Notorious 'Archive Today' website allegedly leads bizarre DDoS campaign against security blogger — Wikipedia considers removing all links to the Archive

The operator of Archive Today has allegedly been running a DDoS (denial of service) campaign against the personal blog of engineer Jani Patokallio for over a month. The site, considered by some a valuable resource for backups of information, is widely cited online, including on Wikipedia. Now, the online encyclopedia is considering removing all links to Archive Today, Ars Technica reports.

Patokallio wrote that since January 11, Archive Today has included a piece of JavaScript that makes a visitor's browser open his blog in the background, triggering a massive denial-of-service attack. Wikipedia, among other sites, contains thousands of links to Archive Today, and as an emergency measure, is considering removing them. The discussion is still ongoing, but it does note that about 15% of links to archived content are irreplaceable.

The situation has escalated to a point where even ad-blocking plugins like uBlock Origin are indirectly blocking the DDoS by removing the malicious code, Patokallio claims. The underlying reason for the attack is allegedly a spat between the Archive's operator and Patokallio, revolving around a blog post from 2023, where the researcher looked into what makes Archive Today tick.

The exposé reads as mostly positive, even suggesting that folks donate to Archive Today, as it provides a valuable service to the online community. Among the post's contents, Patokallio shows relatively slim and unverified findings about the Archive's operator's (or operators') identities and their income sources.

Two years and change later, Heise Online recently reported that the FBI was after information about Archive Today, possibly triggering the chain of events. On January 8, a "Nora Puchreiner" (likely an alias) issued a GDPR complaint against Patokallio's blog, claiming the two-year-old post contained personal information and was defamatory.

Patokallio says he then got an email from Archive Today asking him to take down his blog post, but he claimed it went to his spam folder and he didn't read it until much later. Some exchanges ultimately led to a breakdown in communications, with Patokallio on the receiving end of a fairly unhinged rant with multiple defamation threats.

As further context, although the Wayback Machine is the most widely known internet archive, it has some limitations. It's relatively slow to load archived pages, and doesn't save all the content within, particularly for pages that rely heavily on JavaScript to load elements. Archive Today has grown in popularity over time as an alternative that provides speedy access. It's completely free, on top of that.

The completeness of the Archive is a fruit of it playing by few to no rules: it stores all of the content in a page, even dynamically loaded elements, serves pages fast, and pays no mind to the "robots.txt" file that websites use to curtail automated crawlers. Unlike the Wayback Machine, it seemingly doesn't take requests for deletion of archived content, save for those of legal substance.

The Archive also allegedly uses a botnet to keep evading attempts at blocking its crawler, and reportedly maintains a host of accounts at login- and even paywall-blocked websites to archive the contents therein, arguably operating in a gray area regarding a portion of its content. This might have been what triggered an investigation from the authorities, as major news websites don't take kindly to tools that bypass paywalls.

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