Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged DDoS attack

Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that they said has been linked to more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia.

Archive.today — which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph — is perhaps most widely used to access content that’s otherwise inaccessible behind paywalls. That also makes it useful as a source for Wikipedia citations.

However, according to the Wikipedia discussion page about this topic, “There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist […] and to forthwith remove all links to it.” (Ars Technica first reported on the decision.)

The discussion page says that Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, only to be removed from the blacklist in 2016.

Why reverse course again? Because, the discussion page says, “Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack.” Plus, “evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in question was allegedly directed at blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio wrote that beginning on January 11, users who loaded the archive’s CAPTCHA page have been unknowingly loading and executing JavaScript that sends a search request to his Gyrovague blog, in an apparent attempt to get Patokallio’s attention and increase his hosting bill.

Back in 2023, Patokallio published a blog post examining Archive.today, whose ownership he described as “an opaque mystery.” And while he wasn’t able to track down a specific owner, he concluded the site was likely “a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.”

More recently, Patokallio said the webmaster at Archive.today asked him to take the post down for two or three months.

“I do not mind the post, but the issue is: journos from mainstream media (Heise, Verge, etc) cherry-pick just a couple of words from your blog, and then construct very different narratives having your post the only citable source; then they cite each other and produce a shitty result to present for a wide audience,” the webmaster said, according to emails shared by Patokallio.

Patokallio said that after he declined to take the post down, the webmaster responded with “an increasingly unhinged series of threats.”

Wikipedia editors also pointed to webpage snapshots in Archive.today that appeared to have been altered to insert Patokallio’s name — hence the concern that it’s become “unreliable” as an archive.

Wikipedia’s guidance now calls for editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites, replacing them with links to the original source or to other archives like the Wayback Machine.

On a blog linked from the Archive.today website, the site’s apparent owner wrote that Archive.today’s value to Wikipedia was “not about paywalls” but rather “the ability to offload copyright issues.” They later wrote that things had turned out “pretty well” and said they would “scale down the ‘DDoS’.”

“Why didn’t you write about such events earlier, folks of the tabloids?” they said. “I don’t expect you to write anything good, because then who would read you, but there was plenty of dramas, wasn’t there? Because there was no Jani to nudge you?”