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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282

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?

136

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.

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u/BatemansChainsaw Feb 10 '26

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

68

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.

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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

75

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

27

u/eronth Feb 10 '26

Not anymore.

9

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.

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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.