DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder’s identity in 2023. […] A Tumblr blog post apparently written by the Archive.today founder seems to generally confirm the emails’ veracity, but says the original version threatened to create “a patokallio.gay dating app,” not “a gyrovague.gay dating app.”
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Archive-today-Operator-uses-users-for-DDoS-attack-11171455.html:
By having Archive.today unknowingly let users access the Finnish blogger’s URL, their IP addresses are transmitted to him. This could be a point of attack for prosecuting copyright infringements.
As a longtime editor who makes heavy use of archive.today (it’s often much more effective than the Wayback Machine), I’m deeply conflicted about this, and this is disgusting behavior on the part of archive.today; regardless of what a piece of shit the blog owner is, I hope they see prison time for abusing their trust to perpetrate this DDoS.
Right now, the Wikipedia RfC seems pretty split. This is a complicated issue, so I’m going to need to read and think more before I chime in. Just wild.
I would go for something like A - B - A:
- hide the links so the ddos gets migitated, and start replacing the links where possible
- when the malicious code is gone, reinstate the links, deprecate .today, dont stop replacing the links
- when the links in the most commonly requested articles are gone, hide the rest while it waits for replacement.
but i’m no wikipedian, just someone who likes reading talk pages lol
We need an open-source internet archive site that isn’t based in the USA and isn’t run by someone who’ll jeopardize the whole enterprise to attack someone’s blog. Archive.today is a great thing to exist on the Internet and I hope it continues, but we need one that we know isn’t going to host malware or vanish on us.
That said, I don’t appreciate the blogger’s urge to doxx whoever runs the archive. It’s exactly the kind of site where the admins would need security and anonymity so the US Government or another power doesn’t shut them down. If you doxx the owner you could kill the site.
Regarding the USA point, from the article, there are many indications that the site was founded by someone from Russia:
But in October 2025, the FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” We wrote about the subpoena, and our story included a link to Patokallio’s 2023 blog post in a sentence that said, “There are several indications that the [Archive.today] founder is from Russia.”
This is the link to the 2023 blog post: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/
I think the future of wikipedia looks a bit bleak if they drop archive.today now. They need a decent archiver to function. Internet archive is good but its a single group hosted in the US, plus any site with a paywall isn’t surviving on the internet archive very well.
They’ve needed good alternative for awhile and the need is just growing. I wish public libraries could fill the gap but its probably not realistic. We’ve had legal deposit requirements for non-print media in various jurisdictions for awhile but i’m doubtful how effective it is, nor is it convenient to access or use for wikipedia.
To be fair Wayback Machine is not the only option, there are at least 3 other Internet archival services besides archive.today:
- Ghostarchive
- Megalodon
- Etched (warning: cryptobros)
Unfortunately their scrapers are nearly not as developed as Wayback Machine’s and archive.today’s are (Ghostarchive and Megalodon can’t bypass Anubis/Cloudflare check, for example). Ghostarchive is neat when it works because of very high-fidelity captures (even more high-fidelity than archive.today’s captures are), but only something like ~75% of everything I’ve ever archived there works. Oh, and it can also archive short (<10 min) YouTube videos with low/average bitrate.
Megalodon is pretty much useless for Wikipedia because it doesn’t work with, like, half of all online news websites.
I haven’t archived anything on Etched yet, but their premise of “archiving a web page forever on bitcoin” doesn’t seem attractive so I probably won’t use it.
Very True, I have had some good use out of ghostarchive. When it works. There’s also self-hosted options like archivebox. And Several paid solutions like perma.cc. Kiwix/Zim too although that’s focused on wiki’s themselves & offline storage/access so not as useful for sources. But yes I’ve found none get consistantly good archives as much as archive.org or archive.today.
I have not heard of etched, but I do tend to avoid a lot of the crypto stuff.
Its also concerning if any of the archives suddenly going down & the data isn’t backed up. I know the storage requirements alone makes good backups unlikely, but with archive.today looking so volitile I wonder if one’s going to be needed.
Edit: added links & spelling
Honestly this situation is wild. The whole article is a hundred percent worth a read. It’s just… So bizarre. Good luck to you wiki contributers navigating this situation.
what the fuck
I’m so confused
is archive.today dead now?
So archive.today owners got doxxed and they DDoSed the Doxxer as retaliation? Is that what happened?
No, the original blogpost did not dox the .today owner, it just unearthed some other alias and the general idea that the owner might sit in russia.
2 years pass.
Now Tucows (the domain registrar for .today) got a demand from the FBI for all data they have on .today, which caused news pieces where the blog post was linked.
The .today owner wanted the blog post not reachable from those news articles, and sent an email to the blog owner with the request to “take the blog post down for a few months” so that the news articles wouldn’t link there anymore. Sadly, that mail went into the spam folder and the blogger didn’t see it.
Because there was no reaction to his mail, the owner of .today put code into his captcha page, DDoS-ing the blog. The blogger and the .today-owner later did mail with each other, but the .today-owner seems to be a pretty unreasonable and rude person.
Wikipedia is now split: on the one side, .today is the actual best archive site, because it doesn’t care about copyright, censorship and employs advanced scraping techniques, which can bypass a lot of paywalls (which the internet archive does not do). This makes it great for citing sources. On the other side it’s not very trustworthy to insert code in your captcha page that makes your computer part of a DDoS attack.
So now there are 3 options for wikipedia.
- a) remove all archive.today links: this would be very,very disruptive since around 700k links on wikipedia would go dead
- b) phase out archive.today, so that no new links are getting added in the future - that implies looking for an alternative, which could even be the wikimedia foundation itself
- c) do nothing
Hope it helps with the confusion!
It would be pretty incredible if the Wikimedia Foundation started a project to archive the web
To archive the human-made parts of the web at least, which is going to become both increasingly difficult and increasingly important as AI slop sends the signal-to-noise spiralling asymptotically towards zero. I might actually stop mercilessly blocking their donation drives if they attempt that, to be honest.
I think that’d go pretty far beyond Wikimedia’s mandate, but having something whose purpose was specifically archiving just the sources for their articles would be pretty awesome.
It supports the goal of free knowledge, so I think it wouldn’t veer far off its mission
You’re misinterpreting what Wikimedia’s “free knowledge” mandate is about. They have a hard-line requirement that the knowlege they distribute is legally free, for example - it has to be under an open license. archive.today is quite the opposite of that. They don’t just archive any old knowledge willy-nilly, they’ve got standards. And so forth.
Simply running an archive.today clone would not fit. The “source documents only” archive would already be stretching the edges rather far. There’s already Wikisource, for example, and it’s got the “open licenses only” restriction.
This is only tangentially related to the matter at hand, but there seems to be some attack on YouTube with fully LLM-generated channels and videos “covering” this situation: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/dlQhs.
Interesting…
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This is pretty wild indeed.
As an editor, I tried to not use archive.today and so far I’ve succeeded.
I’m tempted to chip in, so far I was an observer.
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