Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links

archive.org also complies with takedown requests, so it's worth asking: could the organised campaign against archive.today have something to do with it preserving content that someone wants removed?

owner-archive-today . blogspot . com

2 years old, like J.P's first post on AT

It's very silly to talk about doxing when all someone has done is gather information anyone else can equally easily obtain, just given enough patience and time, especially when it's information the person in question put out there themselves. If it doesn't take any special skills or connections to obtain the information, but only the inclination to actually perform the research on publicly available data, I don't see what has been done that is unethical.

So it doesn't necessarily raise questions about whether the content has been changed or not. The difference is in whether that change is there to make the archive usable - and of course, for archive.today, that's not the case.

This is absolutely the buried lede of this whole saga, and needs to be the focus of conversation in the coming age.

I don't think the DDOSing is a very good method for fighting back but I can't blame anyone for trying to survive. They are definitely the victim here.

If that blog really doxxed them out of idle curiosity they are an absolute piece of shit. Though I think this is more of a targeted campaign.

If archive.whatever wasn't so useful to the general public, it'd be hard to distinguish from a criminal operation given the way it operates, unlike say the Internet Archive who goes through all of the proper legal paperwork to be a real nonprofit.

That doesn't seem nefarious, though. It makes sense they wouldn't want to reveal whatever accounts they use to bypass blocks, and the logged-in account isn't really meaningful content to an archive consumer.

Now, if they were changing the content of a reddit post or comment, that would be an entirely different matter.

https://www.in.gov/nircc/planning/highway/traffic-data/inter...

and reddit blocks their agent seemingly. It is open source though.

Open source. Self hosted or managed. Native iOS and Android apps.

Its Content Scripts feature allows custom JS scripts that transform saved content, which could be used to do URL rewriting.

* https://omnom.zone/

* https://github.com/asciimoo/omnom

"promoted" as used here means placing an archive.tld URL at the top of an HN thread so that many HN readers will follow it, or placing these URLs elsewhere in threads

It's not promoted, it's just used as a paywall bypass so everyone can read the linked article.

If a site (or the WAF in front of it) knows what it's doing then you'll never be able to pass as Googlebot, period, because the canonical verification method is a DNS lookup dance which can only succeed if the request came from one of Googlebots dedicated IP addresses. Bingbot is the same.

The curious part is that they allow web scraping arbitrary pages on demand. So if a publisher could put in a lot of arbitrary requests to archive their own pages and see them all coming from a single account or small subset of accounts.

I hope they haven't been stealing cookies from actual users through a botnet or something.

Why? in the world of web scrapping this is pretty common.

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.

They're basically recommending changing verifiable references that can easily be cross-checked and verified, to "printed on paper" sources that could likely never be verified by any other Wikipedian, and can easily be used to provide a falsification and bias that could go unnoticed for extended periods of time.

Honestly, that's all you need to know about Wikipedia.

The "altered" allegation is also disingenuous. The reason archive.org never works, is precisely because it doesn't alter the pages enough. There's no evidence that archive.today has altered any actual main content they've archived; altering the hidden fields, usernames and paywalls, as well as random presentation elements to make the page look properly, doesn't really count as "altered" in my book, yet that's precisely what the allegation amounts to.

BTW, they also alter paywalls and other elements, because otherwise, many websites won't show the main content these days.

It kind of seems like "altered" is the new "hacker" today?

Not sure why it would only be on archive.is and not the others but ‘is’ loads for me.

> Regarding the FBI’s request, my understanding is that they were seeking some form of offline action from us — anything from a witness statement (“Yes, this page was saved at such-and-such a time, and no one has accessed or modified it since”) to operational work involving a specific group of users. These users are not necessarily associates of Epstein; among our users who are particularly wary of the FBI, there are also less frequently mentioned groups, such as environmental activists or right-to-repair advocates.

> Since no one was physically present in the United States at that time, however, the matter did not progress further.

> You already know who turned this request into a full-blown panic about “the FBI accusing the archive and preparing to confiscate everything.”

Not sure who he's talking about there.

>Oh? Do tell!

They do. In the very next paragraph in fact:

   The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original 
   source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so 
   it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, 
   Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that 
   doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper)

You're part of the community! Prove him right!

Unfortunately this happens more often than one would expect.

I found this out when I preserved my very first homepage I made as a child on a free hosting service. I archived it on archive.org, and thought it would stay there forever. Then, in 2017 the free host changed the robots.txt, closed all services, and my treasured memory was forever gone from the internet. ;(

We live at a moment where it's trivially easy to frame possession of an unsavory (or even illegal) number on another person's storage media, without that person even realizing (and possibly, with some WebRTC craftiness and social engineering, even get them to pass on the taboo payload to others).

In response to J.P's blog already framed AT as project grown from a carding forum + pushed his speculations onto ArsTechnica, whose parent company just destroyed 12ft and is on to a new victim. The story is full of untold conflicts of interests covered with soap opera around DDoS.