this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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267
Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by Aatube@thriv.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder's identity in 2023. [...] A Tumblr blog post apparently written by the Archive.today founder seems to generally confirm the emails’ veracity, but says the original version threatened to create “a patokallio.gay dating app,” not “a gyrovague.gay dating app.”

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Archive-today-Operator-uses-users-for-DDoS-attack-11171455.html:

By having Archive.today unknowingly let users access the Finnish blogger's URL, their IP addresses are transmitted to him. This could be a point of attack for prosecuting copyright infringements.

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[–] Strawberry@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] onehundredsixtynine@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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

  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's captures are), but 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, half 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.

[–] Strawberry@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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 one's going to be needed.

Edit: added links & spelling

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 81 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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; regardless of what a piece of shit the blog owner is, I hope they see prison time for abusing their trust to perpetrate this DDoS.

Right now, the Wikipedia RfC seems pretty split. This is a complicated issue, so I'm going to need to read and think more before I chime in. Just wild.

[–] VonReposti@feddit.dk 65 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 55 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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 and has never worked.
  • 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 both the Wayback Machine and archive.today, because relying on the link staying up is objectively a mistake (and relying on just one is negligent).
    • The security that 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 at a time when Wikipedia is already on shaky footing.

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 in this case it's "I could use a hug".

* "Outsider" and "insider" used to denote experience editing; most anyone can do anything on Wikipedia from the get-go.

[–] VonReposti@feddit.dk 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"As quickly as possible" pulls a lot of weight in my statement. Just like when the EU is trying to cut our dependence with US payment providers, Wikipedia can't do it overnight. The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, the next best time is right now.

Cutting ties with archive[.]today takes a long time, but the longer the decision to cut it takes, the longer to the ties are actually cut. It's all about "make haste slowly", ie. do a lot of planning on how to actually cut the ties with minimal impact so you can do it when forced to (for example if FBI were to take the servers one day) or when you decide that the independence from archive[.]today is more valuable than the remaining impact of cutting dependence. This could take half a year, a year, or more.

But indecision will at some point put you in a worse position: You are funneling your traffic to a malicious website that actively participates in DDoS attacks by using users' traffic (including those coming from Wikipedia) to carry out the attack. Indecision can open you up to serious litigation and reputational damage by proximity. Given that archive[.]today crossed the line to malicious activity by misusing their traffic, what's to stop them from malicious activity by misusing their content? IMO even if you think the integrity of your content and its sources are too valuable (and trust me, I think it's very valuable) you need to consider this as a warning sign and realise that nothing's stopping archive[.]today from losing the editorial integrity that you rely on.

So my suggestion, brainstorm ideas that would make you independent: Make agreements with IA to improve retention, roll your own archiver, make a deal with news orgs to show their articles as citations (this last one I actually like most the more I think about it. A good negotiator can call it advertising for the news org and you'll at the same time not infringe on copyright like archive[.]today is). If you wait until point of no return, the choice has already been made for you whether you like it or not. And worst part is that you'd scramble to find a solution instead of the best solution.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

So my suggestion, brainstorm ideas that would make you independent:

Editors have been doing this for years.

Make agreements with IA to improve retention,

The IA already lives on a razor's edge in terms of copyright and is doing everything it thinks it can to push that. Many websites leave the IA be because having free, independent archives can benefit them, but it doesn't take a lot for a copyright holder to say: "Hey, you're hosting my IP verbatim, I sent you a takedown request, you didn't comply, and I'm taking you to court."

You can't just "make agreements" for the IA to violate copyright law (more than it arguably already is). They're already doing the best they can, and pushing them to do more would endanger Wikipedia even worse. It's not an exaggeration to say that the IA dying would be a project-wide apocalypse.

roll your own archiver,

I'd bet it could be done if the IA went down, triggering a project-wide crisis, but among other things, I'm sure the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't want to paint a target on its backs. We're very cautious when it comes to copyrighted material hosted on Wikimedia projects, and this would be dropping a fork into a blender for us.

make a deal with news orgs to show their articles as citations (this last one I actually like most the more I think about it. A good negotiator can call it advertising for the news org and you'll at the same time not infringe on copyright like archive[.]today is).

I don't think I understand one. The Wikimedia project gets to host verbatim third-party news articles? This is creative but completely unrealistic; you'd be asking news organizations to place their work under a copyleft license for citing on Wikipedia (that's what we host except for minimal, explicitly labeled fair use material that has robust justification). It'd be a technical nightmare any way you slice it, and logistically it'd be a clusterfuck.

Even if you magically overcame those problems, Wikipedia exists to be neutral and independent, and this "wink wink nudge nudge ;)" quasi-advertising deal would look corrupt as fuck – us showing preferential treatment for certain sources not based on their quality but on their willingness to do us favors.

If you wait until point of no return, the choice has already been made for you whether you like it or not. And worst part is that you'd scramble to find a solution instead of the best solution.

Here's the thing: we know. This RfC is full of highly experienced editors deciding if Wikipedia is going to amputate. Option A means immediate, catastrophic, irreversible, mostly unfixable damage to Wikipedia. That is something that needs to be thought through, and your suggestions – which are appreciated for showing you're giving it real thought – reflect that people who don't regularly edit can't really, viscerally understand how completely screwed Wikipedia is by this.

[–] Aatube@thriv.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The Wikimedia project gets to host verbatim third-party news articles? This is creative but completely unrealistic

It would be just like the extant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library.

In the worst case we could just run Megalodon on all the archive.today URLs

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

I think you have a very severe misunderstanding of the Wikipedia Library, which I have access to and frequently use. The WPL allows active editors in good standing to access paywalled sources.

  • You must have an account which is 6+ months old, has made 500 edits, has 10+ edits in the last month, and is not blocked. (an extreme minority of editors, let alone readers.)
  • You must first apply to gain access.
  • For publications with limited subscriptions, you must individually apply on top of your WPL access.
  • Critically: the WPL does not host any of these publications. You are taken to them via a portal and given an access token.

I can't emphasize enough how absurd this comparison is. "Solar farms exist; building a Dyson sphere would be basically the same thing. Let's get to work." And the thing is: I wish you were right.

Edit: That said, if you ever need copyleft material, we do maintain Wikimedia Commons for media generally and Wikisource which is a transcribed digital library of free sources. Much narrower in scope than this, but I highly recommend them!

[–] Aatube@thriv.social 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

I am an active editor lol. I'm saying that the proposal is to establish something similar to TWL for media URLs. It would serve the same purpose for editors as a major complaint in the discussion was over addition of Archive.today links to bypass paywalls. Obviously developing this deal would take a lot of work but it is workable.

You must first apply to gain access.

That's not true. Anyone who meets the stats you mentioned may access TWL.

the WML does not host any of these publications

Indeed, that's what makes it legally sound and prevents us from needing to relicense. We don't need to license the content to copyleft for the thing to work.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

That's not true.

Okay, then you'll need to explain the annual emails I've gotten saying "Your application to the Wikipedia Library has been approved" after I apparently tripped and fell and filled out a manual form applying to the library every year.

It doesn't seem selective once you meet the four aforementioned criteria, but you do need to manually apply.

The idea you're talking about, meanwhile, is nonsensical and doesn't address basically anything about the massive structural problems blacklisting archive.today imposes. I wholly support expanding out the Wikipedia Library, but even this pie-in-the-sky version of it falls too far short of what archive.today provides – and that's just going forward in an ideal world where you can snap your fingers and make this fantasyland WPL happen as soon as archive.today is blacklisted.

The "backcatalogue", so to speak, is what's going to be the most catastrophic part of this by far. I spent years where my main focus was just on bringing dead sources back to life; I don't know the full extent of how bad this is, but I know for damn sure what you've suggested (which won't ever happen) undoes barely a fraction of the damage.

[–] Aatube@thriv.social 1 points 2 hours ago

34 (mainly non–core Anglosphere newspapers) of the 121 platforms TWL can give you access to require an application. The rest you can access automatically, instantaneously right now as long as you meet the stats.

I mentioned that this (only) solves one (of two) major problems archive.today was used to solve: paywalls. This is also very workable; you already have major newspapers like Haaretz and WSJ available on TWL.

I also mentioned that the backcatalogue problem can be solved by running a different archiving service on the existing archive.today URLs we use.

[–] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 7 points 1 day 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

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 37 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

We need an open-source 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. Archive.today is a great thing to exist on the Internet and I hope it continues, but we need one that we know isn't going to host malware or vanish on us.

That said, I don't appreciate the blogger's urge to doxx whoever runs the archive. It's exactly the kind of site where the admins would need security and anonymity so the US Government or another power doesn't shut them down. If you doxx the owner you could kill the site.

[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 day 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: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/

[–] nullroot@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day 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.

[–] onehundredsixtynine@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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

Interesting...

[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 46 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

2 years pass.

Now 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, censorship 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 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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

[–] cecilkorik@piefed.ca 1 points 1 day 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.

[–] CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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

Edit: I was actually thinking of this thread https://sh.itjust.works/post/54542523

[–] patruelis@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day 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.

[–] Beep@lemmus.org 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Got downvoted when I posted it before.