A Tumblr blog post apparently written by the founder of Archive.today generally confirms the authenticity of the email, but says that the original version threatened to create “a patokallio.gay dating app,” not “a gyravague.gay dating app.” There are several other recent posts on Tumblr blogs criticizing Patokaliou and accusing him of hiding his real name. However, the Gyroveg blog shows Patokaliou’s name in a sidebar and reveals that he works for Google in Sydney, Australia, while stating that the blog post contains only his personal views.
In an email, Patokalio included a link to Wikipedia’s page on the Streisand effect, the name given to conditions in which people suppress access to information rather than drawing more public attention to information they want to hide. The Archive.today site maintainer apparently saw this as a threat.
“And threatening me with Streisand… a name so great and rare that it could be used to name some scam project in retaliation or become a synonym for a new category of AI porn… are you serious?” the email said. Patokalio responded, “No, you’re Streisanding yourself: DDoS has done already My blog posts received more attention than in the last two years, with no action taken on my part.
Subsequent replies in the email thread included threats of “Nazi grandpa” and “gay dating app.” Patokalio wrote that it did not seem worthwhile to continue the discussion after these emails. “At this point it was very clear that the negotiations had run their course, so here we are,” Patokalio wrote in his Feb. 1 blog post. “And for the record, my long-dead grandfather served in an anti-aircraft unit of the Finnish Army, defending against attacks by the Soviet Union during World War II. That’s probably enough to qualify as a ‘Nazi’ in Russia these days.”
Although the outcome on Wikipedia has not yet been determined, Patokalio wrote that they suffered no real damage from the DDoS attack. The maintainer of Archive.today apparently intended to make Patokalio’s hosting costs more expensive, but “I have a flat fee plan, which means it costs me exactly zero dollars,” he wrote.
This article was updated with a statement from the Wikimedia Foundation and further comment from Patokalio.
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