Wikipedia bans Archive.today over alleged DDoS attacks and content alteration

As reported by TechCrunch, Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service, following concerns about its practices. The service, which operates under several domain names including archive.is and archive.ph, has been linked over 695,000 times on the online encyclopedia.

The decision stems from evidence presented on Wikipedia's discussion page, citing that Archive.today allegedly hijacked users' computers to execute a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This attack was reportedly aimed at blogger Jani Patokallio, where users loading the archive's CAPTCHA page unknowingly executed JavaScript that sent search requests to his blog, increasing his hosting costs. Furthermore, evidence suggests Archive.today operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering the service unreliable for citations.

The site's owner, described as a Russian individual, acknowledged scaling down the "DDoS" activity and suggested the value of the archive to Wikipedia was related to offloading copyright issues rather than bypassing paywalls.

Source: TechCrunch