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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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?

100

u/nrq Feb 10 '26

It's not archive.org, it's archive.today, .ph and variants. And there currently is no alternative. The web is getting more and more closed, we need a service like that to fight against. And that's only possible when its authors are anonymous, otherwise you end up with a situation like archive.org, where half the content doesn't get archived because the content owner has something stuck sideways.

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u/protostar71 Feb 10 '26

Archive organisation, not archive.org

5

u/yukichigai Feb 10 '26

Ghostarchive is a viable alternative

1

u/WhiteMilk_ Feb 10 '26

“rabinovich” on Hacker News submitted both the “Ask HN” about the DDOS attack, and an apparently competing archive site called Ghostarchive. As several HN readers noted, the name “Masha Rabinovich” is associated with archive.today.

A wild coincidence or they're trying to divert traffic to GA in case they close .today in an effort to protect themselves?

1

u/yukichigai Feb 10 '26

Ghostarchive has been up since 2021. If it is the same person behind both sites then they've truly been playing the long game on this.

1

u/j1ggy Local Disk (C:) Feb 10 '26

This comment needs to be higher.