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Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?

140 points by rabinovich ↗ HN
archive.today has recently (I noticed this, like, 3 days ago) started automatically making requests to someone's personal blog on their CAPTCHA page. Here's a screenshot of what I'm talking about: https://files.catbox.moe/20jsle.png

The relevant JS is:

   setInterval(function() {
     fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s=" + Math.round(new Date().getTime() % 10000000), {
       referrerPolicy: "no-referrer",
       mode: "no-cors"
     });
   }, 300);
Looking at this blog, there seems to be exactly one article mentioning archive.today - "archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet" (https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...), where the person running the blog digs up some information about archive's owner.

So perhaps this is some kind of revenge/DOS attack attempt/deliberately wasting their bandwidth in response to this article? Maybe an attempt to silence them and force to delete their article? But if it is, then I have so many questions. Like, why would the owner of the archive do that 2.5 years after the article was published? Or why would they even do that in the first place, do they not know about Streisand effect?

I'm confused.

27 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 57.8 ms ] thread
ventegus
They might need to tweak a single word. Streisand readers won’t have a clue which.

Save the page now and compare a week later.

dunder_cat
Hmm. If it is an attempt at DDoS attacks, it's probably not very fruitful:

  >$ resolvectl query gyrovague.com

  gyrovague.com: 192.0.78.25                     -- link: eno1
                 192.0.78.24                     -- link: eno1
Viewing the first IP address on https://bgp.he.net/ip/192.0.78.25 shows AS2635 (https://bgp.he.net/AS2635) is announcing 192.0.78.0/24. AS2635 is owned by https://automattic.com aka wordpress.com. I assume that for a managed environment at their scale, this is just another Wednesday for them.
mediumdeviation
Pretty sure that blog is hosted on Wordpress.com infrastructure so it's not like the blog owner would even notice unless it generates so much traffic that WP itself notices.

That said I don't think there's many non-malicious explanation for this, I would suggest writing to HN and see about blocking submissions from the domain hn@ycombinator.com

sbdaman
Given it's set to generate random pages on the site, is there even any possible explanation for this that isn't sketchy?
nativeit
I just tried in my browser (Firefox on Ubuntu) and got the same result. Deeply curious.
rafram
Remember when Archive.is/today used to send Cloudflare DNS users into an endless captcha loop because the creator had some kind of philosophical disagreement with Cloudflare? Not the first time they’ve done something petty like this.
internetter
There's really no interpretation of this which isn't malicious, although, not to defend this behaviour whatsoever, I'm not entirely surprised by it. The only real value of archive.is is its paywall bypassing abilities and, presumably, large swaths of residential proxies that allow it to archive sites that archive.org can't. Only somebody with some degree of lawlessness would operate such a project.
ycombinator_acc
What's the alternative? At least they don't comply with takedown requests, which can't be said about archive.org who remove everything even semi-controversial.
Barbing
Worth blocking the URL for users of that Archive site then, avoid extra burden?
aendruk
How would you determine who is a user of the archive site?
eli
Well that is a very silly way to punish the author of an article you don’t want people to know about.
blorg
I never would have read the article had archive.today not gone into a CAPTCHA loop on me and then I see in developer tools it's pinging this other site. Talk about Streisand effect.
internetter
I think Streisand effect is the goal. Look at the username of TFA poster and the name of the person the article author suspects.
russian_archive
While many people here on HN seems to be pro archive.today, please remember that it's a website managed by pro-Kremlin people, who, among other things selectively choose which content to erase, and track visitors and archivers in a few sneaky ways (look at the HTTP / DNS requests when you visit / archive pages).

One has to wonder why all this tracking from administrator(s) that want to stay anonymous?

You can't trust anything hosted on archive.today because you can't trust that the content hasn't been altered in some way in the pursuit of their agenda.

ventegus
Hm, a pro-Kremlin website, banned on Russian state firewall while actively used by Myrotvorets and many gov.ua sites....
self_awareness
And that's how advertising works, folks. If someone wants a website dead, I want to know more about it.
aendruk
OP frames this like they just stumbled across the blog post but they created an account matching the name discussed within it three months ago?

I’m confused.

mastermedo
What my pattern-matching eyes immediately spotted is that the hn username that posted this is rabinovich. The linked article speaks about Masha Rabinovich. Maybe a coincidence.

> in a 2012 F-Secure forum post, a “masharabinovich” complains about “my website http://archive.is/” being blacklisted. They pop up on Wikipedia as well getting told off for adding too many links to archive.is, including a mention that they’re using the Czech ISP fiber.cz

gyrovague
Gyrovague here, author of the targeted blog post:

https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...

In the past week or so, I have received a GDPR takedown attempt of the archive.today blog post (which my hosting provider rightly rejected), a politely worded request to take it down (which was sadly eaten by my spam filter), and now this (thanks to the HN reader who tipped me off).

Given that the proverbial cat has been out of the bag for 2.5 years at this point, I'm genuinely puzzled as to what they're hoping to achieve, but this does not seem like a very good way of going about it.

fhub
This feels like the start of treasure hunt like game. Between username of rabinovich (as others have pointed out) and the prior submission by rabinovich of an archive.today like tool 3 months ago - https://ghostarchive.org/. When you click into the search query examples for ghostarchive such as this one https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://docs.google.com. Many of the documents are very weird indeed.
jijijijij
> This feels like the start of treasure hunt like game. Between username of rabinovich (as others have pointed out) and the prior submission by rabinovich of an archive.today like tool 3 months ago - https://ghostarchive.org/. When you click into the search query examples for ghostarchive such as this one https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://docs.google.com. Many of the documents are very weird indeed.

This is what someone trying to start a treasure hunt like game would say....

Mom! Am I an NPC? Mom! Am I real???

1vuio0pswjnm7
Irony:

The author of the personal blog post claimed he works for Google, who has arguably the world's most complete web archive and uses it for commercial purposes

This archive used to be publicly accessible, at least in part, at webcache.googleusercontent.com^1

The blog post compares the size of archive.today with archive.org (about 1:40, according to the author)

But it does not include a comparison to cache.googleusercontent.com

1. Bing, another Google competitor, also offered part of their own archive at cc.bingj.com during that time