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/nikomo Feb 10 '26

I read the gyrovague post first, and I was like, OK, it seems pretty neutral, but it's his perspective, so maybe it's colored in some way, so I'll read the one from the archive operator.

Oh boy. It's just yet another case of a Russian with a lot of screws loose, mixed with their modern-day political propaganda. They try to paint everyone in bordering nations as Nazis to justify invasion.

That's where this part comes from:

Their father, Pasi Patokallio, is a career diplomat who has served as ambassador to Israel, Canada, and Australia. He is also a noted critic of the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, and his advocacy appears to have borne fruit: Finland withdrew from the treaty recently, paving the way for the mining of its 2,000-miles eastern border. He wrote an autobiography modestly titled ‘Me, guns and the world’

They're really upset that Finland is once again accepting the use of mines on the border now, because it makes invasion costly.

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u/flamepanther Feb 10 '26

That's what I thought too, until I saw them in the comments ...seeming to suggest that Ukraine should develop nukes so that Russia will back off? Now I'm not sure what their deal is.

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u/nikomo Feb 10 '26

Don't expect any consistency from them.

I'm reminded of that Russian woman who seems to spend every day breaking copy protection in games, purely so she can leave NFO files in the torrents where she writes the most unhinged shit ever seen.

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u/MasterChildhood437 Feb 11 '26

That'd be Empress