Wikipedia Blacklists Archive.today, Starts Removing 695,000 Archive Links (arstechnica.com) 14
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.
"There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it," stated an update today on Wikipedia's Archive.today discussion. "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable."
More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is facing an investigation in which the FBI is trying to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls. "Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability," said today's Wikipedia update. "However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today."
"There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it," stated an update today on Wikipedia's Archive.today discussion. "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable."
More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is facing an investigation in which the FBI is trying to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls. "Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability," said today's Wikipedia update. "However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today."
Is Wikipedia still an encyclopaedia? (Score:2)
Every news story these days seems to be reddit-level, chronically online drama.
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
Out of curiosity, I looked up Donald Trump on there just to see what it said. Ignoring a couple of really recent posts that seemed jarring by their inclusion, it mostly seemed like a competent summary of a lot of stuff, and I didn't see much there, if anything, that I disagreed with.
The problem was what *wasn't* there. The impeachments were about a paragraph long. Basically nothing about the January 6th committee was there, none of the myriad civil and criminal cases were there, etc. It was the most whitewashed article I've seen in a long time.
And then I looked up "Barack Obama". Far from being whitewashed, that article was mud-bathed. The controversy section was quite detailed, but tended to leave out any details that could be seen as positive. For example, it points out the 2013 Inspector General report about the IRS targeting conservative groups, but conveniently omits later revelations that at the time he made that report, he was aware that liberal groups were similarly targeted, thus creating a false narrative that the behavior was specifically anti-Republican, when in fact, it was anti-PAC. Still problematic, but very differently so.
So basically, the information that is presented seems to be mostly correct, but is massively right-biased by the information that it chooses to leave out. And lest you think that they just omitted things they didn't consider important, I would point out that both articles were packed with copious amounts of tedious and meaningless trivia that nobody should care about, and the articles could easily have been reduced by 90% without meaningful loss of useful information. For example, how many people care that one of Obama's elementary schools had a lot of Muslims in attendance? Exactly nobody... assuming it is even true and is not an AI hallucination or right-wing propaganda.
I'm not impressed. A trustworthy source should omit trivial and unimportant details, but should not omit details that would bias opinion. This reliably failed on both counts. Horribly. Irredeemably. To the folks working on that site, my advice would be this: Start over. This is trash.
But I guess that's the whole point — creating a right-biased Fakeipedia so that people don't have to be exposed to facts that exceed the limits of their political bubble world. So in that regard, I guess they succeeded. But I have exactly as much trust in that as I do in AI hallucinations.
Re: (Score:2)
People aren't using other 'pedias, they're using LLMs. Make of that what you will.
As to Wikipedia, I'll just point to a Vetinari quote: "Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions." Make of that what you will.
Re: (Score:1)
The George Orwell Playbook (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The George Orwell Playbook (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean sure, there could be some kind of conspiracy, though Occam's razor suggests that it is more likely that the person who created it is doing something questionable.
On the other hand, given the current state of the U.S. government, the possibility that they are being targeted for having cached some kind of data that the Trump administration doesn't want seeing the light of day is not nearly as unlikely as one might hope.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Now archive.today is being blamed for DDoS attacks against others"
The DDoS was documented awhile ago and AFAIK was still on-going so was verified by multiple parties.
I never used archive.today, even without a VPN it just gave me endless captcha prompts so I avoided it for years.
"Archives" are used by trolls and harrasers (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The main reason why archive.today was popularized was during the gamergate era, where people would archive things that people were doing, so that it would be permanently saved, in addition to avoiding paywalls, cookies, and advertisements. ```legitimate archives obey takedown requests``` is like saying ```legitimate libraries obey censorship laws```, and you justify it because you want to control access to history, so the only person who can define their past is the person themselves, and they should be abl
Streisand (Score:2)
The claims against the archive owner are wild [gyrovague.com] and would be easily disproved if untrue.
Is this the same operator who would block readers if their ISP used some DNS feature he didn't like, back in the day?
I understand being disagreeable, but, jeeze, this takes it to a whole new level. Way to have people's sympathies and then burn it all to the ground with malice.
Wikipedia was apparently in the position of being forced to amplify the attacks with their links to the archive. Not a supporter of theirs these da