55 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 63.6 ms ] thread
> an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced.

Oh? Do tell!

I will no longer donate to Wikipedia as long as this is policy.
>In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name.

Oh good. That's definitely a reasonable thing to do or think.

The raw sociopathy of some people. Getting doxxed isn't good, but this response is unhinged.

I don't see the point in doxing anyone, especially those providing a useful service for the average internet user. Just because you can put some info together, it doesn't mean you should.

With this said, I also disagree with turning everyone that uses archive[.]today into a botnet that DDoS sites. Changing the content of archived pages also raises questions about the authenticity of what we're reading.

The site behaves as if it was infected by some malware and the archived pages can't be trusted. I can see why Wikipedia made this decision.

this seems like type of thing that should be on blockchain and decentralized nodes validate authenticity, it could support revisions but not lose originals
(comment deleted)
Anyone has a short summary as to who and why Archive.today acted via DDos? Isn't that something done by malicious actors? Or did others misuse Archive.today?
Why not show both? Wikipedia could display archive links alongside original sources, clearly labeled so readers know which is which. This preserves access when originals disappear while keeping the primary source as the main reference.
At this point Archive.today provides a better service (all things considered) compared to Wikipedia, at least when it comes to current affairs.
Kinda off-topic, but has anyone figured out how archive.today manages to bypass paywalls so reliably? I've seen people claiming that they have a bunch of paid accounts that they use to fetch the pages, which is, of course, ridiculous. I figured that they have found an (automated) way to imitate Googlebot really well.
It's because it's actively maintained, and bypassing the paywalls is its whole selling point, thus, they do have to be good at it.

They bypass the rendering issues by "altering" the webpages. It's not uncommon to archive a page, and see nothing because of the paywalls; but then later on, the same page is silently fixed. They have a Tumblr where you can ask them questions; at one point, it's been quite common for everyone to ask them to fix random specific pages, which they did promptly.

Honestly, you cannot archive a modern page, unless you alter it. Yet they're now being attacked under the pretence of "altering" webpages, but that's never been a secret, and it's technologically impossible to archive without altering.

> If you want to pretend this never happened – delete your old article and post the new one you have promised. And I will not write “an OSINT investigation” on your Nazi grandfather

From hero to a Kremlin troll in five seconds.

So toward the end of last year, the FBI was after archive.today, presumably either for keeping track of things the current administration doesn't want tracked, or maybe for the paywall thing (on behalf of rich donors/IP owners). https://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-is-trying-to-unmask-the-registra...

That effort appears to have gone nowhere, so now suddenly archive.today commits reputational suicide? I don't suppose someone could look deeper into this please?

FYI, archive.today is NOT the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine.
Anecdotally I generally see archive.is/archive.today links floating around "stochastic terrorist" sites and other hate cults.
I noticed last year that some archived pages are getting altered.

Every Reddit archived page used to have a Reddit username in the top right, but then it disappeared. "Fair enough," I thought. "They want to hide their Reddit username now."

The problem is, they did it retroactively too, removing the username from past captures.

You can see on old Reddit captures where the normal archived page has no username, but when you switch the tab to the Screenshot of the archive it is still there. The screenshot is the original capture and the username has now been removed for the normal webpage version.

When I noticed it, it seemed like such a minor change, but with these latest revelations, it doesn't seem so minor anymore.

There is an post describing the possibility of an organised campaign against archive.today [1] https://algustionesa.com/the-takedown-campaign-against-archi...

How does the tech behind archive.today work in detail? Is there any information out there that goes beyond the Google AI search reply or this HN thread [2]?

[1] https://algustionesa.com/the-takedown-campaign-against-archi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816427

A big fear of mine is something happening to archive.is

There is so much is archived there, to lose it all would be a tragedy.

I noticed I've started being redirected to a blank nginx server for archive.is... but only the .is domain, .ph and .today work just fine. I wonder if they ended up on an adblocker or two.
They seem totally unrelated to the Internet Archive. They probably only ever got on Wikipedia by leeching of the IA brand and confusing enough people to use them
> “I’m glad the Wikipedia community has come to a clear consensus, and I hope this inspires the Wikimedia Foundation to look into creating its own archival service,” he told us.

Hardly possible for Wikimedia to provide a service like archive.today given the legal trouble of the latter.

Strangely naive.

I believe there are multiple options with different degree of "half-baked"-ness, but can anyone name the best self-hosted version of this service?

Ultimately, what we all use it for is pretty straight-forward, and it seems like by now we should've arrived at having approximately one best implementation, which could be used both for personal archiving and for iternet-facing instances (perhaps even distributed). But I don't know if we have.