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Comment by dydgbxx

6 months ago

Why? It’s accurate and if the owner has chosen to do this for months now, why should we ever trust they won’t again? Nobody should ever use that site and every optional filter should block them.

40 comments

dydgbxx

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winkelmann  6 months ago

There's probably a worthwhile discussion to be had about what it takes for a site in this situation to be removed from blocklists. An apology? Surrender to authorities? Halting the malicious activity for a certain period of time?

Regardless, another user reports the attack is still ongoing[1], so this isn't a discussion that's going to happen about archive.today anytime soon.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474777

  • ryandrake  6 months ago

    I suppose “evidence that the site’s leadership has permanently changed” would convince me. Whoever decided to put in the code that causes visitors to DDOS someone should never be running a web site again.

    • yencabulator  6 months ago

      The person behind archive.today has churned through multiple aliases already, so any such claim would be highly dubious.

      And since the site stores unauthorized copies of content, I don't expect any new leadership would be willing to announce much more than a pseudonym.

  • viktoresku  6 months ago

    That is called Chutzpah.

    HN and WP and the top communities (alongside with Reddit) using AT exclusively for piracy making all the legal troubles.

    Now the pirates require "apology" from a free service they abuse, threatening that they will stop pirating otherwise.

  • jojomodding  6 months ago

    If there was an apology it could be considered, depending on the apology (i.e. is it earnest?). But so far that does not seem to happen.

charcircuit  6 months ago

>Why?

Because once the problematic content is removed it should no longer be blocked.

>It's accurate

It is neither a C&C server for a botnet, nor any other server related to a botnet. I would not call it accurate.

>Nobody should ever use that site

It has a good reputation for archiving sites, has stead the test of time, and doesn't censor pages like archive.org does allowing you to actually see the history of news articles instead of them being deleted like archive.org does on occasion.

  • 3eb7988a1663  6 months ago

    The site started doctoring archived versions as part of the petty feud. That is, what was supposed to be a historical record, suddenly had content manipulated so as to feed into this fight[0]. There is no redemption. You want to be an archive, you keep it sacrosanct. Put an obvious hosting-site banner overlay if you must, but manipulating the archive is a red-line that was crossed.

      ...On 20 February 2026, English Wikipedia banned links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with to insert Patokallio's name.[19] The decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability[19] while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects.[20] The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict.[19][20]

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today

    • boredhedgehog  6 months ago

      That line of argument is rather misleading, as some kind of content manipulation is inherent to the service an archive that violates paywalls has to provide. It needs to conceal the accounts it uses to access these websites, and their names and traces are often on the pages it's archiving.

      Did AT go beyond that and manipulate any relevant part? That's rather difficult to say now. AT is obviously tampering with evidence, but so is Wikipedia; their admins have heavily redacted their archived Talk pages out of fear one of these pseudonyms might be an actual person, so even what exactly WP accuses AT of is not exactly clear.

    • charcircuit  6 months ago

      While I disagree with that action I still trust the site as a reliable source. Redemption is possible. Maybe not for Wikipedia, but I don't care about that site and consider it rotten.

  • InsideOutSanta  6 months ago

    It's not just problematic content, it's criminal behavior. And the site has a bad reputation for archival, given that the owner altered the content of archived articles.

    • charcircuit  6 months ago

      The site commits copyright infringement by showing you content it doesn't have the rights for. This is not the kind of site to go on about morals for.

      >the site has a bad reputation

      Not compared to archive.org. archive.is has a much better track record.

      9 replies →

    • JasonADrury  6 months ago

      >It's not just problematic content, it's criminal behavior.

      How is that supposed to be a big deal when the one of core services archive.today provides is obviously illegal anyway?

      2 replies →

  • gbear605  6 months ago

    It is in fact a botnet - they’ve been hijacking user browsers to act as a botnet to DDoS.

    • charcircuit  6 months ago

      Are Hacker News users part of a botnet since they link to sites that when people click they go down due to all of the traffic? Am I part of a botnet if I have HN open as it means HN can execute javascript? I think it's stretching the definition.

      3 replies →

quotemstr  6 months ago

Because it's not the place of a DNS resolver to police the internet.

  • qzzi  6 months ago

    1.1.1.1 is simply a free DNS, 1.1.1.2 blocks malware, and 1.1.1.3 blocks both malware and adult content. It's a service that does exactly what it's supposed to do.

  • ryandrake  6 months ago

    If I specifically choose a DNS server that promises to not resolve sites that will use my computer in a botnet, then it is that DNS resolver’s place to do that.

  • dqh  6 months ago

    This particular revolver is an opt-in service for users that want Cloudflare to block anything that Cloudflare designates as malware.