I'm guessing whoever is sending those letters snapshotted the CSAM on archive.today themselves to have leverage to take them down.
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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It's the same Christian fascist lobby groups financed by psychopathic oligarchs and their corporations... I guarantee it. This is analogous to their attacks on wikipedia, VPN's, DNS, encryption, our private communication systems, and our education, legal, political, and judicial systems.
Their goal is to control or destroy all sources of information on the planet, especially tools that are anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist — like they have been doing in the USA, for decades — one at a time, using every tool at their disposal.
Web archiving tools document fascisms psychological warfare across the internet, so they obviously must be destroyed.
Web archives preserve information the US Government has deleted, like reports on the economy, climate change, and Black history. In general they work against censorship of the internet. This is just another case of using "protecting the children" as a cudgel to kill politically inconvenient sources of information.
There's a part of me that wants to cringe from the conspiracy thinking clear in this response. Unfortunately, the logical, observational part of me is much bigger. I see the patterns on this one.
I just this morning got a privacy update from my Asus router. They're going to start collecting my usage. I clicked disagree, and it went to another popup warning that I will lose most of the features I rely upon, with a button "re-read". How is this not extortion?
Now I have to go through the traumatic process of installing wwdrt and hope I don't brick my internet access entirely.
Several months ago, my brother scanner software would not work until I gave it permission to send my scans to their server. I no longer use that software.
The surveillance state is expanding at an exponential rate. We are amidst the " great reset" the right wingers warned of, but it is driven by their "great" leaders.
it all ties back to peter theil and murdoch, the world over.
maybe there are some big "silent partner" types i'v missed but every dirty little fascist rabbithole like this i'v dug through eventually ended at the doorstep to theil or murdoch
Most would know them through the infamous name "palantier".
It's not even a conspiracy.
Authoritarianism is inherently anti-intellectualism.
What was the ASUS privacy update? In the router settings page? I haven't seen it yet but I don't use any of their extra services
I got a notification on my phone, opened it, and was hit with the privacy practice update. Clicked deny, was hit with a warning my device would be crippled. Port forwarding and other features would no longer work and I would not get feature updates.
I'm getting ready to install the Merlin asuswrt ROM to give them a huge "fuck you" and possibly get access to features I chose not to use due to the data collection they have. Basically, they probably noticed that few activated the honey pot features and chose to just force the surveilance on us all.
It certainly sounds that way
Suspicious to say the least. I wouldn't be surprised if the individuals behind this organization have a secret agenda and were the ones that archived the CSAM content as an attack on archive.today.
Interesting read, great to have a window into the work done by AdguardDNS in the background to ensure their systems are not being manipulated by false claims.
I hope there will be a follow up and investigation from the French police or whomever is responsible for enforcing the LCEN law abuse provisions.
I’m curious how you do this because I want to do something similar. Maybe even a dedicated screen near my servers running on a pi or similar.
They link to the org, which now hosts a response press release (PDF) (EN after FR).
I read through it, and it makes wrong claims, misrepresentations, and wrong conclusions.
It claims AdGuard is lying and shifting its stance and communication while misrepresenting what AdGuard said and published.
They seem to confuse the availability of non-disclosed URLs with removal of known URLs. They seem to confuse successful reports by AdGuard with other content still being available. They fail to disclose, or conveniently evade disclosing, what and how they reported, only saying their report (of unlawful content) can be requested by law enforcement or adguard. They can't fathom AdGuard blocking the content while it is available, and then changing stance and unblocking after the reporting and consequential removal was successful.
The AdGuard post is certainly much more convincing than their "rebuttal" with logical errors and misrepresentations.
Going after adguard for something like this seems like removing your nose to cure a cold. I mean WTAF?!?! This is beyond asinine. They have nothing at all to do with any of it. Do they even understand what adguard is?
Impressive. Thank you for sharing
I'm glad they posted about the background, I was one of their pissed users on Github complaining about their sudden blocking of the 2nd largest archive site, while it wasn't blocked by my UK ISP. (It didn't emotionally help that as a paying AdGuard customer, I was spending money on a service that temporarily made my browsing experience worse.) Fortunately they managed to unblock it after a few days.
People can just switch DNS easily, I am not sure what they're thinking. It is hard to visit archive.today with certain VPN providers that use cloudflare. They do something to poison Cloudflare.
Maybe sites should focus on better paywall blocking if they don't like it.
Just one more reason to self-host DNS, I guess.
Your comment makes no sense with respect to this story.
I don't use AdguardDNS's services but they are going above and beyond in their response to this spurious claim, seems very professional to me. If you read the story and weren't happy with them and it's boistered your desire to roll completely unfiltered DNS so that you won't have any CSAM domains blocked, well.. weird flex.
I think maybe he just meant that the pressure from organisations to make dns services more censored is a reason to run your own dns service.
But I agree with you. The solution is not to stop using public dns services, its to bring attention to things like this and not let it happen in the shadows. Adguard were amazing here and wrote a very good blog post to inform the community.
Both is true, actually.
Not OP, but the most obvious and popular alternative to Adguard DNS is a (self-hosted) Pi-hole. That setup is effectively protected from such attacks, in no small part because it's self-hosted.
I'm self-hosting AdGuard Home, will i be affected?
Unless you use unbound with it, yes.