6 ms·
Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?
archive.today has recently (I noticed this, like, 3 days ago) started automatically making requests to someone's personal blog on their CAPTCHA page. Here's a screenshot of what I'm talking about: https://files.catbox.moe/20jsle.png https://files.catbox.moe/20jsle.png
The relevant JS is:
setInterval(function() {
fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s=" + Math.round(new Date().getTime() % 10000000), {
referrerPolicy: "no-referrer",
mode: "no-cors"
});
}, 300);
Looking at this blog, there seems to be exactly one article mentioning archive.today - "archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet" (https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...), where the person running the blog digs up some information about archive's owner.
So perhaps this is some kind of revenge/DOS attack attempt/deliberately wasting their bandwidth in response to this article? Maybe an attempt to silence them and force to delete their article? But if it is, then I have so many questions. Like, why would the owner of the archive do that 2.5 years after the article was published? Or why would they even do that in the first place, do they not know about Streisand effect?
I'm confused.
- ventegus 9mo agoThey might need to tweak a single word. Streisand readers won’t have a clue which. Save the page now and compare a week later.
- dunder_cat 9mo agoHmm. If it is an attempt at DDoS attacks, it's probably not very fruitful: >$ resolvectl query gyrovague.com gyrovague.com: 192.0.78.25 -- link: eno1 192.0.78.24 -- link: eno1 Viewing the first IP address on https://bgp.he.net/ip/192.0.78.25 https://bgp.he.net/ip/192.0.78.25 shows AS2635 (https://bgp.he.net/AS2635 https://bgp.he.net/AS2635) is announcing 192.0.78.0/24. AS2635 is owned by https://automattic.com https://automattic.com aka wordpress.com. I assume that for a managed environment at their scale, this is just another Wednesday for them.
- dunder_cat 9mo agoIt occurred to me while reading the article that I could also just have checked the TLS cert. The cert I was given presents "Common Name tls.automattic.com". However, maybe someone will discover bgp.he.net via this :-)
- catlifeonmars 9mo ago> maybe someone will discover bgp.he.net via this I did, thank you!
- justsomehnguy 9mo agoAdd https://bgp.tools https://bgp.tools to the list
- notmysql_ 9mo agogood ol' hurricane electric
- arcfour 9mo agoI believe they're probably trying to get the blog suspended (automatically?) hence the cache busting; chewing through higher than normal resources all of a sudden might do the trick even if it doesn't actually take it offline.
- mike_d 9mo agoIt is using the ?s= parameter which causes WordPress to initiate a search for a random string. This can result in high CPU usage, which I believe is one of the DoS vectors that works on hosted WordPress.
- mediumdeviation 9mo agoPretty sure that blog is hosted on Wordpress.com infrastructure so it's not like the blog owner would even notice unless it generates so much traffic that WP itself notices. That said I don't think there's many non-malicious explanation for this, I would suggest writing to HN and see about blocking submissions from the domain hn@ycombinator.com
- heraldgeezer 9mo ago[flagged]
- sbdaman 9mo agoGiven it's set to generate random pages on the site, is there even any possible explanation for this that isn't sketchy?
- mediumdeviation 9mo agoIt's not random, setting the query string to a new value on every fetch is a cache busting technique - it's trying to prevent the browser from caching the page, presumably to increase bandwidth usage.
- gertop 9mo agoIt's trying to prevent the server from caching the search. Thousands of different searches will cause high CPU load and the WordPress might decide to suspend the blog.
- nativeit 9mo agoI just tried in my browser (Firefox on Ubuntu) and got the same result. Deeply curious.
- rafram 9mo agoRemember when Archive.is/today used to send Cloudflare DNS users into an endless captcha loop because the creator had some kind of philosophical disagreement with Cloudflare? Not the first time they’ve done something petty like this.
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- AndroTux 9mo agoThat's still a thing. Happens to me as we speak.
- wolvoleo 9mo agoFor me it just doesn't resolve at all on Cloudflare dns. So annoying.
- stavros 9mo agoIt wasn't a philosophical disagreement, they needed some geo info from the DNS server to route requests so they could prevent spam and Cloudflare wasn't providing it citing privacy reasons. The admin decided to block Cloudflare rather than deal with the spam.
- internetter 9mo agoThere's really no interpretation of this which isn't malicious, although, not to defend this behaviour whatsoever, I'm not entirely surprised by it. The only real value of archive.is is its paywall bypassing abilities and, presumably, large swaths of residential proxies that allow it to archive sites that archive.org can't. Only somebody with some degree of lawlessness would operate such a project.
- Brybry 9mo agoIt's not just for paywall bypassing. Sometimes there are archive.today snapshots that aren't in the Wayback Machine (though I think your overall point about lawlessness still stands). For example, there was some NASA debris that hit a guy's house in Florida and it was in the news. [1] Some news sites linked to a Twitter post he made with the images but he later deleted the post. [2] The Wayback Machine has a ton of snapshots of the Twitter post but none of them render for me. [3] But archive.today's snapshot works great. [4] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9www02e49zo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9www02e49zo [2] https://xcancel.com/Alejandro0tero/status/1768729031493427225 https://xcancel.com/Alejandro0tero/status/176872903149342722... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20240715000000*/https://twitter.com/Alejandro0tero/status/1768729031493427225 https://web.archive.org/web/20240715000000*/https://twitter.... [4] https://archive.md/obuWr https://archive.md/obuWr
- internetter 9mo agoArchive.today has a different approach to the baseline archive technology (executing javascript at archival time and saving the DOM instead of saving and replaying server responses verbatim). Additionally, Archive.today employs a number of site specific mitigations which aren't visible to the end user. In some cases, for instance, they use accounts, but then retroactively modify the DOM to mask this mitigation. [0] While the exact strategy they use for Twitter isn't known to me, they are doing something by their own admission. [1] [0] https://blog.archive.today/post/708008224368001024/why-isnt-instagram-archive-working https://blog.archive.today/post/708008224368001024/why-isnt-... compounded with personal observation. [1] https://blog.archive.today/post/708565142782246912/pretty-please-remove-the-recent-restrictions-for https://blog.archive.today/post/708565142782246912/pretty-pl...
- Barbing 9mo agoWorth blocking the URL for users of that Archive site then, avoid extra burden?
- aendruk 9mo agoHow would you determine who is a user of the archive site?
- eli 9mo agoWell that is a very silly way to punish the author of an article you don’t want people to know about.
- crazysim 9mo ago"It’s a testament to their persistence that they’re managed to keep this up for over 10 years, and I for one will be buying Denis/Masha/whoever a well deserved cup of coffee." https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-... And one where the author's cool with whoever is running archive.today.
- bakugo 9mo ago> And one where the author's cool with whoever is running archive.today. I don't think it really matters how "cool" you are with someone while actively trying to doxx them.
- rabinovich 9mo agoRevealing publicly available information (actually publicly available, in the sense of "any person can easily look this up", not "publicly available" in a sense of "publicly available in leaked databases", which actual doxxers use as an excuse for their actions) isn't doxxing.
- jijijijij 9mo agoಠ_ಠ
- bakugo 9mo agoDoxxing has never been restricted to just leaked databases. I'd argue that any publishing of personal information in a context in which the individual clearly doesn't want to be identified counts. The owner of the site is not identified anywhere on the site itself. And I think we can both agree that it's the sort of site whose owner would prefer to remain as anonymous as possible. The blog post digs up information about the owner from whois records, which do count as easily accessible public information, but then links to Kiwifarms of all places, and goes on to talk about identifying writing patterns and doing "detective work" involving cross-referencing profile pictures of accounts on various websites that were obviously not intentionally linked together by their owner. This is a textbook doxxing attempt.
- ideasphere 9mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45922875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45922875 “Behind the complaints: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today”
- russian_archive 9mo agoWhile many people here on HN seems to be pro archive.today, please remember that it's a website managed by pro-Kremlin people, who, among other things selectively choose which content to erase, and track visitors and archivers in a few sneaky ways (look at the HTTP / DNS requests when you visit / archive pages). One has to wonder why all this tracking from administrator(s) that want to stay anonymous? You can't trust anything hosted on archive.today because you can't trust that the content hasn't been altered in some way in the pursuit of their agenda.
- ventegus 9mo agoHm, a pro-Kremlin website, banned on Russian state firewall while actively used by Myrotvorets and many gov.ua sites....
- self_awareness 9mo agoAnd that's how advertising works, folks. If someone wants a website dead, I want to know more about it.
- aendruk 9mo agoOP frames this like they just stumbled across the blog post but they created an account matching the name discussed within it three months ago? I’m confused.
- 333c 9mo agoSometimes HN admins revive quality posts that didn't get much traction when they were first posted. When this happens, the timestamps are updated to make the post look new. I can't say for sure whether this is what happened here, but it is a possible explanation.
- eddyg 9mo agoThis post did in fact go through the second-chance pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool (For more details on posts getting “rescued”, see Dan’s comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)
- mastermedo 9mo agoWhat my pattern-matching eyes immediately spotted is that the hn username that posted this is rabinovich. The linked article speaks about Masha Rabinovich. Maybe a coincidence. > in a 2012 F-Secure forum post, a “masharabinovich” complains about “my website http://archive.is/” http://archive.is/” being blacklisted. They pop up on Wikipedia as well getting told off for adding too many links to archive.is, including a mention that they’re using the Czech ISP fiber.cz
- gghffguhvc 9mo agoWild idea: Could be a symbolic dead man switch. Reports of FBI going hard after archive.today around the time the HN account was setup and they post an archive.today competitor. Pings on the investigative article then a post to HN saying “3 days ago” which could indicate when FBI succeeded. The only comment by the poster on this article is a sharp clarification of what doxxing is and isn’t. Perhaps this is just an unusual way of slowly stepping out from behind the curtain on your own quirky terms after a fantastically long tenure.
- KawaiiCyborg 9mo ago> They pop up on Wikipedia as well getting told off for adding too many links to archive.is Funnily enough, they removed that from their talk page right around the time this thread got posted, their first edit in almost 6 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Masharabinovich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Masharab... That's a lot of coincidences...
- gyrovague 9mo agoGyrovague here, author of the targeted blog post: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-... In the past week or so, I have received a GDPR takedown attempt of the archive.today blog post (which my hosting provider rightly rejected), a politely worded request to take it down (which was sadly eaten by my spam filter), and now this (thanks to the HN reader who tipped me off). Given that the proverbial cat has been out of the bag for 2.5 years at this point, I'm genuinely puzzled as to what they're hoping to achieve, but this does not seem like a very good way of going about it.
- notmysql_ 9mo agoWhat did the politely worded request say, was it from the creator?
- gyrovague 9mo agoI will not be sharing any discussions publicly until/unless we come to an agreement, but yes, at least it appeared to be.
- g-b-r 9mo agoGreat article, is the attack affecting you in any way? Do you know when it began? And what do you think of the account reporting this being named rabinovich, and having being created months ago?
- opengrass 9mo agoSockpuppet/troll unless you link the HN thread in the blog. rabinovich OP while the article talks about "Masha Rabinovich." I suspect it's all a ruse for the FBI.
- internetter 9mo ago> Sockpuppet/troll unless you link the HN thread in the blog. I've had email correspondence with gyrovague where they've shared this exact sentiment.
- fhub 9mo agoThis feels like the start of treasure hunt like game. Between username of rabinovich (as others have pointed out) and the prior submission by rabinovich of an archive.today like tool 3 months ago - https://ghostarchive.org/ https://ghostarchive.org/. When you click into the search query examples for ghostarchive such as this one https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://docs.google.com https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://docs.google.com. Many of the documents are very weird indeed.
- jijijijij 9mo ago> This feels like the start of treasure hunt like game. Between username of rabinovich (as others have pointed out) and the prior submission by rabinovich of an archive.today like tool 3 months ago - https://ghostarchive.org/ https://ghostarchive.org/. When you click into the search query examples for ghostarchive such as this one https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://docs.google.com https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://docs.google.com. Many of the documents are very weird indeed. This is what someone trying to start a treasure hunt like game would say.... Mom! Am I an NPC? Mom! Am I real???
- s13k 9mo agoDDosing but still archiving: https://archive.is/https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ https://archive.is/https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-...
- g-b-r 9mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628734 makes some good points, it shouldn't have been downvoted do death
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agoIrony: The author of the personal blog post claimed he works for Google, who has arguably the world's most complete web archive and uses it for commercial purposes This archive used to be publicly accessible, at least in part, at webcache.googleusercontent.com^1 The blog post compares the size of archive.today with archive.org (about 1:40, according to the author) But it does not include a comparison to cache.googleusercontent.com 1. Bing, another Google competitor, also offered part of their own archive at cc.bingj.com during that time