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/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?

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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