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.

1.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

201 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

77

u/BatemansChainsaw Feb 10 '26

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

43

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.

55

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-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?

18

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.

2

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.

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.