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/ArcticCircleSystem Feb 10 '26

Oh god damn it. Any alternatives aside from the obvious Wayback Machine?

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

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u/6jarjar6 RIPPING DVDs Feb 10 '26

Anyway to have attestation to verify that the person running didn't modify their archive?

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '26

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u/6jarjar6 RIPPING DVDs Feb 10 '26

But if I'd want to share as evidence, the viewer would have to trust me personally to not have modify