Link: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

And the award for the biggest non-sequitur in Internet history goes to... This guy!

Now explain why you think that's relevant to the article you commented on.

I don't want to do the sir this is a Wendy's thing, but damn this is screaming for a Sir this is a Wendy's kinda thing.

People with lotsa money tried to make truth disappear....are you all fucking nutz?

“I am so smart, the answer is obvious. So I won’t tell you. If you don’t get it, you’re not as smart as me.”

🙄

In old Aztec lands, it was a crime to pass counterfeit cocoa beans. They used them as a medium of exchange.

Should I stop using archive.ph then? I mostly used it because it's a lot faster than archive.org, which is a bit clunkier to use.

Unpleasant truth

Clicks on a website and absolutely nothing else

It sounds like archive.today is behaving poorly. As far as I know, Wikipedia isn't exactly "big money". If you know different on either front, can you please explain. Otherwise your comments are meaningless.

But like, first you seem to be upset at the concept of money, which is silly on the face of it. Second, which part of money exchanging hands are you implying? The original DDoS attack or the blacklisting? And in either case, how is the exchanging of money the primary aspect of the story?

AFAIK archive.is , .ph and .today are all just different domains for the same site.

There is nothing as hilarious as someone trying to use fancy words but missing pretty basic concepts of the language.

You’re trying to sound smart. It’s making you sound dumber.

Archive.today became non-citable the moment it began altering archived webpages, regardless of anything else.

Humans believe things. We're very symbolic animals.

Money you can fuck? I don't see why not. Not entirely sure how it'll change hands moving forward but it's time to shake things up.

I asked 3 questions. You ignored all 3 and answered with another question also not relevant to the post. You are not to be taken seriously.

From Wikipedia

As of 13:27, 19 February 2026 (UTC), the owners are now batch-replacing certain names in archived pages with the real name of the gyrovague.com webmaster as a form of harassment.

The top piece of evidence (not in any special order) was redacted due to "revealing personal information".

Other subsequent pieces of evidence were retained but names were replaced with abbreviations

I have another evidence of tampering: this is a Megalodon archive of a archive.ph archive of a post. The original post is now dead. Patokallio mentions this post in his blog – he would surely mention if the post mentioned him, in the way the archived version does. He quoted the original [N.P.] was a woman[...], while the archive.ph reads Jani Patokallio was a woman[...]

Another example:

Sometime today, Archive.today replaced the name with the equivalent amount of spaces (only where N...'s name used to be). Ironically, "Jani Patokallio" is of the same length as "N...".

You should try yelling “money” again, that’ll definitely convince people. Of. Well, whatever it is you’re trying to convince us of.

GhostArchive came up in discussions.

jsyk your posts here just hurt the point you're trying to make.

I strongly recommend you delete and revisit these thoughts and restructure them so you're not being told "sir this is a wendies".

Mmmk, better abandon this "money" experiment. Surprised it only lasted thousands of years, but I'm sure human nature will adapt

AT's ddos is because of personal reasons.

Dunno if I would call it "behaving poorly".

The blogger in question doxxed the owner/maintainer of Archive.today who in return doxxed the blogger. To me this sounds more like eye for an eye FAFO.

Money, an invented concept, because the difficulty of trading 2 cows for 500 bushels of grain to a farmer 100 km away induced people to come up with a better system than bartering you mean?

This is seriously some I’m 13 and this is deep bullshit

If it's altering snapshots, it's not a reliable archive. Simple as that.

Well, for accessing paywalled articles .org is no replacement for .ph/.today, sadly. But it's advisable to use it as little as possible, it seems using visitors for DDoS'ing the blog is still going on.

That's inappropriate, childish, and unprofessional. It makes them untrustworthy for citations. There are better ways of handling it.

If altering snapshots for a grudge isn't your definition of "behaving poorly" for a site archiving the state of the Internet, then you must not think they have to be an accurate source of information. If they're not an accurate source of information, then Wikipedia has no obligation to allow them to be used in citations, and they should remove such citations.

Went to a strip club once and the stripper was handing out fake $69 bills with her image on it and a link to her OnlyFans...

Has the accuracy of the snapshots actually changed based on this edit? After all, if it's factual information being presented...

I do agree that it raises the issue of what other modifications there may be, and it IS childish, but so is going after a person who provides a good service and wants to remain anonymous while doing so.

All I'm saying is that while I do not agree with the actions, I also am not saying I don't understand the reasoning behind.

The problem that web.archive.org and ghostarchive.org both have is that they regularly fail to archive content

Has the accuracy of the snapshots actually changed based on this edit? After all, if it's factual information being presented...

Yes! Quite literally, yes. They're supposed to be an archive of what is on other sites. It doesn't matter if the original site was, right, wrong, complete, incomplete, accurate, inaccurate, factual, unfactual, etc. If they change things, they're editorializing and are no longer an archive, they're new content - which is not the purpose people use them for.

I do agree that it raises the issue of what other modifications there may be,

That's literally the point. It doesn't matter how much you "understand the reasoning" (though you also think it's childish and don't agree with the actions). You can use it if you want to, no one is stopping you. The point is Wikipedia can't trust it as a source of archived data and has every right to ban it.

Yep, also owned by archive.today.

As is archive.is, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn.

Km are just a made up unit, the only unit found in nature is football fields.

Understandable. Archive.today is really good at getting website content, but their methods are proprietary and a little dubious.

If you just want to save things locally, I believe Single File is really good. It downloads the page that you see on your browser, as you see it.

Just like murican Jesus intended brother!

This is peak incompetence, I think, but it maybe shows that they see their mission not in preserving credible sources, but in breaking paywalls or something else entirely that is not forfeited by petty revenge edits

This is still my number one fear to hear about any archive, because altering the data when done properly may go undetected and lead people to wrong conclusions

The blogger in question doxxed the owner/maintainer of Archive.today who in return doxxed the blogger.

Did you actually read the two articles posted by the blogger? The archive.today owner wasn't doxxed. No personally identifying information was provided; it only aggregates already-known info including a couple of fake aliases. The most it concludes is that the guy is Russian or operating out of Russia.

https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/

https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/

Also, as the name indicates, it downloads the page as a single file. Obviously, it doesn't help for archiving the page for other people, though.