Hacker News

From historical posts on HN:

Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 (8 months ago, 366 points, 178 comments)

Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 (9 months ago, 140 points, 71 comments)

Version that doesn't require login: https://reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetoday_l...

I'm confused though, it says the site injected malware into its archived form. But the HN title says archive.today injected the malware.

To make my edit in the parent clear: HN mods have changed the title, to the exact title of the post reddit on r/seattle. This is understandable.

I always respect the "don't editorialize" rule, but felt that this was a special case as the post title is so sub-reddit specific. My original post title was along the lines of "r/Seattle mods discover archive.today injecting malware, ban site.

TIL; I always thought it was part of archive.org and I never understood why people hated it. Now I get it

no one can view old.reddit.com w/o being authorized. idk if you're aware, but it lost a lot of appeal as such. what i'm saying is, folks can view reddit.com w/o logging in, but not old.reddit.com

Looks like ClickFix impersonating GitHub

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickFix

Hmmm... any other day I'd think that I need archive.today to get past reddit's login wall to read that.

Maybe this will be enough to finally rule against paywalled submissions here on HN.

I wonder if the redirect target is region based, because my redirect took me to the fake Github page. I'm in the US. A fake RT article rhymes with the well established doppelganger propaganda campaign, which could rationalize why it would be region based. The irony of the doppelganger campaign being a Russian state-sponsored campaign is not lost on me.

> Unlike the Reddit mods, I'm not getting redirected to the malware site, just the fake RT site.

Well, this got on the front page of HN... Such things make even FAANG behemoths pay attention. What I mean is, who knows what happened since r/Seattle called it out.

Does some other archive, archive the archiver?

There might be a cryptographic solution for this problem, but that's far beyond my knowledge set.

Also, as the peer comment pointed out, it could be geo-scoped. You know, like a targeted attack.

The entire reason that I posted this originally is that I cannot think of a juicier userbase than HN. We all post archive.is links every single time. Given that operator's history, we are doing the link-click analogy of pasting shell commands from the web into our terminals. We should know better by now, but complacency leads to ___.

[dead]

Archive.today has been caught intentionally using JS in the past to target others maliciously, so probably better not to give them the benefit of the doubt: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/search-engines/archive...

Seems unlikely to be the case here if what one of the mods said is true:

> We verified this isn't just us or just this source (it's a link in a NYT article to a PDF anyway, about the most safe combo I can think of)

Might be able to find the article in question by looking for NYT links posted to the subreddit recently (if the presumably-deleted archive link was posted separately as a reply).

It looks like some reddit mods on a power trip. Zero actual evidence presented.

Edit: Now there is something here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/comment/19...

What are the alternatives besides the IA?

Surprised that using visitors for DDoS attacks wasn't enough already.

One legal way to share news stories which generate controversy is to have an AI make a summary of the article, rewording it to remove any copyright from the article (this legal trick only works when the news site in question is reporting on factual events, since facts can’t be copied as per Feist vs. Rural 1991, and I make sure that the summary has “a different sequence, pace, and setting than the original article” as per legal judgments on whether an AI summary of factual events as reported by a news source is subject to copyright).

And about 30 minutes ago, they switched the reddit post to flaired user only for comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...

Not sure if this post even qualifies to be on hacker news...its all rumors and any attempt to distill the incident to its facts is met with pushback.

> When someone asked, he got downvoted a bunch and ridiculed, which reminds me of why I don't have a Reddit account.

This happens on HN too.

You can solve this problem by creating your own WSJ archive site. Until then, there are no alternatives.

for anyone interested, here's a writeup of the DDoS story: https://web.archive.org/web/20260203073744/https://gyrovague...

Weren't they also caught modifying their "archived" content?

You keep using it as normal and if it tells you to copy and paste commands into your terminal you DO NOT do it?

> investigative journalist

I think there is a confusion of blogger with a registered journalist, who must follow journalist's (ethic) rules.