Wikipedia might blacklist Archive.today after site maintainer DDoSed a blog

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

See full article...

 

[robert.walter]

Dump them Wiki.

If you lay down with dogs you get up with fleas.

Putting users at risk by sending them to a site run by a nutjob puts them at risk.

Ps It’s always the damn Russians …

 

[OrvGull]

What other option did the archive webmaster have to get the post taken down?

Suck it up and accept that someone posting about what country they think you live in is not illegal?

 

[justsomebytes]

Hardly seems like criminal activity to me.

DDOS attacks are a crime, hence why you aren't supposed to do them. Normally they are prosecuted under the CFAA. If they didn't hear back, they don't have a legal right to a take down of the blog in this case.

It does make me wonder what the FBI is investigating them for, originally, when they didn't hear back from an email and so decided to immediately commit a crime.

 

[Statistical]

Hardly seems like criminal activity to me.

It LITERALLY is criminal activity. As in there are laws against denial of service attacks.

 

[OrvGull]

A GPDR request is “legal thuggery”?

It was a sternly worded letter from a lawyer meant to censor someone's speech.

Someone's country of origin is not, in itself, protected information.

There was an explicit threat to publish another blog post.

Well yeah, you threaten a blogger the result is going to be more blog posts. At very least they're going to have to explain where the other post went.

 

[Statistical]

Suck it up and accept that someone posting about what country they think you live in is not illegal?

Or you know sue them. Seek a preliminary injunction to take the website down pending the outcome of the trial. Not that I think he had any chance of winning because he didn't have a case. Regardless there is no "I tried the easiest and most basic legal action and since that didn't work all criminal activity is allowed" exception under the law.

 

[OrvGull]

Or you know sue them. Seek a preliminary injunction to take the website down pending the outcome of the trial. Not that I think he had any chance of winning because he didn't have a case. Regardless there is no "I tried the easiest and most basic legal action and since that didn't work all criminal activity is allowed" exception under the law.

Maybe in Russia. That does seem to be a thing there.

 

[Cthel]

A GPDR request is “legal thuggery”?

There was an explicit threat to publish another blog post.

If the GDPR request wasn't actually from the real Nora Puchreiner (assuming such a person exists and is the owner of Archive.today), then yes, that would be legal thuggery.

In the same way as sending a false DMCA takedown request to try and take down a YouTube video you don't like would be legal thuggery.

 

[graylshaped]

“We need verifiable citations so that we can maintain readers’ trust, however, in order to be trustworthy our references also have to be safe to access.”

Agreed: it's both, and if the site is willing to do dickish things, there is nothing to stop it from doing other dickish things as even more links are added.

 

[betam4x]

Maybe someone should archive archive.is/archive.today (perhaps wikipedia themselves) in a way that the links can be easily updated. Then update the links and blacklist the site.

Although if the site’s owner(s) is trying to DDoS a blog, I suspect they also would not hesitate to contaminate content, and likely have been doing so for some time.

 

[aranyn]

Archive.is has and continues to host doxxes concerning hundreds or even thousands of individuals. They do not reply when asked about such content or are requested to remove it.

I have no pity for the owner here. This outright illegal behavior absolutely deserves a ban from Wikipedia anyways.

 

[Uncivil Servant]

So what option was left but to escalate?
...
If you're under FBI investigation

Leaving aside the fact that escalation is rarely a good idea, and even leaving aside that we're talking about committing a federal crime, which you should not be doing even if you are not currently being investigated by the FBI...

If you are under federal investigation, you contact an attorney, explain the type of investigation, get a referral to an attorney who deals with those cases. Tell that attorney everything, answer every question, no matter how silly it sounds. Do everything that attorney tells you to do, and do not do anything that attorney has not explicitly told you to do.

There, that's several hundred dollars worth of legal advice for free, and doing this can help you avoid decades of prison time.

 

[Statistical]

Idiotic to cut it off. Dumb moral stands over mostly theoretical future harms which result in very real and substantial harm to Wikipedia itself feels like a plague of excessive Puritanism and is almost always self-defeating behavior.

There are current ongoing harm even ignoring future ones.

The archive website is engaging in DDOS attacks USING VISITORS' COMPUTERS. A least some of those visitors are coming from wikipedia. So wikipedia is linking on a mass scale to an active malware website. Not a hypothetical or just in the past but right now. Following a link from wikipedia to archive your computer system would be part of an ongoing DDOS attack against a third party.

Condoning it tells the website owner that using visitors from their largest source of traffic in this illegal manner is acceptable and no adverse action will be take. It inevitably will not be the last time wikipedia users are used as DDOS bots.

 

[Kilgore_Trout]

Are you frigging insane?

Let's meet with my wife, my kids, and many friends and get their opinions on this.

What is their opinion of the East Karelian concentration camps?

 

[Steve austin]

Some discussion centered on copyright infringement, given that Archive.today publishes copies of many copyrighted articles. “On the general problem of linking to copyright infringement: perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation can work on ways to establish legally licensed archives of major paywalled sites, in partnership with archives such as the Internet Archive,” one editor wrote. “It would be challenging given the business model of those sites, but maybe a workable compromise can be established that manages how many Wikipedia editors [have] access at a given time.”

[bolding added]
The problem with the bolded suggestion is that access to the archived articles isn’t needed just by Wikipedia editors, but also by Wikipedia users - otherwise the cited articles don’t serve the purpose of providing the needed verification. A possible alternative could be that the Wikipedia citations become only references, leaving accessing the underlying source up to the reader. That already is the case for a lot of citations, especially books, but also many things behind paywalls. However, that significantly hurts Wikipedia, since its utility owes a lot to the user’s ability to examine the underlying source in most cases, and loss of that would be significant. That’s in addition to the problems it would cause editors. (The existing inability to access the content of many cites is already a problem for both editors and users.)

I don’t see a good solution - many of the sites that now paywall their archives do so because those archives are a significant source of the value subscribers gain, driving subscriptions, so giving them up for free financially impacts the site. OTOH, giving up the citations impacts Wikipedia, which is a very valuable resource.

 

[graylshaped]

Idiotic to cut it off. Dumb moral stands over mostly theoretical future harms which result in very real and substantial harm to Wikipedia itself feels like a plague of excessive Puritanism and is almost always self-defeating behavior.

What is dumb about not tolerating extortionate behavior? Be specific.

 

[NC Now]

Maybe someone should archive archive.is/archive.today (perhaps wikipedia themselves) in a way that the links can be easily updated.

The site is full of copyrighted material. And other things. Which is why I'm guessing Wikipedia is just going to "walk".

 

[NC Now]

What is their opinion of the

My wife's grandfather or his brother was dragooned into the German armed forces in late 1944 / early 1945. He was sent to the front with other folks in their 50s and 60s and early teens. As soon as he could he took everyone around him and surrendered to the allied forces.

You can say he fought for the NAZI's. Are you now saying his decendents are all NAZIs?

Oh, and my wife is here due to her mom marrying a US Army Lt.

So we have a non trivial number of relatives who are decendents of some "fought" for the NAZI's and friends in current Germany who are also decendents of the same. Calling them NAZIs is absurd.