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.

“There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it,” stated an update today on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion. “There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site is commonly used to bypass news paywalls, and the FBI has sought information on the site operator’s identity with a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows.

“Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability,” said today’s Wikipedia update. “However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today.”

Editors urged to remove links

Guidance published as a result of the decision asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.”

The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.” The Internet Archive is a nonprofit based in the US.

As we previously reported, malicious code in Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page was used to direct a DDoS against the Gyrovague blog written by a man named Jani Patokallio. The Archive.today maintainer demanded that Patokallio take down a 2023 blog post that discussed the archive site founder’s possible identity. Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia.

When we last wrote about this topic, the Archive.today maintainer told Ars Technica that it would not provide any comment on the Wikipedia discussion unless we removed references to Patokallio’s blog, which we did not do.

Archive.today maintainer sent threats

Patokallio told Ars today that he is pleased by the Wikipedia community’s decision. “I’m glad the Wikipedia community has come to a clear consensus, and I hope this inspires the Wikimedia Foundation to look into creating its own archival service,” he told us.

In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name. These threats were discussed by Wikipedia editors in their deliberations over whether to blacklist Archive.today, and then editors noticed that Patokallio’s name had been inserted into some Archive.today captures of webpages.

“Honestly, I’m kind of in shock,” one editor wrote. “Just to make sure I’m understanding the implications of this: we have good reason to believe that the archive.today operator has tampered with the content of their archives, in a manner that suggests they were trying to further their position against the person they are in dispute with???”

“If this is true it essentially forces our hand, archive.today would have to go,” another editor replied. “The argument for allowing it has been verifiability, but that of course rests upon the fact the archives are accurate, and the counter to people saying the website cannot be trusted for that has been that there is no record of archived websites themselves being tampered with. If that is no longer the case then the stated reason for the website being reliable for accurate snapshots of sources would no longer be valid.”

Blog capture tampered with

One example discussed by Wikipedia editors involved Jani Patokallio’s name being inserted into an Archive.today capture of a blog post that was mentioned by Patokallio in his February 2026 write-up of the DDoS incident. This blog is related to the “Nora” alias used by the Archive.today maintainer, which now appears to be the name of an actual person.

“It appears increasingly likely that the identity of ‘Nora’ has been appropriated from an actual person, whose only connection to archive.today was a request to take down some content,” Patokallio wrote in an update to his blog today. “As a courtesy, I have redacted their last name from this post.”

Evidence presented in the Wikipedia discussion showed that Archive.today replaced Nora’s name with Patokallio’s name in the aforementioned blog post. The Archive.today capture has since been reverted to what appears to be the original version. In other cases, Archive.today captures included a “Comment as: Jani Patokallio” string on captures that previously had a “Comment as: Nora [last name redacted]” string.

Even if the snapshot alterations hadn’t helped convince Wikipedia’s volunteer editors to deprecate Archive.today, the Wikimedia Foundation itself might have stepped in. In its comments on the DDoS, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia said on February 10 that it had not ruled out intervening due to “the seriousness of the security concern for people who click the links that appear across many wikis.”

https://archive.ph/6tjt3

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29802

Google handed a British graduate student’s bank and credit card information over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after he was targeted by the agency for attending a pro-Palestine protest for just five minutes. 

The tech giant fulfilled a subpoena request from ICE for “a wide array of personal data” on Amandla Thomas-Johnson, an activist and journalist who was studying in the US at Cornell University, The Intercept reported.   

Thomas-Johnson went into hiding in the college town of Ithaca, upstate New York, in spring last year as Donald Trump’s administration began rounding up foreign students who opposed Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

He had briefly attended a 2024 protest against companies supplying weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair, which got him banned from campus. 

As well as financial information, the data requested by ICE included usernames, addresses, a list of any IP masking services, telephone numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers. 

Thomas-Johnson had no opportunity to challenge the subpoena. 

He believes ICE was planning to monitor and then detain him, but by the time of the subpoena he had already fled to Switzerland. 

“We need to think very hard about what resistance looks like under these conditions,” he told The Intercept, “where government and big tech know so much about us, can track us, can imprison, can destroy us in a variety of ways.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment from the outlet. 

From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.

Trying to get away from my phone more, and an e reader sounds like a good way to get myself to read more. Kobo is sounding like the most recommended one based on some googling, but I’m also ok with jailbreaking something like an older kindle from eBay. Something that plays nice with Libby would be ideal but not required.

I found a few helpful git tips and tricks at work the other day, so I figured I might share them.

Google Maps no longer shows user reviews of locations if you're not logged in. It just shows the star rating. Probably for the same reason that Google Maps is not on its own domain, but the main google.com one: user tracking using google.com cookies.