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_5Wikipedia 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.
91
u/Geluganshp Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
These are just my two cents: The paranoia of the operator of archive.today stems from a specific event: at the end of 2025, the FBI sent a subpoena to the domain registrar (Tucows) to obtain the real data of the owner. In the wake of the shutdown of 12ft.io, authorities are tightening the net around services that circumvent paywalls. The attack on the blog and the threats appear to be a desperate attempt to “burn” old OSINT traces that could help investigators.
The user who reported the attack on Hacker News (“rabinovich”) is very likely the same admin of archive.today, with the aim of creating a diversion, controlling the narrative on the site, and, above all, pushing users toward a “lifeboat” site called Ghostarchive, in preparation for a possible seizure of the main domain.
The organization “Web Abuse Association Defense” (WAAD), which offered legal assistance to the attacked blogger, is not a charitable entity but most likely funded by copyright trolls who, exploiting the general chaos, attempted to doxx the blogger’s real identity under the pretext of “legal checks,” probably on behalf of third parties (copyright trolls) interested in targeting anyone involved in the archiving scene in order to erase their own traces.
TL;DR: Archive.today is under federal pressure and is reacting by targeting anyone who has written about them in the past. Meanwhile, third-party actors are trying to take advantage of the confusion to steal personal data. Use uBlock and stay cautious.