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.
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.
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.
I mean, probably not. Maybe if they posted a public apology (an actual one, not a 'I'm sorry I was caught' one), listed the steps that they would take to ensure it doesn't happen again and how the fact that they weren't doing it could be publicly verified.
They've shown they're willing to deliberately weaponize their users to fight a personal dispute with someone, and didn't take corrective action when called out. Trustworthiness is something you lose and don't get back.
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.
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]
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.
If archive.today was known to be run by God himself, I would still describe what he is doing as a DDoS and breaching the trust of its users by abusing their browser and bandwidth to conduct his battles.
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.
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.
The operator of archive.today (presumably one, at most a handful of people) can edit archived pages on archive.today
Literally anyone can edit archived pages on archive.org.
There are literally at least hundreds of thousands of tampered archives on archive.org. How is that not worse than the couple of tampered archives on archive.today?
Do you actually mean edit or do you just mean delete
Both are problematic, but falsifying a historic record is orders of magnitude worse than deleting one, and conflating them would be extremely dishonest
I'm not sure how illegal copyright violations really are, given that all major tech companies are doing it. DDoS attacks, on the other hand, are pretty clear-cut.
I also think "but they also do that other crime" doesn't help their case.
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.
Hacker News absolutely would be if it was making those requests to random sites that the user doesn’t know about, and have no reason to be making requests to other than attacking them.
I suppose if all the users go on the site intentionally wanting to take part in a DDoS, then sure it’s not a botnet. But that’s not reality.
If you don't think this is a DDoS with archive.today visitors acting as an unwitting/unwilling botnet, how do you think this normally works? It's not any more sophisticated. There is not much functional difference between someone telling my smart fridge to ping https://gyrovague.com and a website telling my browser to do it.
I don't think it's a botnet. To me that implies that the software that runs on your computer is a service that talks to a C&C server or to other bots P2P, forming the net(work) part of a botnet. In this case it is not a bot downloading a payload from a C&C, but a user intentionally visiting a website which downloads and runs the payload. It does not really work as a botnet since the web browser is not a service that will continually talk with a network of other servers to get a new payload.
Try ignoring what the payload is as it does not really matter in defining what is or isn't a botnet (though botnets typically imply malicious or sketchy payloads).
In regards to it being a DDoS it leans more in the yes direction due to the intent of it, but it also sites sending traffic to other sites is part of the web. You can embed things from other sites like images and then those others sites will fulfill those requests. The web didn't restrict pages to only send requests and load content from the same domain.
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.
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.
