"archive.today is currently categorized as: * CIPA Filter * Reference * Command and Control & Botnet * DNS Tunneling"<p>Ditto for their other domains like archive.is and archive.ph<p>Example DoH request:<p>$ curl -s "<a href="https://1.1.1.2/dns-query?name=archive.is&type=A" rel="nofollow">https://1.1.1.2/dns-query?name=archive.is&type=A</a>" -H "accept: application/dns-json"<p>{"Status":0,"TC":false,"RD":true,"RA":true,"AD":false,"CD":false,"Question":[{"name":"archive.is","type":1}],"Answer":[{"name":"archive.is","type":1,"TTL":60,"data":"0.0.0.0"}],"Comment":["EDE(16): Censored"]}<p>---<p>Relevant HN discussions:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805</a> "Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006</a> "Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740</a> "Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?" - Post about the script used to execute the denial-of-service attack<p>Wikipedia page on deprecating and replacing archive.today links:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidance" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...</a>
I think there are two angles to look at this. Yes, there’s the attack on the weblog. But there’s also pressure on archive.today, e.g. an FBI investigation [1] and some entity using fictitious CSAM allegations [2].<p>[1]: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/fbi-subpoena-tries-to-unmask-mysterious-founder-of-archive-today/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/fbi-subpoena-tri...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://adguard-dns.io/en/blog/archive-today-adguard-dns-block-demand.html" rel="nofollow">https://adguard-dns.io/en/blog/archive-today-adguard-dns-blo...</a>
Jani Patokallio who runs gyrovague.com published a blog post attempting to dox the owner of archive.today.<p>Jani justifies his doxing as follows "I found it curious that we know so little about this widely-used service, so I dug into it" [1]<p>Archive.today on the other hand is a charitable archival project offered to the public for free. The operator of Archive.today risks significant legal liability, but still offers this service for free.<p>[1]: <a href="https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/#:~:text=I%20found%20it%20curious%20that%20we%20know%20so%20little%20about%20this%20widely%2Dused%20service%2C%20so%20I%20dug%20into%20it%2C" rel="nofollow">https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...</a><p>It's weird to see people getting fixated on the DDoS, which is obviously far less nasty than actually attempting to dox someone. The only credible reason for Jani to publish something like this is if he desires to cause physical harm to the operator of archive.today<p>Or are we just looking at an unhinged fan stalking their favorite online celebrity?<p>People were critical of the Banksy piece, but this is much nastier. At least Banksy is a huge business, archive.today does not even make money.
All your comments are painting archive.today as an innocent victim in all this, but in addition to the DDoS, they have been caught modifying archived pages as well as sending actual threats to Patokallio [1] which in my opinion seem far worse than the "doxxing".<p>Just the fact alone that they modified archived pages has completely ruined their credibility, and over what? A blog post about them that (a) wasn't even an attack, it is mostly praising archive.today, and (b) doesn't reveal any true identities or information that isn't already easily accessible.<p>From my perspective at least, archive.today seems like the unhinged one, not Patokallio.<p>[1] <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...</a>
Ridiculous.<p>Patokallio started with his completely unprovoked doxing of archive.today. Doxing someone is an implicit threat of violence, why else would you need their physical identity if not to reach out and touch them?<p>Both parties here come across as unhinged, but one is clearly much worse than the other.
Jani here. What you describe as "doxxing" consisted of a) a whois lookup for archive.is and b) linking to a StackExchange post from 2020 called "Who owns archive.today" [1]. There is literally no new information about the site's owner in the post, all names have been dug up before and are clearly aliases, and the post states as much.<p>[1] <a href="https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/145817/who-owns-archive-today-and-archive-is-and-where-is-it-hosted" rel="nofollow">https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/145817/who-owns-...</a>
I don't see how this description changes the fundamental nature of your actions.<p>Even a half-assed attempt at doxing is still an attempt at doxing.<p>It'd be much easier to accept that you're acting in good faith had you deleted the post when it became obvious that the target doesn't appreciate it.<p>You could still do that, and it would very simply be the right thing to do.
If the site operator is working for the FSB, doxx away! Although the world needs a better alternative to Internet Archive, it shouldn't be an alternative that is an arm of an authoritarian government.
So you published an article trying to dox the operator of archive.today, but you were lazy about it?<p>I fail to see how that’s supposed to be any better.
Isn’t doxxing most of the time just collecting data from multiple public sources and connect them?
You disgusting weasel
> It's weird to see people getting fixated on the DDoS, which is obviously far less nasty than actually attempting to dox someone.<p>Why even do that, then? Why not just make a public post of theirs like: "Hey, here's someone trying to doxx me, and here's the unfair and fictitious bullshit the lying government is trying to pin on me. Here's all the facts, decide for yourselves."<p>Why do something as childish as DDoSing someone which takes away any basic good will and decency/respect you might have had in the eyes of many?<p>That way, it'd also be way more clear whether attempts at censorship are motivated by them acting as a bad actor, or some sort of repression and censorship thing.<p>I don't really have a horse in this race, but it sounds like lashing out to one own's detriment.
I'm wondering if Jani is possibly going to walk into the wrong party here and get burned. I did some public archival stuff about a decade ago and it was state sponsored and for the intelligence community. I'm not suggesting this is but it'll be very much of interest to competing intelligence services as it's an information control point. None of those are the sort of people you start pissing off by sticking your dick in it. FBI is likely just one of the actors here.
Perhaps Mr. Patokallio would like the same scrutiny applied to his own life now - it's only fair, and we have the technology.
I suppose an argument can be made that archive infringes copyright.<p>Hell I use it to circumvent paywalls.
So the two angles are that archive.today is doing something illegal and also being investigated by American law enforcement?
Archive.today's attack on <a href="https://gyrovague.com" rel="nofollow">https://gyrovague.com</a> is still on-going btw. It started just over two months ago. Some IPs get through normally but for example finnish residential IPs get stuck on endless captchas. The JS snippet that starts spamming gyrovague appears after solving the first captcha.
I'm not a web developer, but I've picked up some bits of knowledge here and there, mostly from troubleshooting issues I encounter while using websites.<p>I know there are a number of headers used to control cross-site access to websites, and the linked blog post shows archive.today's denial-of-service script sending random queries to the site's search function. Shouldn't there be a way to prevent those from running when they're requested from within a third-party site?
You can't completely prevent the browser from sending the request—after all, it needs to figure out whether to block the website from reading the response.<p>However, browsers will first send a preflight request for non-simple requests before sending the actual request. If the DDOS were effective because the search operation was expensive, then the blog could put search behind a non-simple request, or require a valid CSRF token before performing the search.
> I know there are a number of headers used to control cross-site access to websites<p>Mostly these headers are designed around preventing reading content. Sending content generally does not require anything.<p>(As a kind of random tidbit, this is why csrf tokens are a thing, you can't prevent sending so websites test to see if you were able to read the token in a previous request)<p>This is partially historical. The rough rule is if it was possible to make the request without javascript then it doesn't need any special headers (preflight)
[flagged]
One side publishes words, the other DDoSes. One side could just ignore the other and go about their business, the other cannot. One is using force, which naturally leads to resistance and additional attention, the other is not.<p>Both sides look like they have been bullied in the past and not found their way out of reproducing the pattern yet.
SF, DS, KF all only publish words. Presidents use words to direct planes to drop bombs on schools full of little girls.<p>It's deliberately obtuse to suggest that "words" aren't a big deal.<p>>One is using force, which naturally leads to resistance and additional attention, the other is not.<p>I'd say attempting to dox someone and then spreading that information is deploying far more significant force than a minor lazy DDoS attack.<p>Doxing or attempting to dox someone is effectively threatening them with physical violence. A DDoS is nothing at all in comparison.
Words can have bad consequences.
We‘ll see what will happen to Banksy after Reuters published words.
> The blog is still online and only exists as a part of a harassment campaign targeting archive.today<p>The blog has a lot of more posts on random topics. Why do you imply that the owner of the bloh is part of a harassment campaign and "only" that is the reason for this years old blog to exist?
You think DDoS (which is illegal btw) is okay as long as you don't like the target?
Harassment an doxing are both illegal.
I, like almost all people, firmly believe that dropping bombs on people is okay as long as I find the target sufficiently despicable.<p>Why are you pretending to be surprised by this view that is held by approximately every single person in the world?<p>Or do you think we should have different standards for DDoS and actual violence?
Considering the site itself is an illegal archive of websites, I think its obvious most of us don't treat what's 'legal' as a guide to whats 'moral'.
While I would it also better to a bit redact names and details mentioned in the original article in hindsight, I hardly find real defamation. I guess you want to provide random unproven evidence if someone is target of various foreign law enforcement and commercial sites.
In the article they even call for donations to archive.today . As far as I read the tone of the post is full of admiration. Funny thing is that IMHO the rather childish JavaScript attack gives credibility to the post after all.
In all this I somehow hope that we see a legal solution to all this major global copyright crisis that has been reinforced by LLM training. (If you want conspiracy theory: that I guess would be easy monetization for archive these days selling their snapshots)
While you article is insightful. Can the blog author please redact the actual names and nicks from your orginal blog post (including the exact places where to find the information). As this was discussed below. While I think you had good intentions, but it might be good to also reflect on the rights of that person not be identified.<p>Edit: I misread the comment initially as from someone with more insight. However, I guess it is obvious that anyone can see the JavaScript and participates involuntarily in the DoS.
Why is archive today attacking that website?
Good. You don't get to use my computer for a DDoS. I don't care why the DDoS was happening. I wasn't asked, and that's a serious breach of trust.
[flagged]
<i>Breach of trust</i> by a site whose unstated primary purpose is bypassing paywalls and ripping off content?<p>20 years ago during the P2P heyday this was assumed to come with the territory. Play with fire and you could get burned.<p>If you walk into a seedy brothel in the developing world, your first thought should be "I might get drugged and robbed here" and not what you're going to type in the Yelp review later about their lack of ethics.
Well if we are going to use this analogy, 20 years ago virus scanners also flagged malicious stuff from p2p as a virus, and people still thought putting malicious content on p2p was a shitty thing for someone to do (even if it was somewhat expected).<p>Nobody was shedding any tears 20 years ago for the virus makers who had their viruses flagged by virus scanners.
Given they are retroactively tampering with past archives it's not exactly trustworhy in the first place
I always thought that mainstream media sites with paywalls were pretty far down there in the tier list of websites though. Not sure if this analogy lands unless irony was the goal.
A bit context if you are confused why Public DNS server blocking websites. 1.1.1.2 is Malware blocking DNS server similar to AdBlock DNS server. It is not 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1<p>Here is the DDoS context
<a href="https://gyrovague.com" rel="nofollow">https://gyrovague.com</a>
The DNS tuneling flag alongside C&C/botnet is the odd one — that category implies data exfiltration or firewall bypass, not just aggressive crawling or DDoS behavior. Would be interesting to know what traffic pattern triggered it.
Good. What archive.today is doing is illegal
Cloudflare dns has gone back and forth on whether it wants to resolve them since 2019. It’s taken that away and restored it again (intentionally? mistake?) at least four times.<p>The c&c/botnet designation would seem to be new though.
As far as I am aware, all previous issues with archive.today and Cloudflare were on account of archive.today taking measures to stop Cloudflare's DNS from correctly resolving their domains, not the other way around.<p>The current situation is due to Cloudflare flagging archive.today's domains for malicious activity, Cloudflare actually still resolves the domains on their normal 1.1.1.1 DNS, but 1.1.1.2 ("No Malware") now refuses. Exactly why they decided to flag their domains <i>now</i>, over a month after the denial-of-service accusations came out, is unclear, maybe someone here has more information.
Sounds a bit like when "Finland geoblocked archive.today". In all actuality, there was no geoblocking of the site in Finland by any authorities or ISPs, but rather it was the website owner blocking all Finnish IPs after some undisclosed dispute with Finnish border agents. When something bad happens, people seem a bit too willing to give archive.today the benefit of the doubt.
Have they? The thing I remember previously was archive.is, and it wasn’t a block, archive.is was serving intentionally wrong responses to queries from cloudflare’s resolvers.<p>This is notably not a change to how 1.1.1.1 works, it’s specifically their filtered resolution product.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702</a>
Intentionally, I believe? archive.today iirc has explicitly blocking Cloudflare from resolving them at various times over the years due to Cloudflare DNS withholding requesting-user PII (ip address) in DNS lookups.<p>Looking forward to when Google Safe Browsing adds their domains as unsafe, as that ripples to Chrome <i>and</i> Firefox users.
> Cloudflare dns has gone back and forth.<p>Just tells me they are an unreliable resolver. Instead of being a neutral web infra, they actively participate in political agendas and censor things they "think" is wrong.
If you want "neutral" DNS now, run your own resolver and hope upstreams don't backstab you ltaer, because outsourced trust never come free.
1. As noted in prior comments, Cloudflare wasn’t blocking this site previously. The site operator chose to make their site unresolvable by Cloudflare.<p>2. 1.1.1.2, the resolver being discussed in this post, is explicitly Cloudflare’s malware-filtered DNS host. 1.1.1.1 does not filter this site.
Otoh, without archive.today a substantial % of HN posts would be unreadable for nearly all of the audience.
When the heat dies down, hopefully this flag gets removed.
Why? It’s accurate and if the owner has chosen to do this for months now, why should we ever trust they won’t again? Nobody should ever use that site and every optional filter should block them.
Also, they were caught tampering saved webpages as well, so the website cannot be trusted to fulfill it's main purpose anymore: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...</a>
There's probably a worthwhile discussion to be had about what it takes for a site in this situation to be removed from blocklists. An apology? Surrender to authorities? Halting the malicious activity for a certain period of time?<p>Regardless, another user reports the attack is still ongoing[1], so this isn't a discussion that's going to happen about archive.today anytime soon.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474777">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474777</a>
>Why?<p>Because once the problematic content is removed it should no longer be blocked.<p>>It's accurate<p>It is neither a C&C server for a botnet, nor any other server related to a botnet. I would not call it accurate.<p>>Nobody should ever use that site<p>It has a good reputation for archiving sites, has stead the test of time, and doesn't censor pages like archive.org does allowing you to <i>actually</i> see the history of news articles instead of them being deleted like archive.org does on occasion.
The site started doctoring archived versions as part of the petty feud. That is, what was supposed to be a historical record, suddenly had content manipulated so as to feed into this fight[0]. There is no redemption. You want to be an archive, you keep it sacrosanct. Put an obvious hosting-site banner overlay if you must, but manipulating the archive is a red-line that was crossed.<p><pre><code> ...On 20 February 2026, English Wikipedia banned links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with to insert Patokallio's name.[19] The decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability[19] while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects.[20] The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict.[19][20]
</code></pre>
[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today</a>
That line of argument is rather misleading, as some kind of content manipulation is inherent to the service an archive that violates paywalls has to provide. It needs to conceal the accounts it uses to access these websites, and their names and traces are often on the pages it's archiving.<p>Did AT go beyond that and manipulate any <i>relevant</i> part? That's rather difficult to say now. AT is obviously tampering with evidence, but so is Wikipedia; their admins have heavily redacted their archived Talk pages out of fear one of these pseudonyms might be an actual person, so even what exactly WP accuses AT of is not exactly clear.
While I disagree with that action I still trust the site as a reliable source. Redemption is possible. Maybe not for Wikipedia, but I don't care about that site and consider it rotten.
[flagged]
It's not just problematic content, it's criminal behavior. And the site has a <i>bad</i> reputation for archival, given that the owner altered the content of archived articles.
>It's not just problematic content, it's criminal behavior.<p>How is that supposed to be a big deal when the one of core services archive.today provides is obviously illegal anyway?
I'm not sure how illegal copyright violations really are, given that all major tech companies are doing it. DDoS attacks, on the other hand, are pretty clear-cut.<p>I also think "but they also do that other crime" doesn't help their case.
The site commits copyright infringement by showing you content it doesn't have the rights for. This is not the kind of site to go on about morals for.<p>>the site has a bad reputation<p>Not compared to archive.org. archive.is has a much better track record.
It is in fact a botnet - they’ve been hijacking user browsers to act as a botnet to DDoS.
[flagged]
Because it's not the place of a DNS resolver to police the internet.
1.1.1.1 is simply a free DNS, 1.1.1.2 blocks malware, and 1.1.1.3 blocks both malware and adult content. It's a service that does exactly what it's supposed to do.
If I specifically choose a DNS server that promises to not resolve sites that will use my computer in a botnet, then it is that DNS resolver’s place to do that.
This particular revolver is an opt-in service for users that want Cloudflare to block anything that Cloudflare designates as malware.
Literally what the product is here.
Unlikely unless their behaviour changes.<p>They arent being flagged because of the attention.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
Bulletproof hosting service not happy that someone is running their C&C infrastructure elsewhere