not sold. Once a domain has expired, someone else can register it and park it with robots.txt.
Make your own copy of the html documents in question and publish them elsewhere? Publish a copy from the backups you kept?
What sort of "elsewhere" would you recommend?
It's not ownership of the person, but legally it's joint ownership of their assets.
So you have two modes, absolute blind trust and bail at the first sign of anything that manages to wiggle through it? Your spouse is human, humans lie, humans do selfish things, humans make mistakes.
Your spouse doesn't need to know your every thought or action but if there is something you are making available for literally any other third party (network provider, government, friend, etc) and you don't think marrying a person implicitly and automatically amounts to granting consent to that plus more you'd never share with another party it's you who should probably just get a divorce.
There are very important and obvious reasons for that, not the least of which is if you are unconscious your partner has the right to give access to all that information to someone else and also make choices like whether or not a doctor should do something that will kill you if you've eaten X or been exposed to Y in the past 24hrs.
There are paranoid partners out there but having a doubt or suspicion in an innately fallible thing isn't the issue. Not seeing your partner as someone you ultimately trust is a marriage killer. I might write something in a message I'd rather my wife not see and I'd be annoyed if she were looking in my messages with out some sort of reason but of course she has the right to look at them without legal consequences. Your spouse can give consent to a law enforcement officer to search your possessions and information waiving your right to privacy but you think they shouldn't be legally entitled to waive that the same right when they have need?
In my house the bar for looking at one another's text messages is at the "oh yeah, I remember (s)he sent that address I'm trying to find to Joe last week."
"OMG. Marriage is not ownership."
Giving up the right to sex without the consent of the person you are marrying is one absolute and universal thing that marriage absolutely includes. That consent is required even if the sex doesn't involve them. Just because someone doesn't own you doesn't mean they don't have rights or that you can do anything you want without consequences. If you violate that agreement they have a right to know and for that information to be disclosed in a divorce. Of course if you are at the point where you are willing to have sex your partner doesn't consent to it baffles me why you aren't getting divorced already since that is pretty much the only thing marriage is, the ultimate level of commitment not to have sex your partner doesn't consent to.
Which would be stalking... if you were doing it without some sort of legal relationship that gives a party the legal right to that information or even to authorize others to it like say an ISP agreement or a LEGAL MARRIAGE.
Remember a few years back DOD funding resulted in a process that let researchers extract an image someone had seen from their visual cortex? Your spouse can consent on your behalf to have that procedure done and see the results.
How is this any different than hiring a private investigator? People lie and break commitments, no amount of blind trust is going to change that nobody deserves blind trust and that when someone breaks that trust the other party has a right to know and they deserve to face the consequences.
But forget cheating for a moment. What is the harm in real stalking? There actually isn't any, it's just creepy. All the rest of the justifications on making such activity illegal revolve around slippery slope fallacies but really its freaking creepy. But what is creepy about your spouse being able to locate you or your phone? If there is some kind of emergency who is the person you are supposed to trust to make the call on whether reaching you is more important than your privacy in that moment and needs to be able to act on it. Your spouse. Your cell phone provider already has malware shipped with your phone that includes these capabilities, they can and at times do all the things you've listed above. You risk the horny entry level AT&T guy watching you in the dressing room for the sake of being able to take pictures with animal faces replacing your friends, did you somehow think marriage wasn't consenting to share data to a larger degree than the click-through on FB?
Seriously, if your spouse hearing something you are saying on a call, seeing you changing, or anything you might say in an email or social media message, or being able to see where you are gives you the creeps you should probably be married to someone you trust and who isn't so creepy.
That person who keeps his partner a prisoner... one in hundreds of millions, partners dramatizing situations to the point where they sound like they are comparable to keeping a spouse locked up in a mountain cabin or a basement dungeon more like 1 in 20. Now take a moment to filter anytime you consider if something which is creepy or wrong should be illegal consider whether you'd rather have it happen than be locked in that basement dungeon for years because that is what you are literally saying should be done to the person who did that wrong thing.
It's very good that they find malicious sites that do illegal surveillance of people and that the main thing is that even if they delete these sites from the Internet, Google will download all the sites to the archive in order to later prove it is not right. I'm glad that at least someone is following the order. Just recently I knew that the guys from PaperCheap writes a good essay very cheap. They can help you anytime)
Is there one?
"Remember a few years back DOD funding resulted in a process that let researchers extract an image someone had seen from their visual cortex?..."
uh, no? we're easily decades away from that, if it's possible at all, but it's pretty easy to cook up a "demo" that's convincing enough to part rubes from their money. of course, there are plenty of cash-flush rubes in DOD... good old financial incentives can get scientists and engineers to accomplish anything, even the impossible, as long as you don't look too close at the smoke and mirrors.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky