Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.

Shoulda have led with that.

But how else to bypass a paywall?

any1 found an alternative?

Would just like to add the ublock was updated to block this ddos attack so, moral qualms aside, you can use the archive without participating in the attack.

I point this out but archive.is has content literally available nowhere else.

I, for one, would not trust archive.today if they stoop down to covert ddosing by their users web browsers. Who knows what else they feel entitled to use you for then.

This is months old and yes there has been fallout, but posting it as if it was new is misleading.

Question about https://archivebox.io/

Does it get around paywalls ?

I do wonder what the motivation of gyrovague to dox the owner of archive.today was?

From Hacker News:

"Gyrovague", the author of the post we're commenting under has for reasons unknown engaged in targeted harassment of the owner of "archive.today". Now the owner of archive.today is attempting a rather lazy DoS attack against gyrovague.com. A rather mild response to gyrovague attempting to bring the archive.today owner physical harm by spreading potentially identifying information about them.

There's really very little to be said about this whole thing besides that Gyrovague should try to be a less awful person in the future.

It is relevant to this discussion to mention that archive.today keeps in the public sphere that which governments and powerful people have scrubbed out of general awareness by applying various forms of pressure. So we should expect them to come under pressure too.

Maybe related, maybe not: Wikipedia's owner came under pressure it seems to muddy the debate around the genocide in Gaza. Archive.today will hold a record of the propaganda warfare in mainstream media and more ephemeral web content like videos/blogs uploaded from within Gaza. So by excluding this particular archive Wikipedia seems to be prioritising media sources that are manipulated by governments and the powerful.

What a shitty website - i cant make it past the «we will track all kinds of shit from you»

This is a privacy forum and you work for Google. That is a case for you being the bad guy.

I tried reading up on this whole thing, and my understanding is that Gyrovague, tired of archive.today bypassing paywalls, decided to dox who the owner of archive.today is. Counterarguments that the info "was already out there" was made, yada yada, and then Gyrovague's blog began getting DDoS'ed and edits on archive.today would replace names with Gyrovague's to make them appear as someone into CSAM.

DDoS'ing is a bit childish, but it's the internet, what weapons besides it do you really have.. Oh right, if you're an archiving site like archive.today is, I guess you could tamper with all your data to make it appear as if the person you're DDoS'ing is a pedophile.. Riiight.
So there's no way of trusting the accuracy of the data on archive.today anymore, it's literally tainted, talk about shooting oneself in the foot, or perhaps more apt: Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Sketchy af

Wikipedia intersected w/u Gyrovague

threadiverse needs a tiny push.

Why are you posting this several-weeks-old piece of news that has already had several fediverse threads made about it to so many communities right now? Why is it so important to you that people think about it again? Has anything important about it happened very recently?

Blah blah woof woof internet drama as usual. The functional question that remains (and that matters) is only one: which archive tool to use next that bypasses paywalls.

this is why i like to disable Javascript if its not necessary using noscript.

Link to a post a while back about archive.is (and other archive.* sites) sending data to Russia. Post discusses this article

It seems that in some cases (piefed) my post only appears as a bump on a previous post, without my additions, so here they are as a comment:

Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal blog. All users encountering archive.today's CAPTCHA page currently load and execute the following Javascript: setInterval(function() { fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s=" + Math.random().toString(36).substring(2, 3 + Math.random() * 8), { referrerPolicy: "no-referrer",…

Far too many netizens still try to ignore this or even come up with reasons why gyrovague is the bad guy here.

Alternative archive pages:

archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archivebox.io (self-hosted)

But how else to bypass a paywall?

I've read relevant articles and clicked old links - they all seem to be history. The only ones that still work just look for the article in various archives - the subject of this post always amongst them. The same applies to this article, but there's still some good tips.

Here is the original article from 2023: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ and what Patakallio has to say about it today:

The post mentions three names/aliases linked to the site, but all of them had been dug up by previous sleuths and the blog post also concludes that they are all most likely aliases, so as far as “doxxing” goes, this wasn’t terribly effective.

Here is a relevant ArsTechnica article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.

archive.today (.ph, .is, .md, .fo, .li, .vn) also loads a pixel and javascript from mail.ru. The script mentions lamoda.ru, kommersant.ru, dzen.ru, ad.mail.ru, vk.com, vkontakte.ru, ok.ru, odnoklasseniki.ru. I haven't researched this further, but I think one can assume that your IP address will be spread across all relevant Russian websites. 10 years ago I would have said "so what? The Russians have social media too" but today you can safely assume that all this data is available to the government itself and is actively contributing to the hybrid war.

All in all, archive.today has always been in the "too good to be true" category. Call me suspicious.

And once again because it's important:

The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.”

I'm a bit of a troglodyte, I had to look up what PII referred to.

Whoever is doing the responding and the petty bullshit with the captcha stuff isn't doing themselves any favors by being a gland end unnecessarily. I'm not really curious as to who is behind the archive website so the blog authors need to unmask them is lost on me admittedly. I do use the paywall bypass site, but given the person's responses I'll try not to use it at all going forward, for however much that actually makes a difference.

The claim that archive.today is orchestrating a DDoS via CAPTCHA execution contradicts its known architecture, which relies on user agents to fetch content rather than actively injecting malicious payloads into client-side scripts. If the CAPTCHA page is indeed executing arbitrary JavaScript, this suggests a severe supply chain compromise or a misunderstanding of how the service's proxy network functions. Can you provide the specific user-agent headers or network traces showing the origin of the traffic to distinguish between a botnet hijack and a false positive?