• 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. • In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. • The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases. • “There is consensus to immediately deprecatearchive.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 anupdatetoday 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 (seeWP: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 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages.
Article Summaries:
- Wikipedia has decided to blacklist the archive site Archive.today and is beginning a mass removal of its links from the English‑language edition. The move follows a discovery that Archive.today was used to host a DDoS attack on a blogger and that the site had altered archived pages to insert the target’s name. Editors agreed to deprecate the service, add it to the spam blacklist, and delete or replace its links. Over 695,000 links across roughly 400,000 articles will be removed or redirected to alternative archives such as the Internet Archive or Ghostarchive.
Sources: