Wikipedia bans Archive.today after site executed DDoS and altered web captures
Source: Hacker News
Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today
The English‑language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial‑of‑service (DDoS) attack against a blog.
During discussions about whether to deprecate Archive.today because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the targeted blogger. The alterations appeared to be motivated by a grudge over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.
“There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it,” stated an update today on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion. “There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”
More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across roughly 400,000 Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is currently the subject of an investigation in which the FBI is trying to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.
“Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability,” said today’s Wikipedia update. “However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today.”
Editors urged to remove links
Guidance published as a result of the decision asks editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site:
archive.todayarchive.isarchive.pharchive.foarchive.liarchive.mdarchive.vn
The guidance states that editors can:
- Remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content.
- Replace the archive link with a different archive service, such as the Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon.
- Change the original source to something that doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a printed source) or where a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.