YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Archive.today links going forward

83 points consumer451 2 hours ago 40 comments

consumer451 2 hours ago | parent

Archive.today = archive.is - which is added via comment on a huge percentage of posts on HN.

Link to comment explaining the discovery:

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

edit: Maybe I should have titled this "claim to have discovered" as there is no external verification, and no write up. I thought I should post this in any case.

mahboi 1 hour ago | parent

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.

dpark 1 hour ago | parent

You said the same thing twice. “The site” == archive.today

The claim is that archive.today is injecting malware into archived pages. Given some of the past behavior, this is not hard to believe.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

The archive.today site is the one injecting the malware, not the site being archived.

mahboi 1 hour ago | parent

"It was discovered by a member of the mod team today that an article archived by archive.today had injected malware links into the archived article."

Idk, maybe this is just a typo, but grammatically this is saying the article injected the links.

k00shball 3 minutes ago | parent

Go to https://archive.ph/jXv3A#selection-5079.208-5079.212 Click on "Filed on Tuesday" and it will redirect you to a site telling you to download something.

(To be fair, that isn't the only redirect so you might need to click it a few times.)

arprocter 1 hour ago | parent

Looks like ClickFix impersonating GitHub

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

abeyer 50 minutes ago | parent

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

vadansky 40 minutes ago | parent

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

shagie 38 minutes ago | parent

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)

grimgrin 34 minutes ago | parent

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

Akronymus 18 minutes ago | parent

you used to be able to set the redesign_optout cookie to true, but that doesnt seem to work anymore as of like a day ago for me

consumer451 14 minutes ago | parent

Thanks for the reminder. Theoretically, I know this, but it’s a really hard habit to get out of.

Permik 1 hour ago | parent

The writing had been on the wall for a while. Hopefully this'll finally drive the usage of the site down.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

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

Hamuko 56 minutes ago | parent

There's been quite a lot of people still defending the site. Basically "who cares about DDoS attacks and altering archived sites' content when it allows bypassing paywalls?"

LoganDark 51 minutes ago | parent

Setting my user-agent to Googlebot in a private window bypasses most paywalls just fine. Surprised at how many sites aren't checking against the published IP ranges.

1317 21 minutes ago | parent

well, yeah

john_strinlai 47 minutes ago | parent

not sure why this is downvoted. they modified their captcha so that visitors contributed to a ddos against a blog, on top of a handful of other threats, tampering of archived data, etc.

they are not great people.

burningChrome 35 minutes ago | parent

As a personal vendetta against Jani Patokallio (a Finnish cybersecurity blogger) who was trying to unmask the person who ran the site - which goes back to 2023.

MisterMunchkin 20 minutes ago | parent

I don't really care about that though, because trying to dox someone and get them killed isn't a good or moral thing to do. You could easily just not do that. You have to really go out of your way to try and hunt someone down, and at any point you could just not do it. For the targeted person to want revenge is just an inevitability.

AyyEye 6 minutes ago | parent

Residential proxies DDoSing half the internet is standard operating procedure this decade and yet everyone still buys connected garbage and monetizes their apps this way.

knowaveragejoe 20 minutes ago | parent

What are the alternatives besides the IA?

kragen 1 hour ago | parent

Disappointing but not that surprising; it's been banned from Wikipedia for months because it was enlisting viewers' computers in a DDoS against an investigative journalist for trying to figure out who was behind it. But it's the only way I've found to access a lot of information that is otherwise lost. So, what do we do?

nbajka 48 minutes ago | parent

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

mahboi 36 minutes ago | parent

tbh yeah, this isn't my first time visiting a sketchy website and won't be my last

sfoley 45 minutes ago | parent

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

danso 30 minutes ago | parent

That's been my nagging fear about them too. Obviously it's not an option they'd want to exercise frequently, but it could be devastating to individual targets.

(ofc this is a risk with the Wayback Machine, who also has a policy for honoring takedown request. But the Internet Archive's board and executives are known people with reputations)

throw0101c 16 minutes ago | parent

On modifying bits, see perhaps this comment from a discussion ~8 months ago:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092006#47100204

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

mahboi 13 minutes ago | parent

Hm, someone in the first thread mentioned a Reddit cofounder did something like this too

humodz 42 minutes ago | parent

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

efficax 34 minutes ago | parent

They really need to show some evidence for this! Just this suggestion means I won't ever use it again

Onavo 23 minutes ago | parent

Until somebody invents a solution for bypassing paywalls at scale, they are not going away. It's like people asking "why don't AI companies release their training data".

avidruntime 11 minutes ago | parent

Not sure what to believe here. Wouldn't it be possible to create a site that has some js embedded that is able to be aware of archive's process so that the archived page renders a different page than the original? Could that secondary page be what is trying to deliver the malware, using archive as an unwitting laundry? That matches the MO of malware delivery via other services, no? I'm baffled as to why the mods don't provide any details whatsoever. There are more links to the controversy between the blogger who sought archive's webmasters identity than details of this incident. The mods in this subreddit are doubling down on not sharing details under the guise of "not our job to be infosec". Perhaps a write up is in due time but at the moment this feels like a sketchy of the aforementioned drama

lysace 7 minutes ago | parent

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

avidruntime 2 minutes ago | parent

Is it a power trip stemming from a technical misunderstanding (archive.today exploited to deliver malware =/= archive.today attempting to deliver malware) or is it something else? In any case, reading the comments on reddit, seems like the mods are going out of their way to appeal to hysterics.

Unbelievable that the comment asking for evidence sits at -24 upvotes in that thread as of now. https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...

Ukv 2 minutes ago | parent

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.

avazhi 8 minutes ago | parent

That sucks I guess but until there’s an alternative I don’t really care.

ada-h00k 5 minutes ago | parent

I think it's a shame that copyright laws don't allow us to host a non shady alternative to this. The only reason people use such dubious sites is that there's no other way to share a link to a news site without risking that the text will be altered later or hidden behind a paywall.