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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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[–] 4 points 9 months ago (12 children)

Is it really an "unreliable source", though? The owner of the site is acting maliciously with regards to this DDOS, of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's going to act maliciously about the contents of archive.today itself.

One could make the case that the owner of archive.today was already flagrantly flouting copyright law, and therefore a criminal, and therefore "unreliable" right from the get-go. Let's not leap to conclusions here.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (9 children)

    Using visiting clients for attacking makes the site malicious, and it's because the owner decided it should be, not because it was hacked or got served "spicy" ads or something.

    Since this jarhead has no qualm in weaponizing his site, dragging every visitor into this, and threatening the owner of a small blog with creating a whole category of AI porn just for a blog post from 2 years ago: what if he decides he could use visiting clients for other uses, like crypto mining? If my wiki had 700k links pointing there, i'd think hard about my choices, and would want to reduce my dependency on such a source.

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

    Sure, I'm not saying this isn't "malicious."

    I'm questioning why this particular instance of lawbreaking makes his site an "unreliable source", whereas all the copyright violation he's been up to all along didn't? And now you're bringing in speculative instances of future lawbreaking that also seem unrelated, what does crypto mining have to do with the reliability of the sources archived there?

    My point here is that people are jumping from "he did something bad that I don't like!" to "therefore everything he does is bad and wrong!" Without a clear logical connection between those things. Sure, the DDOS thing is a good reason to try to avoid sending traffic to his site. But that has nothing to do with the reliability of the information stored there.

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

    To be fair, your argument has been made by others on the RfC too, comparing the situation with Wikipedia linking to Anna's Archive.

    Truth is, when being honest, Wikipedia should never have started linking there. It probably started out of noble intentions: making sure sources stay available for everyone.

    Now a new factor has come into play - that the site is being weaponized. The admin there has surely the ability to modify whatever he wants, create fake articles, change the wording of others and so on, and has now proven - without a single doubt - that he is not trustworthy.

    This means that the reliability of all hosted information has to be questioned as well. And here we are.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Wikipedia should have never linked there? There are legitimate reasons it has been used over archive.org presented in this very thread and multiple link archivers is definitely a good thing so I disagree that it should never have been linked to.

    For the second point you can make the opposite claim using the same evidence: the admin has almost certainly had the ability to edit pages that have been archived to their site but does not appear to have done so, making them trustworthy. The fact that they are using it as a botnet does not mean that the information is incorrect and certainly not without a single doubt.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    First: It's pirated content. I do not have an issue with playing fast and loose with copyright, but Wikipedia shouldn't have started linking there, because pirated content of this volume has the side effect of involving authorities pretty fast. Wikipedia has enemies, they are rich and ressourceful, and this is an attack surface they shouldn't have.

    Second: People do not tend to trust others who behave erratically, and when trust is eroded it's not so easy to fix it again. In reality it's this way: nobody knows if the content there has been modified, and trust was the only thing holding all this together.

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

    Haven't seen anything to indicate that Masha Rabinovich / Denis Petrov / [whoever runs the site] is a jarhead. Where's that coming from?

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago* (4 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Still not sure I follow but I'll look again.

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  • [+] 1 point 9 months ago (3 children)
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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)
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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    They have shown they are willing to participate in malicious activity by misusing their users' traffic, what's stopping them from carrying out malicious activity by misusing their content?

    Even if that seems farfetched, by stepping from copyright infringement to cybercrime activities they painted a much larger target on their backs making it much less certain that they'd still be around next year.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    As I said, they already shown they were willing to participate in illegal copyright violation right from the site's inception. Why is one of those things a red line and the other isn't? They're both evidence that the site's controller is willing to flagrantly break laws for their own purposes.

    Nothing was ever "stopping them from carrying out malicious activity by misusing their content." Not from day one.

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