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 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 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is facing an investigation in which the FBI is trying to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.
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Guidance published as a result of the decision asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. 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), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.”
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Evidence presented in the Wikipedia discussion showed that Archive.today replaced Nora’s name with Patokallio’s name in the aforementioned blog post. The Archive.today capture has since been reverted to what appears to be the original version. In other cases, Archive.today captures included a “Comment as: Jani Patokallio” string on captures that previously had a “Comment as: Nora [last name redacted]” string.
Even if the snapshot alterations hadn’t helped convince Wikipedia’s volunteer editors to deprecate Archive.today, the Wikimedia Foundation itself might have stepped in. In its comments on the DDoS, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia said on February 10 that it had not ruled out intervening due to “the seriousness of the security concern for people who click the links that appear across many wikis.”
From the article:
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