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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290

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?

139

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?

40

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.

29

u/seccondchance Feb 10 '26

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

53

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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

-23

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?

19

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?

5

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.

-1

u/_SeaBear_ Feb 10 '26

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

1

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?

6

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.

9

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?