Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site

Comments

• TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  As a longtime editor who makes heavy use of archive.today (it’s often much more effective than the Wayback Machine), I’m deeply conflicted about this, and this is disgusting behavior on the part of archive.today; I hope they see prison time.

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  • VonReposti@feddit.dk ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I don’t really see it as a complicated issue. Archive[.]today is now an unreliable source that uses its user traffic to engage in malicious activities. By using it, Wikipedia will become unreliable by proxy.

    The best course of action is to distance yourself from it as quickly as possible.

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    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I don’t really see it as a complicated issue.

      That makes sense from (what I think is) an outsider’s perspective. From an insider’s perspective, here’s the problem:

      • Wikipedia has a strict verifiability policy.
        • This policy states that “Each fact or claim in an article must [correspond to reliable sources]”.
        • This policy is the bedrock of Wikipedia. The project is fundamentally unsustainable without it, and we’re still undoing damage from decades ago when the policy either didn’t exist or was too loosely enforced.
        • I’m making a third bullet point because I cannot emphasize enough how much “just ignore it lol” cannot work.
      • Hundreds of thousands of articles have citations sourced to archive.today.
        • This is despite the fact that the Internet Archive is prioritized whenever possible. We even have a prolific Internet Archive bot that (when possible) automatically recovers citations.
        • The Interrnet Archive complies with blanket takedown requests of a domain very easily. Even if we ignore the ones going forward because now both resources are unreliable, archive.today would have untold millions of webpages archived which the IA does not – many of which are used on Wikipedia.
        • Archive.today will archive material that the Internet Archive will simply fail to archive because, on a technical level, it’s just better at capturing a static snap of an article (which is what we want). It’s especially true for paywalled articles, which the Wayback Machine is often stymied by.
      • This would also make the Internet Archive the only remaining avenue for archiving URLs, meaning Wikipedia effectively collapses if something happens to the IA (granted that’d already be catastrophic with archive.today, much moreso than archive.today’s hypothetical removal).
      • Archiving URLs isn’t just some incidental thing.
        • Citations are the backbone of Wikipedia. Casual readers might find them comforting to have. Researchers will rely on them. But editors cannot operate without them. We might actually use them more than readers do, because they help us a) check what’s already there, b) better understand the subject ourselves, and c) expand out the article.
        • Link rot is so much more pervasive than I think people fully grasp. When I’m writing an article, if possible, I archive every single source I use at the Wayback Machine and archive.today, because relying on the link staying up is objectively a mistake.
        • The security archives offer generally just incalculably reduces the workload and mental load for editors.

      If you’ve ever tried to add a citation on Wikipedia to a sentence that says “citation needed”, you’ve rubbed up against Brandolini’s law. A corollary is that it’s much, much harder to cite an uncited statement than it is to create one. If you remove archive.today, you flood Wikipedia with hundreds of thousands of these. It’s dampened a bit by the fact that the citation metadata is still there and that some URLs will still be live, but I cannot emphasize – as an editor of nearly 10 years, with over 25,000 contributions, and who’s authored two featured articles – that you’d introduce a workload that could never be done, whose repurcussions would be felt for decades.

      Even if you somehow poofed away all that work, there are bound to be tens of thousands of statements in articles you have to get rid of because they simply cannot be reasonably sourced anywhere else. For many, many statements, this is not incidental information independent from the rest of the article; many of these removals would require you to fundamentally restructure the surrounding prose or even the entire article.

      It’s hard for me to explain that you just have to “trust me bro” that those people voting “Option C” take what archive.today did very seriously and recognize that either option is going to mean major, irreparable damage to the project. Wikipedia is a lot different from the editing side than it is on the reading one; sometimes it’s liberating, sometimes it’s horrifying, and this case it’s “I could use a hug”.

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  • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I would go for something like A - B - A:

    • hide the links so the ddos gets migitated, and start replacing the links where possible
    • when the malicious code is gone, reinstate the links, deprecate .today, dont stop replacing the links
    • when the links in the most commonly requested articles are gone, hide the rest while it waits for replacement.

    but i’m no wikipedian, just someone who likes reading talk pages lol

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• floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  We need an internet archive site that isn’t based in the USA and isn’t run by someone who’ll jeopardize the whole enterprise to attack someone’s blog.

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  • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Regarding the USA point, from the article, there are many indications that the site was founded by someone from Russia:

    But in October 2025, the FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” We wrote about the subpoena, and our story included a link to Patokallio’s 2023 blog post in a sentence that said, “There are several indications that the [Archive.today] founder is from Russia.”

    This is the link to the 2023 blog post: gyrovague.com/…/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the…

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• Strawberry@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I think the future of wikipedia looks a bit bleak if they drop archive.today now. They need a decent archiver to function. Internet archive is good but its a single group hosted in the US, plus any site with a paywall isn’t surviving on the internet archive very well.

  They’ve needed good alternative for awhile and the need is just growing. I wish public libraries could fill the gap but its probably not realistic. We’ve had legal deposit requirements for non-print media in various jurisdictions for awhile but i’m doubtful how effective it is, nor is it convenient to access or use for wikipedia.

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  • onehundredsixtynine@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    To be fair Wayback Machine is not the only option, there are at least 3 other Internet archival services:

    1. Ghostarchive
    2. Megalodon
    3. Etched (warning: cryptobros)

    Unfortunately their scrapers are nearly not as developed as Wayback Machine’s and archive.today’s are (Ghostarchive and Megalodon can’t bypass Anubis/Cloudflare check, for example). Ghostarchive is neat when it works because of very high-fidelity captures (even more high-fidelity than archive.today captures are). Unfortunately only something like ~75% of everything I’ve ever archived there works. Oh, and it can also archive short (<10 min) YouTube videos with low/average bitrate.

    Megalodon is pretty much useless for Wikipedia because it doesn’t work with, like, 1/2 of all online news websites.

    I haven’t archived anything on Etched yet, but their premise of “archiving a web page forever on bitcoin” doesn’t seem attractive so I probably won’t use it.

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    • Strawberry@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Very True, I have had some good use out of ghostarchive. When it works. There’s also self-hosted options like archivebox. And Several paid solutions like perma.cc. Kiwix/Zim too although that’s focused on wiki’s themselves & offline storage/access so not as useful for sources. But yes I’ve found none get consistantly good archives as much as archive.org or archive.today.

      I have not heard of etched, but I do tend to avoid a lot of the crypto stuff.

      Its also concerning if any of the archives suddenly going down & the data isn’t backed up. I know the storage requirements alone makes good backups unlikely, but with archive.today looking so volitile I wonder if a

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• 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?

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  • 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!

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    • inari@piefed.zip ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It would be pretty incredible if the Wikipedia Foundation started a project to archive the web

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• nullroot@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Honestly this situation is wild. The whole article is a hundred percent worth a read. It’s just… So bizarre. Good luck to you wiki contributers navigating this situation.

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• onehundredsixtynine@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This is only tangentially related to the matter at hand, but there seems to be some massive attack on YouTube with fully LLM-generated channels and videos “covering” this situation: ghostarchive.org/archive/dlQhs.

  Interesting…

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• CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  We had some discussion about this when the developer published the blog post originally: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63367640

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• Draconic_NEO@chatgptjailbreak.tech ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Fuck me harder daddy

  Image

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• patruelis@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This is pretty wild indeed.

  As an editor, I tried to not use archive.today and so far I’ve succeeded.

  I’m tempted to chip in, so far I was an observer.

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• Beep@lemmus.org ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Got downvoted when I posted it.

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