DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder's identity in 2023.

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.

    • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      45·
      1 day ago

      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!

      • inari@piefed.zipEnglish
        20·
        1 day ago

        It would be pretty incredible if the Wikimedia Foundation started a project to archive the web

        • cecilkorik@piefed.caEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          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.