Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 - Feb 2026 (168 comments)
Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 - Jan 2026 (69 comments)
Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 - Feb 2026 (168 comments)
Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 - Jan 2026 (69 comments)
I see WP is not proposing to run its own.
Like Wikipedia?
> Internet archives wayback machine works as alternative to it.
It is appalling insecure. It lets archives be altered by page JS and deleted by the page domain owner.
Yes, they are essentional, and that was the main reason for not blacklisting Archive.today. But Archive.today has shown they do not actually provide such a service:
> “If this is true it essentially forces our hand, archive.today would have to go,” another editor replied. “The argument for allowing it has been verifiability, but that of course rests upon the fact the archives are accurate, and the counter to people saying the website cannot be trusted for that has been that there is no record of archived websites themselves being tampered with. If that is no longer the case then the stated reason for the website being reliable for accurate snapshots of sources would no longer be valid.”
How can you trust that the page that Archive.today serves you is an actual archive at this point?
Oh dear.
> How can you trust that the page that Archive.today serves you is an actual archive at this point?
Because no-one shown evidence that it isn't.
Oh good. That's definitely a reasonable thing to do or think.
The raw sociopathy of some people. Getting doxxed isn't good, but this response is unhinged.
In response to J.P's blog already framed AT as project grown from a carding forum + pushed his speculations onto ArsTechnica, whose parent company just destroyed 12ft and is on to a new victim. The story is full of untold conflicts of interests covered with soap opera around DDoS.
The article about FBI subpoena that pulled J.P's speculations out of the closet was also in ArsTechnica and by the same author, and that same article explicitly mentioned how they are happy with 12ft down
It’s still a threat isn’t it?
We live at a moment where it's trivially easy to frame possession of an unsavory (or even illegal) number on another person's storage media, without that person even realizing (and possibly, with some WebRTC craftiness and social engineering, even get them to pass on the taboo payload to others).
With this said, I also disagree with turning everyone that uses archive[.]today into a botnet that DDoS sites. Changing the content of archived pages also raises questions about the authenticity of what we're reading.
The site behaves as if it was infected by some malware and the archived pages can't be trusted. I can see why Wikipedia made this decision.
This is absolutely the buried lede of this whole saga, and needs to be the focus of conversation in the coming age.
"You found the smoking gun!"
It still is, uBlocks default lists are killing the script now but if it's allowed to load then it still tries to hammer the other blog.
Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog?
With all of this context shared, the Internet Archive is likely meeting this need without issue, to the best of my knowledge.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment
[2] https://perma.cc/about ("Perma.cc was built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab and is backed by the power of libraries. We’re both in the forever business: libraries already look after physical and digital materials — now we can do the same for links.")
[3] https://community.crossref.org/t/how-to-get-doi-for-our-jour...
[4] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#annual-membership-fees
[5] https://www.crossref.org/fees/#content-registration-fees
(no affiliation with any entity in scope for this thread)
also the oldest of that kind and rarely mention free https://www.freezepage.com
Shortcut is to consume the Wikimedia changelog firehose and make these http requests yourself, performing a CDX lookup request to see if a recent snapshot was already taken before issuing a capture request (to be polite to the capture worker queue).
The URLs proved to be less permanent than expected, and so the issue of "linkrot" was addressed, mostly at the Internet Archive, and then through wherever else could bypass paywalls and stash the content.
All content hosted by the WMF project wikis is licensed Creative Commons or compatible licenses, with narrow exceptions for limited, well-documented Fair Use content.
Why? in the world of web scrapping this is pretty common.
Maybe they use accounts for some special sites. But there is definetly some automated generic magic happening that manages to bypass paywalls of news outlets. Probably something Googlebot related, because those websites usually give Google their news pages without a paywall, probably for SEO reasons.
The curious part is that they allow web scraping arbitrary pages on demand. So if a publisher could put in a lot of arbitrary requests to archive their own pages and see them all coming from a single account or small subset of accounts.
I hope they haven't been stealing cookies from actual users through a botnet or something.
It's not possible to imitate Googlebot well enough to fool someone who knows what they're doing, because the canonical way to verify Googlebot is a DNS lookup dance which will only ever succeed if the request comes from one of Googlebots dedicated IP addresses.
From hero to a Kremlin troll in five seconds.
That effort appears to have gone nowhere, so now suddenly archive.today commits reputational suicide? I don't suppose someone could look deeper into this please?
chrisjj•3h ago
Oh? Do tell!
nobody9999•2h ago
>Oh? Do tell!
They do. In the very next paragraph in fact:
chrisjj•2h ago
> editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content
Hopeless. Just begs for alteration.
> a different archive site, like the Internet Archive,
Hopeless. It allows archive tampering by the page's own JS and archive deletion by the domain owner.
> Ghostarchive, or Megalodon
Hopeless. Coverage is insignificant.
nobody9999•2h ago
I did so. You're welcome.
As for the rest, take it up with Jimmy Wiles, not me.
Kim_Bruning•2h ago
Hopeless. Caught tampering the archive.
The whole situation is not great.
that_lurker•1h ago
ribosometronome•1h ago
that_lurker•56m ago
I personally just don't use websites that paywall important information.
bombcar•51m ago
chrisjj•48m ago
zahlman•37m ago