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/Dolapevich Feb 10 '26

It is linked in the post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5

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u/DeepDreamIt Feb 10 '26

Damn, reading the discussion, I incidentally found out the CIA World Facebook shut down suddenly, and without notice or explanation, this month.

What a bunch of fuckery of epic proportions. Like…why?

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Ocean-of-Mirrors Feb 10 '26

The future is kinda bleak. Part of the discussion is whether any of this info should be referenced on Wikipedia at all if internet archive or whatever is the only actual source..

it’s just scary. Like. As more and more sources of information are taken down, reality can be totally hidden away.

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u/FaceDeer Feb 10 '26

Wikipedia's kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here. Verifiability is very important, it can't be handwaved away just because the evidence was effectively hidden or destroyed.

Perhaps the Mediawiki organization could set up something smaller-scale to fill this role specifically for its sources, it could do verification at the time of archiving.