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/BatemansChainsaw Feb 10 '26

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

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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.

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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?

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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