i'm convinced the waybackmachine is running an extortion operation through however many levels of abstraction.

i asked them to send me my mirrors, and they told me they don't do tech support and sent me to a paid service. that is legally equivalent to stealing a barbeque off of your front lawn and telling you to pay the mafia boss if you want it back. that's my property. there's an absolute legal obligation to return it immediately upon request.

they seem to be maintaining some kind of distance from these companies, but i'm calling bullshit on that - i'd be certain that they're operated by people close to archive.org, if not people that work directly for it.

there is a 0% chance i'm paying anybody for this. so, i went looking for some clis ( i found one over ruby, which i had to install, and one over python, which i had installed for the appspot site), and i found a constant - the server reacts well to government sites like dol.gov but throws out 503s on everything else, including big sites like the cbc.

the server is clearly blocking requests.

so, what do you do? i have a tool that seems to work, but is being blocked by the server. i own this material; that's clearly theft. do i call the cops or file a lawsuit?