Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged DDoS attack

Wikipedia editors decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that they said had been linked more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia.

Archive.today – which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph – It is probably widely used to access content that is not accessible other than a paywall. This also makes it useful as a source for Wikipedia citations.

However, according to Wikipedia discussion page on this topic“There is a consensus to immediately stop archive.today, add it, as soon as possible, to the spam blacklist (…) and remove all links to it immediately.” (Ars Technica The decision was first reported.)

The discussion page says Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, only to be removed from the blacklist in 2016.

Why reverse course again? Because, as the discussion page says, “Wikipedia should not point its readers toward a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack.” In addition, “evidence was presented that the operators of archive.today changed the content of the archived pages, making them unreliable.”

The DDoS attack in question was allegedly directed at blogger Jani Patocaliou. Patocallio wrote that starting on January 11, users who loaded the CAPTCHA page became archived Unintentionally downloading and executing JavaScript Who sends a search request to his blog Gyrovague, in an apparent attempt to attract Patokallio’s attention and increase his hosting bill.

In 2023, Patocallio was published Blog post Checked out Archive.today, which described its use as a “dark mystery.” Although he could not track down a specific owner, he concluded that the site was likely “a one-person labor of love, run by a Russian of great talent with access to Europe.”

Recently, Patocallio said the webmaster at Archive.today asked him to remove the post for two or three months.

“I don’t mind this post, but the problem is: journalists from major media outlets (Heise, Verge, etc.) pick out just a few words from your blog, then build completely different narratives so that your post is the only source that can be cited; then they cite each other and produce a poor result to present to a wide audience,” the webmaster said. Emails shared by Patokallio.

After he refused to remove the post, the site’s moderator responded with an “increasing series of agitated threats,” Patocallio said.

Wikipedia editors too He pointed to the web page screenshots on Archive.today which appears to have been edited to include Patokallio’s name – hence the concern that it has become “unreliable” as an archive.

Wikipedia guidance It now calls on editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites, and replace them with links to the original source or to other archives such as the Wayback Machine.

on Blog Linked from Archive.today, the apparent owner of the site books The value of Archive.today to Wikipedia is not “paywall” but rather “the ability to eliminate copyright issues.” They are later books That things went “very well” and they said they would “work to reduce the scope of DDoS attacks.”

“Why didn’t you write about such events earlier, newspaper people?” They said. “I don’t expect you to write anything good, because then who will read you, but there was a lot of drama, wasn’t there? Because there was no unsub to poke you?”