Comment on Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
what the fuck
I’m so confused
is archive.today dead now?
So archive.today owners got doxxed and they DDoSed the Doxxer as retaliation? Is that what happened?
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 23 hours ago
No, the original blogpost did not dox the .today owner, it just unearthed some other alias and the general idea that the owner might sit in russia. Then Tucows (the domain registrar for .today) got a demand from the FBI for all data they have on .today, which caused news pieces where the blog post was linked.
The .today owner wanted the blog post not reachable from those news articles, and sent an email to the blog owner with the request to “take the blog post down for a few months” so that the news articles wouldn’t link there anymore. Sadly, that mail went into the spam folder and the blogger didn’t see it.
Because there was no reaction to his mail, the owner of .today put code into his captcha page, DDoS-ing the blog. The blogger and the .today-owner later did mail with each other, but the .today-owner seems to be a pretty unreasonable and rude person.
Wikipedia is now split: on the one side, .today is the actual best archive site, because it doesn’t care about copyright and employs advanced scraping techniques, which can bypass a lot of paywalls (which the internet archive does not do). This makes it great for citing sources. On the other side it’s not very trustworthy to insert code in your captcha page that makes your computer part of a DDoS attack.
So now there are 3 options for wikipedia. - a) remove all archive.today links: this would be very,very disruptive since around 700k links on wikipedia would go dead - b) phase out archive.today, so that no new links are getting added in the future - that implies looking for an alternative, which could even be the wikimedia foundation itself - c) do nothing
Hope it helps with the confusion!
inari@piefed.zip 23 hours ago
It would be pretty incredible if the Wikipedia Foundation started a project to archive the web
cecilkorik@piefed.ca 21 hours ago
To archive the human-made parts of the web at least, which is going to become both increasingly difficult and increasingly important as AI slop sends the signal-to-noise spiralling asymptotically towards zero. I might actually stop mercilessly blocking their donation drives if they attempt that, to be honest.