this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
272 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
82989 readers
3112 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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 don't really see it as a complicated issue. Archive[.]today is now an unreliable source that uses its user traffic to engage in malicious activities. By using it, Wikipedia will become unreliable by proxy.
The best course of action is to distance yourself from it as quickly as possible.
Is it really an "unreliable source", though? The owner of the site is acting maliciously with regards to this DDOS, of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's going to act maliciously about the contents of archive.today itself.
One could make the case that the owner of archive.today was already flagrantly flouting copyright law, and therefore a criminal, and therefore "unreliable" right from the get-go. Let's not leap to conclusions here.
They have shown they are willing to participate in malicious activity by misusing their users' traffic, what's stopping them from carrying out malicious activity by misusing their content?
Even if that seems farfetched, by stepping from copyright infringement to cybercrime activities they painted a much larger target on their backs making it much less certain that they'd still be around next year.
As I said, they already shown they were willing to participate in illegal copyright violation right from the site's inception. Why is one of those things a red line and the other isn't? They're both evidence that the site's controller is willing to flagrantly break laws for their own purposes.
Nothing was ever "stopping them from carrying out malicious activity by misusing their content." Not from day one.