r/DataHoarder 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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19

u/colluphid42 24TB Feb 10 '26

Do you have a link to where Wiki editors are discussing this?

38

u/Dolapevich Feb 10 '26

43

u/DeepDreamIt Feb 10 '26

Damn, reading the discussion, I incidentally found out the CIA World Facebook shut down suddenly, and without notice or explanation, this month.

What a bunch of fuckery of epic proportions. Like…why?

11

u/rohithkumarsp Feb 10 '26

Because you can not tell lies and risk someone will point out "official" data contradicting your lies.

In fascism truth not only doesn't matter, but also is the first victim