Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

by nobody9999 • 5 months ago

616 357 5 months ago

arstechnica.com

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)

chrisjj19• 5 months ago

an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced.

Oh? Do tell!

nobody99993• 5 months ago

> an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced.
Oh? Do tell!

They do. In the very next paragraph in fact:

   The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original 
   source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so 
   it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, 
   Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that 
   doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper)

that_lurker4• 5 months ago

I would be suprised if archive.today had something that was not in the wayback machine

ribosometronome• 5 months ago

Accounts to bypass paywalls? The audacity to do it?

bombcar• 5 months ago

Wayback machine removes archives upon request, so there’s definitely stuff they don’t make publicly available (they may still have it).

chrisjj19• 5 months ago

Archive.today has just about everything the archived site doesn't want archived. Archive.org doesn't, because it lets sites delete archives.

zahlman• 5 months ago

Trying to search the Wayback machine almost always gives me their made-up 498 error, and when I do get a result the interface for scrolling through dates is janky at best.

layman51• 5 months ago

I know that sometimes the behavior of each archiver service is a bit different. For example, it's possible that both Archive.today and the Internet Archive say they have a copy of a page, but then when you open up the IA version, you might see that it renders completely differently or not at all. It might be caused because the webpage has like two scrollbars, or maybe there's a redirect that happens when a link to the page is loaded. I notice this seems to happen on documentation pages that are hosted by Salesforce. It can be a bit of a pain if you want to save to save a backup copy online of a release note or something like that for everyone to easily reference in the future.

eviks2• 5 months ago

the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today

You're part of the community! Prove him right!

chrisjj19• 5 months ago

But seriously, removal is simple but replacement is not.

alsetmusic• 5 months ago

I will no longer donate to Wikipedia as long as this is policy.

jraph• 5 months ago

Why? The decision seems reasonable at first sight.

chrisjj19• 5 months ago

Second sight is advisable in such cases. Fact is, archives are essential to WP integrity and there's no credible alternative to this one.

I see WP is not proposing to run its own.

Larrikin• 5 months ago

About how much had you previously donated over the years?

mrguyorama• 5 months ago

In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name.

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.

ouhamouch17• 5 months ago

That was private negotiations, btw, not public statements.

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.

Yossarrian223• 5 months ago

Can you elaborate on your point?

MBCook• 5 months ago

Why does it matter it was a private communications?

It’s still a threat isn’t it?

jMyles2• 5 months ago

It's a reminder how fragile and tenuous are the connections between our browser/client outlays, our societal perceptions of online norms, and our laws.

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).

oytis2• 5 months ago

I mean, the admin of archive.today might face jail time if deanonymised, kind of understandable he's nervous. Meanwhile for Patokallio it's just curiosity and clicks

celsoazevedo• 5 months ago

I don't see the point in doxing anyone, especially those providing a useful service for the average internet user. Just because you can put some info together, it doesn't mean you should.

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.

jMyles2• 5 months ago

Changing the content of archived pages also raises questions about the authenticity of what we're reading.

This is absolutely the buried lede of this whole saga, and needs to be the focus of conversation in the coming age.

jsheard7• 5 months ago

It's also kind of ironic that a site whose whole premise is to preserve pages forever, whether the people involved like it or not, is seeking to take down another site because they are involved and don't like it. Live by the sword, etc.

palmotea5• 5 months ago

It's also kind of ironic that a site whose whole premise is to preserve pages forever, whether the people involved like it or not

Oddly, I think archive.today has explicitly said that's not what they're there for, and the people shouldn't rely on their links as a long-term archive.

ddtaylor3• 5 months ago

Did they actually run the DDoS via a script or was this a case of inserting a link and many users clicked it? They are substantially different IMO

dunder_cat2• 5 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 has the earliest writeup that I know of. It was running it via a script and intentionally using cache busting techniques to try to increase load on the hosted wordpress infrastructure.

hexagonwin• 5 months ago

they silently ran the DDoS script on their captcha page (which is frequently shown to visitors, even when simply viewing and not archiving a new page)

cardanome4• 5 months ago

As far as I understand the person behind archive.today might face jail time if they are found out. You shouldn't be surprised that people lash out when you threaten their life.

I don't think the DDOSing is a very good method for fighting back but I can't blame anyone for trying to survive. They are definitely the victim here.

If that blog really doxxed them out of idle curiosity they are an absolute piece of shit. Though I think this is more of a targeted campaign.

luckylion• 5 months ago

Somebody who a) directs DDOS attacks and b) abuses random visitors' browser for those DDOS attacks is never the victim.

You don't know their motives for running their site, but you do get a clear message about their character by observing their actions, and you'd do well to listen to that message.

protimewaster• 5 months ago

As far as I understand the person behind archive.today might face jail time if they are found out. You shouldn't be surprised that people lash out when you threaten their life.

One of the really strange things about all of this is that there is a public forum post in which a guy claims to be the site owner. So this whole debacle is this weird mix of people who are angry and saying "clearly the owner doesn't want to be associated with the site" on the one hand, but then on the other hand there's literally a guy who says he's the one that owns the site, so it doesn't seem like that guy is very worried about being associated with it?

It also seems weird to me that it's viewed as inappropriate to report on the results of Googling the guy who said he owns the site, but maybe I'm just out of touch on that topic.

pibaker• 5 months ago

One thing they always teach you in Crime University is "don't break two laws at the same time." If you have contrabands in your car, don't speed or run red lights, because it brings attention and attentions means jail.

In this case, I didn't know that the archive.today people were doxxed until they started the ddos campaign and caught attention. I doubt anyone in this thread knew or cared about the blogger until he was attacked. And now this entire thing is a matter of permanent record on Wikipedia and in the news. archive.today's attempt at silencing the blogger is only bringing them more trouble, not less.

Barbara_Streisand_Mansion.jpg

fluoridation8• 5 months ago

For a very brief time, "doxing" (that is, dropping dox, that is, dropping docs, or documents) used to mean something useful. You gathered information that was not out in public, for example by talking to people or by stealing it, and put it out in the open.

It's very silly to talk about doxing when all someone has done is gather information anyone else can equally easily obtain, just given enough patience and time, especially when it's information the person in question put out there themselves. If it doesn't take any special skills or connections to obtain the information, but only the inclination to actually perform the research on publicly available data, I don't see what has been done that is unethical.

bawolff8• 5 months ago

Call it stalking or harrasment if you prefer. Regardless its rude (sometimes illegal) behaviour.

That's no justification for using visitors to your site to do a DDOS.

In the slang of reddit: ESH

lelandbatey• 5 months ago

Eh, you can find in public data things like "what is someone's address" based only on their name by looking up public records of mortgage records. That however is quite bad form, and if you did do that, I think it would be pretty unethical.

noobermin3• 5 months ago

Did you read the article? They dug deep, they didn't just do a google search and leave it at that. They drew links between deleted posts and defunct accounts, they compared profile pictures of anonymous profiles.

I'm not defending the archive.today webmaster but it's unfortunately understandable they are angry. Saying what the blogger did was merely point out public information is a gross oversimplification.

Sophira• 5 months ago

Sites that exist to archive other websites will almost always need to dynamically change the content of the HTML that they're serving in some way or another. (For example, a link that points to the root of the website may need changed in order to point to the right location.)

So it doesn't necessarily raise questions about whether the content has been changed or not. The difference is in whether that change is there to make the archive usable - and of course, for archive.today, that's not the case.

luxuryballs• 5 months ago

this seems like type of thing that should be on blockchain and decentralized nodes validate authenticity, it could support revisions but not lose originals

shevy-java• 5 months ago

Anyone has a short summary as to who and why Archive.today acted via DDos? Isn't that something done by malicious actors? Or did others misuse Archive.today?

zeroonetwothree• 5 months ago

If you read the linked article it is discussed

RupertSalt5• 5 months ago

"Non-paywalled" ad-free link to archive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...

basch• 5 months ago

It seems a lot of people havent heard of it, but I think its worth plugging https://perma.cc/ which is really the appropriate tool for something like Wikipedia to be using to archive pages.

mroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perma.cc

ronsor• 5 months ago

It costs money beyond 10 links, which means either a paid subscription or institutional affiliation. This is problematic for an encyclopedia anyone can edit, like Wikipedia.

toomuchtodo4• 5 months ago

Wikimedia could pay, they have an endowment of ~$144M [1] (as of June 30, 2024). Perma.cc has Archive.org and Cloudflare as supporting partners, and their mission is aligned with Wikimedia [2]. It is a natural complementary fit in the preservation ecosystem. You have to pay for DOIs too, for comparison [3] (starting at $275/year and $1/identifier [4] [5]).

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)

extraduder_ire3• 5 months ago

This is assuming they can't work out something with wikipedia to offer it for free (via a wikiforge tool, or bot) in exchange for the exposure of being the most common archive provider/putting a "used by Wikimedia" logo on their website.

The major reason archive.today was being used is that it also bypassed paywalls, and I don't think perma.cc does that normally.

jsheard7• 5 months ago

Does Wikipedia really need to outsource this? They already do basically everything else in-house, even running their own CDN on bare metal, I'm sure they could spin up an archiver which could be implicitly trusted. Bypassing paywalls would be playing with fire though.

toomuchtodo4• 5 months ago

Archive.org is the archiver, rotted links are replaced by Archive.org links with a bot.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InternetArchiveBot

https://github.com/internetarchive/internetarchivebot

raincole2• 5 months ago

Does Wikipedia really need to outsource this?

I hope so. Archiving is a legal landmine.

IshKebab• 5 months ago

Of course they do. If Wikipedia did it themselves they'd immediately get DMCA'd and sued into oblivion.

Bypassing paywalls would be playing with fire though.

That's the only reason archive.today was used. For non-paywalled stuff you can use the wayback machine.

Computer0• 5 months ago

I switched to Perma.cc earlier this week and have had a mixed experience to say the least. I think image heavy pages just error out completely, while still charging me such as:

https://www.in.gov/nircc/planning/highway/traffic-data/inter...

and reddit blocks their agent seemingly. It is open source though.

tl2do• 5 months ago

Why not show both? Wikipedia could display archive links alongside original sources, clearly labeled so readers know which is which. This preserves access when originals disappear while keeping the primary source as the main reference.

bawolff8• 5 months ago

The objection is to this specific archieve service not archiving in general.

ranger207• 5 months ago

They generally do. Random example, citation 349 on the page of George Washington: ""A Brief History of GW"[link]. GW Libraries. Archived[link] from the original on September 14, 2019. Retrieved August 19, 2019."

Gander57396• 5 months ago

This will always be done unless the original url is marked as dead or similar.

AgentME2• 5 months ago

Wikipedia shouldn't allow links to sites which intentionally falsify archived pages and use their visitors to perform DDOS attacks.

paganel• 5 months ago

At this point Archive.today provides a better service (all things considered) compared to Wikipedia, at least when it comes to current affairs.

xurukefi7• 5 months ago

Kinda off-topic, but has anyone figured out how archive.today manages to bypass paywalls so reliably? I've seen people claiming that they have a bunch of paid accounts that they use to fetch the pages, which is, of course, ridiculous. I figured that they have found an (automated) way to imitate Googlebot really well.

tonymet7• 5 months ago

I’m an outsider with experience building crawlers. You can get pretty far with residential proxies and browser fingerprint optimization. Most of the b-tier publishers use RBC and heuristics that can be “worked around” with moderate effort.

quietsegfault• 5 months ago

.. but what about subscription only, paywalled sources?

elzbardico• 5 months ago

which is, of course, ridiculous.

Why? in the world of web scrapping this is pretty common.

xurukefi7• 5 months ago

Because it works too reliably. Imagine what that would entail. Managing thousands of accounts. You would need to ensure to strip the account details form archived peages perfectly. Every time the website changes its code even slightly you are at risk of losing one of your accounts. It would constantly break and would be an absolute nightmare to maintain. I've personally never encountered such a failure on a paywalled news article. archive.today managed to give me a non-paywalled clean version every single time.

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.

Aurornis2• 5 months ago

I've seen people claiming that they have a bunch of paid accounts that they use to fetch the pages, which is, of course, ridiculous.

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.

xurukefi7• 5 months ago

Exactly. If I was an admin of a popular news website I would try to archive some articles and look at the access logs in the backend. This cannot be too hard to figure out.

coppsilgold• 5 months ago

You don't even need active measures. If a publisher is serious about tracing traitors there are algorithms for that (which are used by streamers to trace pirates). It's called "Traitor Tracing" in the literature. The idea is to embed watermarks following a specific pattern that would point to a traitor or even a coalition of traitors acting in concert.

It would be challenging to do with text, but is certainly doable with images - and articles contain those.

layer8• 5 months ago

It’s not reliable, in the sense that there are many paywalled sites that it’s unable to archive.

xurukefi7• 5 months ago

But it is reliable in the sense that if it works for a site, then it usually never fails.

tonymet7• 5 months ago

no tool is 100% effective. Archive.today is the best one we've seen

jsheard7• 5 months ago

I figured that they have found an (automated) way to imitate Googlebot really well.

If a site (or the WAF in front of it) knows what it's doing then you'll never be able to pass as Googlebot, period, because the canonical verification method is a DNS lookup dance which can only succeed if the request came from one of Googlebots dedicated IP addresses. Bingbot is the same.

xurukefi7• 5 months ago

There are ways to work around this. I've just tested this: I've used the URL inspection tool of Google Search Console to fetch a URL from my website, which I've configured to redirect to a paywalled news article. Turns out the crawler follows that redirect and gives me the full source code of the redirected web site, without any paywall.

That's maybe a bit insane to automate at the scale of archive.today, but I figure they do something along the lines of this. It's a perfect imitation of Googlebot because it is literally Googlebot.

Cider9986• 5 months ago

I imagine accounts are the only way that archive.today works on sites like 404media.co that seem to have server sided paywalls. Similarly, twitter has a completely server sided paywall.

cnst3• 5 months ago

It's because it's actively maintained, and bypassing the paywalls is its whole selling point, thus, they do have to be good at it.

They bypass the rendering issues by "altering" the webpages. It's not uncommon to archive a page, and see nothing because of the paywalls; but then later on, the same page is silently fixed. They have a Tumblr where you can ask them questions; at one point, it's been quite common for everyone to ask them to fix random specific pages, which they did promptly.

Honestly, you cannot archive a modern page, unless you alter it. Yet they're now being attacked under the pretence of "altering" webpages, but that's never been a secret, and it's technologically impossible to archive without altering.

Jordan-11711• 5 months ago

There's a pretty massive difference between altering a snapshot to make it archivable/readable and doing it to smear and defame a blogger who wrote about you.

anilakar• 5 months ago

If you want to pretend this never happened – delete your old article and post the new one you have promised. And I will not write “an OSINT investigation” on your Nazi grandfather

From hero to a Kremlin troll in five seconds.

rdiddly• 5 months ago

So toward the end of last year, the FBI was after archive.today, presumably either for keeping track of things the current administration doesn't want tracked, or maybe for the paywall thing (on behalf of rich donors/IP owners). https://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-is-trying-to-unmask-the-registra...

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?

ndiddy2• 5 months ago

The archive.today operator claims on his blog that this was nothing major: https://lj.rossia.org/users/archive_today/

Regarding the FBI’s request, my understanding is that they were seeking some form of offline action from us — anything from a witness statement (“Yes, this page was saved at such-and-such a time, and no one has accessed or modified it since”) to operational work involving a specific group of users. These users are not necessarily associates of Epstein; among our users who are particularly wary of the FBI, there are also less frequently mentioned groups, such as environmental activists or right-to-repair advocates.
Since no one was physically present in the United States at that time, however, the matter did not progress further.
You already know who turned this request into a full-blown panic about “the FBI accusing the archive and preparing to confiscate everything.”

Not sure who he's talking about there.

bjourne• 5 months ago

FYI, archive.today is NOT the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine.

super2562• 5 months ago

I prefer archive.today because the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine allows retrospective removals of archived pages. If a URL has already been crawled and archived, the site owner can later add that URL to robots.txt and request a re-crawl. Once the crawler detects the updated robots.txt, previously stored snapshots of that page can become inaccessible, even if they were captured before the rule was added.

Unfortunately this happens more often than one would expect.

I found this out when I preserved my very first homepage I made as a child on a free hosting service. I archived it on archive.org, and thought it would stay there forever. Then, in 2017 the free host changed the robots.txt, closed all services, and my treasured memory was forever gone from the internet. ;(

pgalvin• 5 months ago

This information is now many years out of date - they no longer have this policy.

casey2• 5 months ago

Anecdotally I generally see archive.is/archive.today links floating around "stochastic terrorist" sites and other hate cults.

snigsnog7• 5 months ago

Shows that it's a great archival service if the most censored people are able to use it without their archives being censored.

oytis2• 5 months ago

I see them everywhere where paywalled content is referenced

ChocMontePy• 5 months ago

I noticed last year that some archived pages are getting altered.

Every Reddit archived page used to have a Reddit username in the top right, but then it disappeared. "Fair enough," I thought. "They want to hide their Reddit username now."

The problem is, they did it retroactively too, removing the username from past captures.

You can see on old Reddit captures where the normal archived page has no username, but when you switch the tab to the Screenshot of the archive it is still there. The screenshot is the original capture and the username has now been removed for the normal webpage version.

When I noticed it, it seemed like such a minor change, but with these latest revelations, it doesn't seem so minor anymore.

palmotea5• 5 months ago

When I noticed it, it seemed like such a minor change, but with these latest revelations, it doesn't seem so minor anymore.

That doesn't seem nefarious, though. It makes sense they wouldn't want to reveal whatever accounts they use to bypass blocks, and the logged-in account isn't really meaningful content to an archive consumer.

Now, if they were changing the content of a reddit post or comment, that would be an entirely different matter.

zymhan• 5 months ago

Editing what is billed as an archive defeats the purpose of an "archive".

TehCorwiz• 5 months ago

If it's not nefarious why isn't it documented as part of their policies? They're not tracking those changes and making clear it was anonymization, why not? If they're not tracking and publishing changes to the documents what's to say they haven't edited other things? The short answer is that without another archived copy we just don't know and that's what's making people uncomfortable. They also injected malicious JS into the site. What's to stop them from doing that again? Trust and transparency are the name of the game with libraries. I could care less about the who they are, but their actions as steward of a collection for posterity fail to encourage my trust.

wuschel2• 5 months ago

There is an post describing the possibility of an organised campaign against archive.today [1] https://algustionesa.com/the-takedown-campaign-against-archi...

How does the tech behind archive.today work in detail? Is there any information out there that goes beyond the Google AI search reply or this HN thread [2]?

[1] https://algustionesa.com/the-takedown-campaign-against-archi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816427

iamnothere• 5 months ago

There was also the recent news about sites beginning to block the Internet Archive. Feels like we are gearing up for the next phase of the information war.

leonidasv• 5 months ago

If they're under an organised defamation campaign, they're not helping themselves by DDoSing someone else's blog and editing archived pages.

ouhamouch17• 5 months ago

it gives them a voice.

behringer3• 5 months ago

Is that, itself, true or disinformation?

ouhamouch17• 5 months ago

There are number of blog posts like

owner-archive-today . blogspot . com

2 years old, like J.P's first post on AT

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 5 months ago

archive.today works surprisingly well for me, often succeeding where archive.org fails.

archive.org also complies with takedown requests, so it's worth asking: could the organised campaign against archive.today have something to do with it preserving content that someone wants removed?

wolvoleo3• 5 months ago

They preserve a lot of paywalled content so yeah I'm sure there's enough financial incentives to bother them :(

bdhcuidbebe2• 5 months ago

They are able to scrape paywalled sites at random, so im guessing a residential botnet is used.

pingou3• 5 months ago

But how do they bypass the paywall? They can't just pretend to be Google by changing the user-agent, this wouldn't work all the time, as some websites also check IPs, and others don't even show the full content to Google.

They also cannot hijack data with a residential botnet or buy subscriptions themselves. Otherwise, the saved page would contain information about the logged-in user. It would be hard to remove this information, as the code changes all the time, and it would be easy for the website owner to add an invisible element that identifies the user. I suppose they could have different subscriptions and remove everything that isn't identical between the two, but that wouldn't be foolproof.

khannn• 5 months ago

It's funny that residential VPN botnets aren't uncommon now. "Free VPN" if you allow your computer/phone to be an exit point.

pyuser583• 5 months ago

Was that written by AI? It sounds like AI, spends lots of time summarizing other posts, and has no listed author. My AI alarm is going off.

lambda• 5 months ago

Yeah, wow. Definitely setting off my AI summary alarm.

girvo• 5 months ago

Yeah nearly certainly.

KennyBlanken• 5 months ago

Ars was caught recently using AI to write articles when the AI hallucinated about a blogger getting harassed by someone using AI agents. The article quoted his blog and all the quotes were nonsense.

robotnikman2• 5 months ago

A big fear of mine is something happening to archive.is

There is so much is archived there, to lose it all would be a tragedy.

karel-3d2• 5 months ago

Archive.is is now publishing really weird posts on their Tumblr blog, related to the whole thing

https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/806832066465497088/ladies...

https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/807584470961111040/it-see...

dmix• 5 months ago

He’s probably being purposefully vague which makes for difficult reading.

ricardobeat• 5 months ago

The word salad with ukraine, arms trade, nazis, hunter biden, leave no doubt the operator is from Russia.

karel-3d2• 5 months ago

He says elsewhere he comes from right wing activism. He could be some hard right type. But he says elsewhere he is outside of US jurisdiction. And the fact that he reacts so violently means that the original blogpost is somehow right. So probably Russia

nubinetwork2• 5 months ago

I noticed I've started being redirected to a blank nginx server for archive.is... but only the .is domain, .ph and .today work just fine. I wonder if they ended up on an adblocker or two.

stephen_g• 5 months ago

There was some beef the site owner had with Cloudflare where if your were using Cloudflare DNS it wouldn’t serve anything to you? Is that still happening?

Not sure why it would only be on archive.is and not the others but ‘is’ loads for me.

nubinetwork2• 5 months ago

Oh maybe... I don't use cloudflare DNS, but maybe one of my rpz zones does something weird...

TZubiri• 5 months ago

They seem totally unrelated to the Internet Archive. They probably only ever got on Wikipedia by leeching of the IA brand and confusing enough people to use them

Onavo• 5 months ago

Wayback machine won't bypass paywall nor pirate content, not to mention they are under US jurisdiction. You can't have your cake and eat it.

krick2• 5 months ago

Honestly, IMHO archive.today is just so much nicer to use in every aspect than IA, that unless they outright start to distribute malware (I mean, like, via the page itself — otherwise it's pretty much irrelevant), I don't think I'll stop using it.

croes• 5 months ago

“I’m glad the Wikipedia community has come to a clear consensus, and I hope this inspires the Wikimedia Foundation to look into creating its own archival service,” he told us.

Hardly possible for Wikimedia to provide a service like archive.today given the legal trouble of the latter.

Strangely naive.

krick2• 5 months ago

I believe there are multiple options with different degree of "half-baked"-ness, but can anyone name the best self-hosted version of this service?

Ultimately, what we all use it for is pretty straight-forward, and it seems like by now we should've arrived at having approximately one best implementation, which could be used both for personal archiving and for iternet-facing instances (perhaps even distributed). But I don't know if we have.

robotnikman2• 5 months ago

I'm wondering the same thing, would be great to have something similar for personal use

tetris11• 5 months ago

Archive.today's domain registrar is Tucows for anyone wondering

ValentineC• 5 months ago

Just curious: is this of any significance?

tonymet7• 5 months ago

Wikipedia's own page on this topic is much more succinct about the context and change in policy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...

cnst3• 5 months ago

Change the original source to something that doesn't need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.

They're basically recommending changing verifiable references that can easily be cross-checked and verified, to "printed on paper" sources that could likely never be verified by any other Wikipedian, and can easily be used to provide a falsification and bias that could go unnoticed for extended periods of time.

Honestly, that's all you need to know about Wikipedia.

The "altered" allegation is also disingenuous. The reason archive.org never works, is precisely because it doesn't alter the pages enough. There's no evidence that archive.today has altered any actual main content they've archived; altering the hidden fields, usernames and paywalls, as well as random presentation elements to make the page look properly, doesn't really count as "altered" in my book, yet that's precisely what the allegation amounts to.

tonymet7• 5 months ago

You should add this context to the talk page. You can do it anonymously without login. I wasn’t aware of either side of this allegation, and it’s helpful to understand this context.

tonymet7• 5 months ago

this was referenced as the evidence for archive.today modifying content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...

Jordan-11711• 5 months ago

The accusation is not that they alter pages at all -- they obviously need to in order to make some pages readable/functional, bypass paywalls, or hide account names used to do so. The Wayback Machine does something similar with YouTube to make old videos playable.

The allegation here is that they altered page content not just to remove their own alias, but to insert the name of the blogger they were targeting. That moves it from a defensible technical change for accessibility to being part of their bizarre revenge campaign against someone who crossed them.

1vuio0pswjnm77• 5 months ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260220191245if_/https://arstec...

archive.today is very popular on HN; the opaque, shortened URLs are promoted on HN every day

I can't use archive.today. I tried but gave up. Too many hassles. I might be in the minority but I know I'm not the only one. As it happens. I have not found any site that I cannot access without it

The most important issue with archive.today though is the person running it, their past and present behaviour. It speaks for itself

Whomever it is, they have lot of info about HN users' reading habits given that archive.today URLs are so heavily promoted by HN submitters, commenters and moderators

belviewreview• 5 months ago

I use archive.today all the time. How do you access pages, like for instance on the economist, without it?

mhitza• 5 months ago

If dang and tomhow enforce a policy against paywalled content would garner less interest in accessing those pages via third parties. Most news gets reported by multiple outlets in general, so the same discussions would still surface.

ouhamouch17• 5 months ago

for instance on the economist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060487

201984• 5 months ago

With the paywall blocker so good it got banned! You can also get it on Android.

https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...

1vuio0pswjnm77• 5 months ago

   http-request set-header user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Lamarr" if { hdr(host) -m end economist.com }

Years ago I used some other workaround that no longer works, maybe something like amp.economist.com. AMP with text-only browser was a useful workaround for many sites

Workarounds usually don't last forever. Websites change from time to time. This one will stop working at some point

There are some people who for various reasons cannot use archive.today

ranger_danger• 5 months ago

For me, all archive.* links just present an endless captcha loop. I am not using CF DNS or any proxy/VPN, but even if I do try those things, it still doesn't work.

fouc• 5 months ago

you can change the tld of any archive.today link if .today doesn't work. for example archive.ph, archive.is, archive.md, etc

qingcharles• 5 months ago

There's a DNS issue between Archive Today and some ISPs which causes their domains not to resolve properly, which is why some people have a lot of trouble using it.

bawolff8• 5 months ago

The fact is i cant have a discussion about a paywalled article without reading it. Archive.today is popular as a paywall bypass because nobody wants HN to devolve into debate based on a headline where nobody has rtfa.

diath• 5 months ago

Whomever it is, they have lot of info about HN users' reading habits given that archive.today URLs are so heavily promoted by HN submitters, commenters and moderators

It's not promoted, it's just used as a paywall bypass so everyone can read the linked article.

1vuio0pswjnm77• 5 months ago

"archive.today" as used here means the collection of archive.tld domains, where .tld could be ".is", ".md", ".ph", etc.

"promoted" as used here means placing an archive.tld URL at the top of an HN thread so that many HN readers will follow it, or placing these URLs elsewhere in threads

1vuio0pswjnm77• 5 months ago

Archive.today wants/needs EDNS subnet

"Geolocation" as a justication is ambiguous

Why a need for geolocation

Geolocation can be used for multiple purposes

"DNS performance" is only one purpose

Other purposes might offer the user no benefit, and might even be undesirable for users

As a result, some users don't send EDNS subnet. It's always been optional to send it

Even public resolvers, third party DNS services, like Cloudflare, recognise the tradeoffs for users and allow users to avoid sending it. Popular DNS software makes compiling support for EDNS subnet optional

Archive.today wants/needs EDNS subnet so bad it tries to gather it using a tracking pixel or it tries to block users who dont send it, e.g., Cloudflare users

Thus, before one even considers all the other behaviour of this website operator, some of which is mentioned in this thread, there is a huge red flag for anyone who pays attention to EDNS subnet

As with almost all websites repeated DNS lookups are not an absolute requirement for successful HTTP requests

There are some IP addresses for archive.{today,is,md,ph,li,...} that have continued to work for years

wolvoleo3• 5 months ago

Whomever it is, they have lot of info about HN users' reading habits given that archive.today URLs are so heavily promoted by HN submitters, commenters and moderators

Anyone interested in the reading habits of HN users can just take a look at news.ycombinator.com ;)

nobody99993• 5 months ago

I can't use archive.today. I tried but gave up. Too many hassles.

What hassles have you experienced?

I use the Archive Page[0] extension which is really easy to use.

The only thing that annoys me about it is the repeated requests (starting about eight or nine months ago) to complete CAPTCHAs.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archive-page/

1vuio0pswjnm77• 5 months ago

"The only thing that annoys me about it is the repeated requests (starting about eight or nine months ago) to complete CAPTCHAs"

What does this annoy you

andai2• 5 months ago

Sounds like there's a gap in the market for a "commons" archive... maybe powered by something p2p like BitTorrent protocol?

This would have sounded Very Normal in the 2000s... I wonder if we can go back :)

bawolff8• 5 months ago

P2p is generally bad for this usecase. P2P generally only works for keeping popular content around (content gets dropped when the last peer that cares disconnects). If the content was popular it wouldnt need to be archived in the first place.

quotemstr• 5 months ago

Imagine a proof-of-space cryptocurrency that encouraged archiving long-tail data.

andai2• 5 months ago

I think if you take this idea far enough you end up reinventing taxes from first principles.

PhilipRoman• 5 months ago

IMO there is actually a very low hanging fruit here, even without P2P or DHTs we could have an URI scheme that consists of a domain and document hash. It is then up to the user to add alternate mirrors for domains. Aside from privacy, it doesn't really matter who answers these requests since the documents are self-signing.

comeonbro• 5 months ago

There is an enormous amount of stuff that is only on archive.today, including stuff that is otherwise gone forever. A mix of stuff that somebody only ever did archive.today on and not archive.org, and stuff that could only be archived on archive.today because archive.org fails on it.

Anything on twitter post-login-wall for one. A million only-semi-paywalled news articles for others. But mainly an unfathomably long tail.

It was extremely distressing when the admin started(?) behaving badly for this reason. That others are starting to react this way to it is understandable. What a stupid tragedy.

nosamu• 5 months ago

Has anyone else noticed that some of Archive.today's X/Twitter captures [1] are logged in with an account called "advancedhosters" [2], which is associated with a web hosting company apparently located in Cyprus? The latest post [3] from the account links to a blog post [4] including private communications between the webmaster of Archive.today (using their previously-known "Volth" alias) and a site owner requesting a takedown. Also note that the previous post [5] from the "advancedhosters" account was a link to a pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine article, archived via Archive.today of course. Seems like an interesting lead to untangle.

[1] https://archive.today/20240714173022/https://x.com/archiveis...

[2] https://x.com/advancedhosters

[3] https://x.com/advancedhosters/status/1731129170091004412

[4] https://lj.rossia.org/users/mopaiv/257.html

[5] https://x.com/advancedhosters/status/1501971277099286539

snigsnog7• 5 months ago

Lead to what?

Kiboneu• 5 months ago

That’s what OP wants to find out.

jeroenhd• 5 months ago

It could be a donated account. I've noticed archive.whatever also bypasses some paywalls by using legitimate account logins but I doubt there's one person going around subscribing to every news outlet that gets any coverage.

If archive.whatever wasn't so useful to the general public, it'd be hard to distinguish from a criminal operation given the way it operates, unlike say the Internet Archive who goes through all of the proper legal paperwork to be a real nonprofit.

frenchtoast8• 5 months ago

A bit off topic, but are there any self hosted open source archiving servers people are using for personal usage?

I think ArchiveBox[1] is the most popular. I will give it a shot, but it's a shame they don't support URL rewriting[2], which would be annoying for me. I read a lot of blog and news articles that are split across multiple pages, and it would be nice if that article's "next page" link was a link to the next archived page instead of the original URL.

1: https://archivebox.io/

2: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/discussions/1395

quinncom• 5 months ago

I like Readeck – https://codeberg.org/readeck/readeck

Open source. Self hosted or managed. Native iOS and Android apps.

Its Content Scripts feature allows custom JS scripts that transform saved content, which could be used to do URL rewriting.

kseistrup• 5 months ago

Omnom comes to mind:

* https://omnom.zone/

* https://github.com/asciimoo/omnom

dakolli• 5 months ago

The FBI called out archive.today a couple months ago, there's clearly a campaign against them by the USA (4th Reich), which stands principally against any information repository they don't control or have influence over (its Russian owned). This is simply donors of the Trump regime who own media companies requesting this because its the primary way around paywalls for most people who know about it.

jl6• 5 months ago

Am I reading this right… they tampered with an archived page and then changed it back? How do we know? Is there another archive site that has before and after proof?

Gander57396• 5 months ago

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ARequests_for_comme...

cnst3• 5 months ago

They've changed usernames they use to post under. That's the only "altered" allegation they've been accused of.

BTW, they also alter paywalls and other elements, because otherwise, many websites won't show the main content these days.

It kind of seems like "altered" is the new "hacker" today?

Jordan-11711• 5 months ago

Specifically, they changed a "commenting as: [their alias]" UI element to "commenting as: [name of the blogger they were fighting with]".

Compare (the changed element is near the very bottom of the page; replace the "[dot]" since these URLs seem to trigger spam filters for some commenters):

archive [dot] is/gFD6Z

megalodon [dot] jp/2026-0219-1628-23/https://archive.is:443/gFD6Z

alfiedotwtf• 5 months ago

It would be nice if there was a non-dynamic snapshot archive as well as the page itself. That way, if the loaded JavaScript stops causes it to stop rendering, at least there’ll be a static fallback

seanhly3• 5 months ago

Curiously, this isn't the first time archive.today was implicated in a DDoS. A HN post from three years back shows some pasted snippets of similar XmlHttpRequest code running on archive.ph (an archive.today synonym site). Post link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38233062

On that occasion, the target of the attack was a site named northcountrygazette.org, whose owner seems to have never become aware of the attack. The HN commenter noted when they went to the site manually it was incredibly slow, which would suggest the DDoS attempt was effective.

I tried to see if there was anything North Country Gazette had published that the webmaster of archive.today might have taken issue with, and I couldn't find anything in particular. However, the "Gazette" had previously threatened readers with IP logging to prosecute paywall bypassers (https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/27/2134236/pay-or-else...), and also blocks archivers in its robots.txt file, indicating it is hostile towards archiving in general.

I can no longer access North Country Gazette, so perhaps it has since gone out of business. I found a few archived posts from its dead website complaining of high server fees. Like the target of this most recent DDoS, June Maxam, the lady behind North Country Gazette, also appears/appeared to be a sleuth.

rawling• 5 months ago

Is it not possible to create a non-repudiable archive of what a website served, when, entirely locally i.e. not relying on some third party site who might disappear or turn out to be unreliable?

Could you not in theory record the whole TLS transaction? Can it not be replayed later and re-verified?

Up until an old certificate leaks or is broken and you can fake anything "from back when it was valid", I guess.

justincormack2• 5 months ago

Unfortunately you can't usefully replay TLS and be able to validate it, so no that does not work. Best strategy would probably be a public transparency log, but websites are pretty variable and dynamic so this would be unlikely to work for many.

octoberfranklin• 5 months ago

Actually you can! After all, TLS lacks the deniability features of more advanced cryptosystems (like OTR or Signal).

The technology for doing this is called a Zero Knowledge Proof TLS Oracle:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/447.pdf

https://tlsnotary.org

The 10k-foot view is that you pick the random numbers involved in the TLS handshake in a deterministic way, much like how zk proofs use the Fiat-Shamir transform. In other words, instead of using true randomness, you use some hash of the transcript of the handshake so far (sort of). Since TLS doesn't do client authentication the DH exchange involves randomness from the client.

For all the blockchain haters out there: cryptocurrency is the reason this technology exists. Be thankful.

arboles3• 5 months ago

I don't know, but archive sites could at least publish hashes of the content at archive time. This could be used to prove an archive wasn't tampered with later. I'm pretty underwhelmed by the Wayback Machine (archive.org), it's no better technically than archive.today.

armchairhacker• 5 months ago

How do you ensure the tampered content isn’t re-hashed? Usually if you’re saving the hash in advance, you can save the whole archived page. Otherwise, you can use a regular archive service then hash the archived page yourself.

The only way I know to ensure an archive isn’t tampered is to re-archive it. If you sent a site to archive.today, archive.org, megalodon.jp, and ghostarchive.org, it’s unlikely that all will be tampered in the same way.

anovikov• 5 months ago

It doesn't work properly anyway anymore...

_el1s7• 5 months ago

Just went into a rabbit hole looking into this, wow, can't tell if this is just another drama on the weird wide web or something else.

realaaa• 5 months ago

wow! but this felt like end of the story - here is LLM summary of timeline - sharing as is

---------

Here’s the chronology that the HN thread id=47092006 is about, based on the linked Ars Technica article and related sources.

---

## 1. What “started the argument”?

The core dispute starts from a 2023 blog post by engineer Jani Patokallio on his site Gyrovague, investigating who is behind archive.today. That post, plus later FBI interest, led to:

1. A *GDPR/takedown campaign* against the blog post. 2. An *apparent DDoS* launched from archive.today’s CAPTCHA page against his blog. 3. *Threats* from the archive.today operator (“Nora”) to associate Patokallio’s name with AI porn and other harassment. 4. *Discovery that archive.today had altered archived pages* to insert Patokallio’s name. 5. A *Wikipedia RfC* and decision to deprecate and blacklist archive.today links.

The Hacker News thread you referenced is about the final step: Wikipedia’s decision to remove ~695,000 archive.today links.

---

## 2. Timeline of the situation

```mermaid timeline title archive.today – Wikipedia controversy chronology

    2012-2015 : Site founded as archive.is; later branded archive.today
    2023-08-05 : Patokallio publishes investigation into archive.today’s ownership
    2025-10-30 : FBI subpoena to archive.today’s registrar (Tucows)
    2025-11-05 : Heise reports FBI subpoena, links to Patokallio’s 2023 post
    2026-01-08 : GDPR complaint from “Nora” to Automattic re Patokallio’s post
    2026-01-10 : archive.today webmaster emails Patokallio asking for temporary takedown
    2026-01-11 : DDoS from archive.today CAPTCHA page against Gyrovague begins
    2026-01-14 : First public HN report about weird/DDoS behavior from archive.today
    2026-01-21 : gyrovague.com added to DNS blocklists used by ad blockers
    2026-01-25 : Email exchange escalates; “Nora” threatens AI porn, “gay dating app”, “Nazi grandfather”
    2026-02-01 : Patokallio publishes detailed timeline and DDoS disclosure
    2026-02-07 : Wikipedia RfC opens on archive.today links
    2026-02-10 : Ars Technica reports on DDoS and Wikipedia considering blacklist
    2026-02-19 : DDoS code still present in archive.today CAPTCHA page (per Wikipedia guidance)
    2026-02-20 : RfC closed; consensus to deprecate/blacklist archive.today
    2026-02-20–21 : Major outlets report Wikipedia’s blacklist; guidance page created

```

So, in the terms of your question:

- *What started the argument* was Patokallio’s 2023 investigation into archive.today’s ownership, which later coverage of the FBI subpoena amplified. - The *direct trigger for Wikipedia’s action* was the combination of: - The *DDoS* launched from archive.today against his blog. - The *threats* (AI porn, harassment) against him. - Evidence that the *archive’s content had been tampered with*, violating Wikipedia’s trust in it as a citation source.【turn4fetch0】【turn9find1】

Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links

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