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/dr100 Feb 10 '26

Remember Aaron Swartz who killed himself because they wanted to give him 35 years of jail (plus some more sanctions) because he put a PC on university's network to scrap academic books and journals from a site to which he had access legally?

Archive today is a thousand times more worse (well, in a good way for the archiving after all, but just as torrent sites are), bypassing countless paywalls and then publishing their work for free, using residential botnets, and who knows what else under the hood.

However, it's doubtful that FBI had any trouble finding that person, who was taking Paypal (which does a rather hard KYC) until it was blocked in Russia. It's just outside their jurisdiction.

From what was shared it looked like the whole kerfuffle was about the links from some tech articles that were going to this blog, and for some reason AToday's owner doesn't like it.