12 ms·

Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links

• chrisjj 8mo ago
  > an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Oh? Do tell!
  • nobody9999 8mo 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)
    • chrisjj 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      • nobody9999 8mo ago
        I just quoted the very next paragraph after the sentence you quoted and asked for clarification. I did so. You're welcome. As for the rest, take it up with Jimmy Wiles, not me.
        • mikehotel 8mo ago
          aka Jimbo Wales
          • nobody9999 8mo ago
            Thanks for the correction. I can't type the letter 'a'[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ewY8CnFae0&t=56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ewY8CnFae0&t=56s
      • Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
        > archive.today Hopeless. Caught tampering the archive. The whole situation is not great.
        • snigsnog 8mo ago
          I'd rather deal with this weird feud than not have access to any archived content that people want censored. Defeats the entire purpose of an archive
        • rockskon 8mo ago
          Did they? I thought the claim was code was added unrelated to the contents of the archived pages that effectuated a DDOS on someone's blog.
  • that_lurker 8mo ago
    I would be suprised if archive.today had something that was not in the wayback machine
    • ribosometronome 8mo ago
      Accounts to bypass paywalls? The audacity to do it?
      • that_lurker 8mo ago
        Oh yeah those where a thing. As a public organization they can't really do that. I personally just don't use websites that paywall important information.
    • bombcar 8mo ago
      Wayback machine removes archives upon request, so there’s definitely stuff they don’t make publicly available (they may still have it).
      • super256 8mo ago
        You don't even need to do requests if you are the owner of the URL. Robot.txt changes are applied in retrospect, which means you can disallow crawls to /abc, request a re-crawl, and all snapshots from the past which match this new rule will be removed.
    • chrisjj 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo ago
  • eviks 8mo ago
    > the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today You're part of the community! Prove him right!
    • chrisjj 8mo ago
      :) But seriously, removal is simple but replacement is not.
• alsetmusic 8mo ago
  I will no longer donate to Wikipedia as long as this is policy.
  • jraph 8mo ago
    Why? The decision seems reasonable at first sight.
    • chrisjj 8mo 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.
      • mook 8mo ago
        Wouldn't it be precisely because archives are important that using something known to modify the contents would be avoided?
        • esseph 8mo ago
          > something known to modify the contents would be avoided? Like Wikipedia?
          • beej71 8mo ago
            No, not like that. There's a difference between a site that: 1) provides a snapshot of another site for archival purposes. 2) provides original content. You're arguing that since encyclopedias change their content, the Library of Congress should be allowed to change the content of the materials in its stacks. By modifying its archives, archive.today just flushed its credibility as an archival site. So what is it now?
            • esseph 8mo ago
              > You're arguing that since encyclopedias change their content, the Library of Congress should be allowed to change the content of the materials in its stacks. As an end user of Wikipedia there are occasions where content has been scrubbed and/or edits hidden. Admins can see some of those, but end users cannot (with various justifications, some excellent/reasonable and some.. nebulous). That's all I'm saying, nothing about Congress or such other nonsense. It seems like an occasion of the pot calling the kettle names from this side of the fence.
• mrguyorama 8mo 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.
  • ouhamouch 8mo 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.
    • Yossarrian22 8mo ago
      Can you elaborate on your point?
      • ouhamouch 8mo ago
        The fight is not about where it is shown and not about what, not about "links in Wikipedia", but about whether News Inc will be able to kill AT, as they did with 12FT.
        • Yossarrian22 8mo ago
          What is News Inc? Are they a funder of Wikipedia(I think Wikipedia didn’t have a parent company so they’re not owners)?
          • ouhamouch 8mo ago
            They are owner of ArsTechnica which wrote 3rd (or 4th?) article on AT in a row painting it in certain colors. The article about FBI subpoena that pulled J.P's speculations out of the closet was also in ArsTechnica and by the same author, and that same article explicitly mentioned how they are happy with 12ft down
• celsoazevedo 8mo 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.
  • jMyles 8mo 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.
  • jsheard 8mo 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.
    • palmotea 8mo 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.
      • johanyc 8mo ago
        What are they for then
        • palmotea 8mo ago
          Bypassing paywalls? It actually seems like they've got accounts at many paywalled sites. Shorter term archiving? Given the unclear ownership situation, it makes sense not to rely on them for anything long term. They could disappear tomorrow.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • input_sh 8mo ago
    I know I'm arguing with a bot that nobody monitors, but it's already in the fucking post.
    • ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
      You're late. Things have changed.
• shevy-java 8mo 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 8mo ago
    If you read the linked article it is discussed
• RupertSalt 8mo ago
  "Non-paywalled" ad-free link to archive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
• basch 8mo ago
  It seems a lot of people havent heard of it, but I think its worth plugging https://perma.cc/ 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perma.cc
  • jsheard 8mo 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.
    • toomuchtodo 8mo ago
      Archive.org is the archiver, rotted links are replaced by Archive.org links with a bot. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InternetArchiveBot https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InternetArchiveBot https://github.com/internetarchive/internetarchivebot https://github.com/internetarchive/internetarchivebot
      • jsheard 8mo ago
        Yeah for historical links it makes sense to fall back on IAs existing archives, but going forward Wikipedia could take their own snapshots of cited pages and substitute them in if/when the original rots. It would be more reliable than hoping IA grabbed it.
        • toomuchtodo 8mo ago
          Not opposed, Wikimedia tech folks are very accessible in my experience, ask them to make a GET or POST to https://web.archive.org/save https://web.archive.org/save whenever a link is added via the Wiki editing mechanism. Easy peasy. Example CLI tools are https://github.com/palewire/savepagenow https://github.com/palewire/savepagenow and https://github.com/akamhy/waybackpy https://github.com/akamhy/waybackpy Shortcut is to consume the Wikimedia changelog firehose and make these http requests yourself, performing a CDX lookup request to see if a recent snapshot was already taken before issuing a capture request (to be polite to the capture worker queue).
• tl2do 8mo 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.
  • bawolff 8mo ago
    The objection is to this specific archieve service not archiving in general.
  • ranger207 8mo 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."
    • Gander5739 8mo ago
      This will always be done unless the original url is marked as dead or similar.
  • AgentME 8mo ago
    Wikipedia shouldn't allow links to sites which intentionally falsify archived pages and use their visitors to perform DDOS attacks.
• paganel 8mo ago
  At this point Archive.today provides a better service (all things considered) compared to Wikipedia, at least when it comes to current affairs.
• xurukefi 8mo 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.
  • tonymet 8mo 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 8mo ago
      .. but what about subscription only, paywalled sources?
      • tonymet 8mo ago
        many publisher's offer "first one's free". For those that don't , I would guess archive.today is using malware to piggyback off of subscriptions.
  • elzbardico 8mo ago
    > which is, of course, ridiculous. Why? in the world of web scrapping this is pretty common.
    • xurukefi 8mo 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.
• anilakar 8mo 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 8mo 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-registrar-behind-archive-today-2000682868 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?
  • ndiddy 8mo ago
    The archive.today operator claims on his blog that this was nothing major: https://lj.rossia.org/users/archive_today/ 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 8mo ago
  FYI, archive.today is NOT the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • super256 8mo 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 8mo ago
      This information is now many years out of date - they no longer have this policy.
      • snigsnog 8mo ago
        Even so you can still just request your site to be removed: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-something-from-archive-org/ https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som...
      • extraduder_ire 8mo ago
        Any idea when that changed? I've been unable to access historical sites in the past because someone parked the domain and had a very restrictive robots.txt on it.
• casey2 8mo ago
  Anecdotally I generally see archive.is/archive.today links floating around "stochastic terrorist" sites and other hate cults.
  • snigsnog 8mo ago
    Shows that it's a great archival service if the most censored people are able to use it without their archives being censored.
  • oytis 8mo ago
    I see them everywhere where paywalled content is referenced
• ChocMontePy 8mo 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.
  • palmotea 8mo 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 8mo ago
      Editing what is billed as an archive defeats the purpose of an "archive".
      • palmotea 8mo ago
        > Editing what is billed as an archive defeats the purpose of an "archive". No, certain edits are understandable and required. Even the archive.org edits its pages (e.g. sticks banners on them and does a bunch of stuff to make them work like you'd expect). Even paper archives edit documents (e.g. writing sequence numbers on them, so the ordering doesn't get lost). Disclosing exactly what account was used to download a particular page is arguably irrelevant information, and may even compromise the work of archiving pages (e.g. if it just opens the account to getting blocked).
      • 8mo ago
• ValveFan6969 8mo ago
  [dead]
• wuschel 8mo ago
  There is an post describing the possibility of an organised campaign against archive.today [1] https://algustionesa.com/the-takedown-campaign-against-archive-today/ 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-archive-today/ https://algustionesa.com/the-takedown-campaign-against-archi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816427
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
  • iamnothere 8mo 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.
    • idiotsecant 8mo ago
      [flagged]
  • leonidasv 8mo ago
    If they're under an organised defamation campaign, they're not helping themselves by DDoSing someone else's blog and editing archived pages.
    • ouhamouch 8mo ago
      it gives them a voice.
      • 8mo ago
• karel-3d 8mo 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-and-gentlemen-in-the-autumn-of-2025-i https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/806832066465497088/ladies... https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/807584470961111040/it-seems-people-dont-read-between-the-lines-they https://archive-is.tumblr.com/post/807584470961111040/it-see...
  • dmix 8mo ago
    He’s probably being purposefully vague which makes for difficult reading.
  • ricardobeat 8mo ago
    The word salad with ukraine, arms trade, nazis, hunter biden, leave no doubt the operator is from Russia.
    • karel-3d 8mo 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
• attila-lendvai 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Permit 8mo ago
    > i don't know anything specific about the site or any conflicts involved, yet this smells like a negative PR campaign to me... What possible value could a comment from someone who has no knowledge of the site or conflict add to this discussion?
    • attila-lendvai 8mo ago
      the sniff test, or gut reaction... sure, it's worth only as much as of a total stranger, but still.
• nubinetwork 8mo 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 8mo 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.
    • nubinetwork 8mo ago
      Oh maybe... I don't use cloudflare DNS, but maybe one of my rpz zones does something weird...
• TZubiri 8mo 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 8mo 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.
    • krick 8mo 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 8mo 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.
• krick 8mo 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.
  • robotnikman 8mo ago
    I'm wondering the same thing, would be great to have something similar for personal use
• tetris11 8mo ago
  Archive.today's domain registrar is Tucows for anyone wondering
  • ValentineC 8mo ago
    Just curious: is this of any significance?
• tonymet 8mo 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_guidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
  • cnst 8mo 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.
    • tonymet 8mo 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.
      • tonymet 8mo ago
        Are there people who just downvote every comment? How is this a bad suggestion? If people want change on WP, they should contribute to the discussion there.
    • tonymet 8mo ago
      this was referenced as the evidence for archive.today modifying content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5#Evidence_of_altering_snapshots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20260220191245if_/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/ 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 8mo ago
    I use archive.today all the time. How do you access pages, like for instance on the economist, without it?
    • mhitza 8mo 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.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • ouhamouch 8mo ago
      for instance on the economist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060487
    • 201984 8mo ago
      With the paywall blocker so good it got banned! You can also get it on Android. https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
• andai 8mo 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 :)
  • bawolff 8mo 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 8mo ago
      Imagine a proof-of-space cryptocurrency that encouraged archiving long-tail data.
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      • pwdisswordfishy 8mo ago
        /dev/random as a free money printer? Sign me up.
    • andai 8mo ago
      I think if you take this idea far enough you end up reinventing taxes from first principles.
  • PhilipRoman 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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/status/1771339650176553315 https://archive.today/20240714173022/https://x.com/archiveis... [2] https://x.com/advancedhosters https://x.com/advancedhosters [3] https://x.com/advancedhosters/status/1731129170091004412 https://x.com/advancedhosters/status/1731129170091004412 [4] https://lj.rossia.org/users/mopaiv/257.html https://lj.rossia.org/users/mopaiv/257.html [5] https://x.com/advancedhosters/status/1501971277099286539 https://x.com/advancedhosters/status/1501971277099286539
  • snigsnog 8mo ago
    Lead to what?
    • Kiboneu 8mo ago
      That’s what OP wants to find out.
      • snigsnog 8mo ago
        No, what information is he hoping to find? Does he also want to doxx the website owner?
  • jeroenhd 8mo 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 8mo 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/ https://archivebox.io/ 2: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/discussions/1395 https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/discussions/1395
  • quinncom 8mo ago
    I like Readeck – https://codeberg.org/readeck/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 8mo ago
    Omnom comes to mind: * https://omnom.zone/ https://omnom.zone/ * https://github.com/asciimoo/omnom https://github.com/asciimoo/omnom
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• dakolli 8mo 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 8mo 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?
  • Gander5739 8mo ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ARequests_for_comment%2FArchive.is_RFC_5#Evidence_of_altering_snapshots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ARequests_for_comme...
  • cnst 8mo 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-117 8mo 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 https://archive.is:443/gFD6Z
• alfiedotwtf 8mo 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
• seanhly 8mo 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 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-news-site-threatens 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.
  • ouhamouch 8mo ago
    [dead]
• rawling 8mo 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.
  • justincormack 8mo 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 8mo 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://eprint.iacr.org/2024/447.pdf https://tlsnotary.org 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.
  • arboles 8mo 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 8mo ago
• ValveFan6969 8mo ago
  [dead]
• anovikov 8mo ago
  It doesn't work properly anyway anymore...
• Keekgette 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• _el1s7 8mo 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 8mo 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】