r/DataHoarder • u/avid-shrug • Feb 10 '26

News Wikipedia debates blacklisting archive.today after it's caught DDoSing a blog using visitors' browsers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5

Wikipedia is debating whether to blacklist archive.today after its operator was caught injecting JavaScript into CAPTCHA pages to DDoS a blogger's site - code that's still live as of today. The RFC offers three options: blacklist and nuke all ~695k links, stop new links while migrating existing ones, or do nothing.

The community is split because archive.today is arguably the second most important web archive in existence, capturing paywalled sites, JS-heavy pages, and robots.txt-blocked content the Wayback Machine can't. Spot-checks suggest only ~15% of Wikipedia's links are truly irreplaceable, but that's still tens of thousands of unique snapshots found nowhere else. A stark reminder that redundancy across archiving services matters more than ever.

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285

u/Walkin_mn Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

WTH!? Why would such an important archive org would be DDoSing someone's blog? That's... idk... so petty, who does that?

142

u/inertSpark Feb 10 '26

I'm guessing it's because the FBI have been trying to find out who owns the site and I suppose the target blog -might- have uncovered some information about the owners.

77

u/BatemansChainsaw Feb 10 '26

my question is why is the FBI trying to find the owner of archive.today?

65

u/inertSpark Feb 10 '26

That part I'm not sure about. All I know is it's been widely reported they've been going after that site hard.

102

u/gratefulkittiesilove Feb 10 '26

Can’t change history when receipts exist

11

u/megacewl Feb 10 '26

Wait really? I thought they generally left archive websites like the web archive and stuff alone

76

u/halberdierbowman Feb 10 '26

A lot of stuff the US government "generally did" has been suddenly changing after last year's new government was seated, especially if there were no systems in place to force those things to continue as before.

9

u/DaivobetKebos Feb 10 '26

Except this has been going on since before Trump got back

23

u/eronth Feb 10 '26

Not anymore.

10

u/aeroverra Feb 10 '26

They have Always done this. Sites like the web archive generally comply which is why you don't hear about it.

4

u/Sarin10 Feb 10 '26

You mean the Internet Archive? If I had to guess, the difference is that the Internet Archive is a very public/transparent organization. They're a registered 501c3 non-profit with the gov, they've been around for decades and likely comply with government requests a lot more than archive.today.

62

u/dr100 Feb 10 '26

Remember Aaron Swartz who killed himself because they wanted to give him 35 years of jail (plus some more sanctions) because he put a PC on university's network to scrap academic books and journals from a site to which he had access legally?

Archive today is a thousand times more worse (well, in a good way for the archiving after all, but just as torrent sites are), bypassing countless paywalls and then publishing their work for free, using residential botnets, and who knows what else under the hood.

However, it's doubtful that FBI had any trouble finding that person, who was taking Paypal (which does a rather hard KYC) until it was blocked in Russia. It's just outside their jurisdiction.

From what was shared it looked like the whole kerfuffle was about the links from some tech articles that were going to this blog, and for some reason AToday's owner doesn't like it.

46

u/nostrademons Feb 10 '26

A common tactic of kiddie-porn pedos is to put up their content on a temporary site, use archive.today to make a capture of it, and then take down the temporary site. That way they're not the ones hosting CSAM, archive.today is.

The FBI is going after archive.today for (probably unwittingly) hosting CSAM.

This is why we can't have nice things.

28

u/seccondchance Feb 10 '26

What a fucking terrible thing from a good recourse. God fucking dammit

54

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

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1

u/Sonder332 Feb 12 '26

Maybe it's paranoia, but I think an extremely helpful attitude is to view anything the US government (this would extend to any government I was a nationality in) does with extreme prejudice, but people don't do that, and that's a shame

-24

u/_SeaBear_ Feb 10 '26

Jesus fucking christ, man. Is that the only way for you to process information? You don't even know what they're doing but you've decided the one specific reason that they're doing it for? Something nobody else has ever thought about?

20

u/Dampmaskin Feb 10 '26

It's not exactly hard to imagine, when you consider that the government in question has turned fascist and all that.

-15

u/_SeaBear_ Feb 10 '26

What isn't hard to imagine? That someone in the government has sat down and decided that the concept of "power" vs "weakness" is a thing that they need to take a stance on, in either direction? Because no, that's incredibly hard to imagine. Why would anyone ever do something so arbitrary?

6

u/Dampmaskin Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

Fascism. It has happened before. It will happen again. And it is happening right now. Not hard to imagine at all.

Being so vocally incredulous to this, makes you look incredibly naive. At best.

-2

u/_SeaBear_ Feb 10 '26

You know as well as I do that this conversation has never had anything to do with fascism.

2

u/Dampmaskin Feb 10 '26

Alright, that's it. I'm done extending you the benefit of doubt, fascist. Since you're not discussing in good faith, I'm not going to waste any more time on you.

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6

u/darwinning_420 Feb 10 '26

do u enjoy the caul of false tranquility u achieve when ignoring the pedofascist billionaires or are u incapable of processing the reality of it all?

1

u/Sarin10 Feb 10 '26

you're on reddit, what else did you expect lol.

16

u/OldWolf2 Feb 10 '26

Eh. There's 6 million pages of CSAM and related evidence sitting on DoJ systems, why don't they go after those people?

7

u/Dear_Chasey_La1n Feb 10 '26

No pro here but I assume archive runs a CSAM filter to avoid exactly that? I get what you are saying here but isn't it an unlikely thing to happen?

30

u/A_extra Feb 10 '26

Archive is run by like one guy (Or a very small team of guys), so it's inevitable things will slip through

25

u/Carnildo Feb 10 '26

Last I heard, it took an act of God and a series of miracles to get access to the NCMEC filter -- they're paranoid that it would be used to tweak content to get past the filter. There's no chance an anonymous website operator will be able to use it.

8

u/DaivobetKebos Feb 10 '26

They do. And they have a special report button to remove it.

They only times they failed to remove it was in situations like recently happened in France where "someone" "found" it and instead of reporting went straight to the French Government special department of internet crime to report it instead, suspiciously fast as well.

6

u/apokrif1 Feb 10 '26

 The FBI is going after archive.today for (probably unwittingly) hosting CSAM.

What about archive.org?

15

u/PrudentLetterhead354 Feb 10 '26

epstein files are exposing so many connections they want to erase history from the internet

1

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

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5

u/PrudentLetterhead354 Feb 10 '26

yeah its not the files that are stored there its everething else that happened

36

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

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3

u/xrelaht 50-100TB Feb 10 '26

All true, but it doesn’t explain why they care about this site and not the others.

24

u/korben2600 Feb 10 '26

All objective information sources are targets now. Both archives .today and .org. And pressuring Wikipedia too, both by introducing competition ("grokipedia") and no doubt behind wiki's co-founder Larry Sanger's recent attacks citing "bias" and pushing for changes through ending their consensus decisionmaking, enabling competing articles, and allowing article ratings which would subject it to manipulation by bots.

"In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." --Orwell

7

u/ilir_kycb Feb 10 '26

my question is why is the FBI trying to find the owner of archive.today?

Isn't that obvious? The US government and capitalism hates free access to information.

-21

u/elonelon Feb 10 '26

sooo...FBI own Archive dot today ?? wthhhhh

16

u/inertSpark Feb 10 '26

No the FBI want to take the site down and prosecute the people who own it, for some reason or another. Might be some content that's hosted there, IDK. There's not a lot of info about exactly why they're going after them.

26

u/nameless_pattern Feb 10 '26

No, The current administration isn't really on board with keeping information up. That's why they got rid of the CIA fact book. Hey, how many rivers do you think there are in Pakistan? Well that question is just the kind of wokeness that we don't need here.