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Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site (arstechnica.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder's identity in 2023. [...] A Tumblr blog post apparently written by the Archive.today founder seems to generally confirm the emails’ veracity, but says the original version threatened to create “a patokallio.gay dating app,” not “a gyrovague.gay dating app.”

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Archive-today-Operator-uses-users-for-DDoS-attack-11171455.html:

By having Archive.today unknowingly let users access the Finnish blogger's URL, their IP addresses are transmitted to him. This could be a point of attack for prosecuting copyright infringements.

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[–] 17 points 9 months ago (8 children)

what the fuck

I'm so confused

is archive.today dead now?

So archive.today owners got doxxed and they DDoSed the Doxxer as retaliation? Is that what happened?

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  • [–] 47 points 9 months ago* (7 children)

    No, the original blogpost did not dox the .today owner, it just unearthed some other alias and the general idea that the owner might sit in russia.

    2 years pass.

    Now Tucows (the domain registrar for .today) got a demand from the FBI for all data they have on .today, which caused news pieces where the blog post was linked.

    The .today owner wanted the blog post not reachable from those news articles, and sent an email to the blog owner with the request to "take the blog post down for a few months" so that the news articles wouldn't link there anymore. Sadly, that mail went into the spam folder and the blogger didn't see it.

    Because there was no reaction to his mail, the owner of .today put code into his captcha page, DDoS-ing the blog. The blogger and the .today-owner later did mail with each other, but the .today-owner seems to be a pretty unreasonable and rude person.

    Wikipedia is now split: on the one side, .today is the actual best archive site, because it doesn't care about copyright, censorship and employs advanced scraping techniques, which can bypass a lot of paywalls (which the internet archive does not do). This makes it great for citing sources. On the other side it's not very trustworthy to insert code in your captcha page that makes your computer part of a DDoS attack.

    So now there are 3 options for wikipedia.

    • a) remove all archive.today links: this would be very,very disruptive since around 700k links on wikipedia would go dead
    • b) phase out archive.today, so that no new links are getting added in the future - that implies looking for an alternative, which could even be the wikimedia foundation itself
    • c) do nothing

    Hope it helps with the confusion!

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  • [–] 20 points 9 months ago* (6 children)

    It would be pretty incredible if the Wikimedia Foundation started a project to archive the web

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    I think that'd go pretty far beyond Wikimedia's mandate, but having something whose purpose was specifically archiving just the sources for their articles would be pretty awesome.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago* (3 children)

    It supports the goal of free knowledge, so I think it wouldn't veer far off its mission

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    You're misinterpreting what Wikimedia's "free knowledge" mandate is about. They have a hard-line requirement that the knowlege they distribute is legally free, for example - it has to be under an open license. archive.today is quite the opposite of that. They don't just archive any old knowledge willy-nilly, they've got standards. And so forth.

    Simply running an archive.today clone would not fit. The "source documents only" archive would already be stretching the edges rather far. There's already Wikisource, for example, and it's got the "open licenses only" restriction.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 months ago

    Archived pages wouldn't necessarily be the knowledge they distribute, just ways to verify the knowledge they distribute is correct. Content from The Wikipedia Library (which provides access to academia) isn't relicensed at all, for example. Such a service would be a project but not a sister project like Wikisource is,

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Wikimedia is an American organisation. In an America where legality is thrown out the window regularly, where foundational laws (e.g. murder, the constitution, etc) clearly no longer matter for the ruling party and vast swathes of people that follow them, what is legally free now?

    I understand your point, I just think this is something to ponder. Is the free knowledge part more, or less, important than the legal part of their goal? Does the legal part truly matter any more?

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    To archive the human-made parts of the web at least, which is going to become both increasingly difficult and increasingly important as AI slop sends the signal-to-noise spiralling asymptotically towards zero. I might actually stop mercilessly blocking their donation drives if they attempt that, to be honest.

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