Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged DDoS attack

In a decisive move, Wikipedia editors have opted to eliminate all links to Archive.today, a popular web archiving service that has been referenced over 695,000 times in the online encyclopedia. Operating under various domain names like archive.is and archive.ph, Archive.today is frequently used to access content behind paywalls, making it a valuable resource for Wikipedia citations. The discussion surrounding this decision highlighted a consensus to blacklist Archive.today due to concerns about its reliability. Wikipedia's editors noted that the site has been involved in practices that could hijack users’ devices to execute distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This was particularly concerning in light of an alleged attack directed at blogger Jani Patokallio, who reported that users loading Archive.today's CAPTCHA page were unknowingly executing JavaScript that sent requests to his blog, potentially to draw attention and inflate his hosting costs. Patokallio, who previously penned a blog post analyzing Archive.today, described the ownership of the site as a “mystery.” While he could not pinpoint a specific owner, he speculated that it was likely run by a talented individual based in Russia. After he refused a request from the site’s webmaster to remove his critical blog post, he faced a series of increasingly aggressive threats. Concerns were also raised about the accuracy of the content on Archive.today, with allegations that archived pages had been altered to include Patokallio’s name. As a result, Wikipedia has instructed its editors to replace links to Archive.today with links to the original sources or to alternative archiving services like the Wayback Machine. In a blog linked to Archive.today, the site's apparent owner claimed that its utility for Wikipedia was not about bypassing paywalls but rather about navigating copyright challenges. They expressed satisfaction with how things had turned out and indicated intentions to reduce DDoS-related activities, while questioning the media's delayed coverage of these events.