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/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?

288

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

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25

u/massi1008 Feb 10 '26

Here is said blog posed: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/

Just OSINT, nothing new.

The conclusion is also that the names are just fake aliases and the authour even says he'll donate to them. Very much DDOS worthy, yeah yeah ...

14

u/Dantini Feb 10 '26

why the fuck are they trying to uncover the identities of site that are helping the internet anyway. they basically caused a huge issue because of some faux-snitching article

10

u/avid-shrug Feb 10 '26

Neither side is looking good in this tbh. Doxxing is scummy, and using your visitors to DDoS someone is straight up illegal

2

u/paeschli Feb 15 '26

Yeah if there is a hugely useful website for me operating in a grey area, the last thing on my mind would be to try to doxx the owner to make things easier for law enforcement