Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?
87 pointsby rabinovich9 hours ago13 comments
  • rafram2 hours ago
    Remember when Archive.is/today used to send Cloudflare DNS users into an endless captcha loop because the creator had some kind of philosophical disagreement with Cloudflare? Not the first time they’ve done something petty like this.
    • NedFan hour ago
      [dead]
  • dunder_cat3 hours ago
    Hmm. If it is an attempt at DDoS attacks, it's probably not very fruitful:

      >$ resolvectl query gyrovague.com

  gyrovague.com: 192.0.78.25                     -- link: eno1
                 192.0.78.24                     -- link: eno1
    Viewing the first IP address on https://bgp.he.net/ip/192.0.78.25 shows AS2635 (https://bgp.he.net/AS2635) is announcing 192.0.78.0/24. AS2635 is owned by https://automattic.com aka wordpress.com. I assume that for a managed environment at their scale, this is just another Wednesday for them.
    • arcfour2 hours ago
      I believe they're probably trying to get the blog suspended (automatically?) hence the cache busting; chewing through higher than normal resources all of a sudden might do the trick even if it doesn't actually take it offline.
    • dunder_cat3 hours ago
      It occurred to me while reading the article that I could also just have checked the TLS cert. The cert I was given presents "Common Name tls.automattic.com". However, maybe someone will discover bgp.he.net via this :-)
    • mike_d2 hours ago
      It is using the ?s= parameter which causes WordPress to initiate a search for a random string. This can result in high CPU usage, which I believe is one of the DoS vectors that works on hosted WordPress.
  • eli2 hours ago
    Well that is a very silly way to punish the author of an article you don’t want people to know about.
  • aendruk18 minutes ago
    OP frames this like they just stumbled across the blog post but they created an account matching the name discussed within it three months ago?

    I’m confused.

  • ideasphere2 hours ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45922875

    “Behind the complaints: Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today”

  • sbdaman3 hours ago
    Given it's set to generate random pages on the site, is there even any possible explanation for this that isn't sketchy?
    • mediumdeviation3 hours ago
      It's not random, setting the query string to a new value on every fetch is a cache busting technique - it's trying to prevent the browser from caching the page, presumably to increase bandwidth usage.
      • gertop33 minutes ago
        It's trying to prevent the server from caching the search. Thousands of different searches will cause high CPU load and the WordPress might decide to suspend the blog.
  • internetter2 hours ago
    There's really no interpretation of this which isn't malicious, although, not to defend this behaviour whatsoever, I'm not entirely surprised by it. The only real value of archive.is is its paywall bypassing abilities and, presumably, large swaths of residential proxies that allow it to archive sites that archive.org can't. Only somebody with some degree of lawlessness would operate such a project.
    • Brybry2 hours ago
      It's not just for paywall bypassing. Sometimes there are archive.today snapshots that aren't in the Wayback Machine (though I think your overall point about lawlessness still stands).

      For example, there was some NASA debris that hit a guy's house in Florida and it was in the news. [1] Some news sites linked to a Twitter post he made with the images but he later deleted the post. [2]

      The Wayback Machine has a ton of snapshots of the Twitter post but none of them render for me. [3]

      But archive.today's snapshot works great. [4]

      [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9www02e49zo

      [2] https://xcancel.com/Alejandro0tero/status/176872903149342722...

      [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20240715000000*/https://twitter....

      [4] https://archive.md/obuWr

      • internetter21 minutes ago
        Archive.today has a different approach to the baseline archive technology (executing javascript at archival time and saving the DOM instead of saving and replaying server responses verbatim). Additionally, Archive.today employs a number of site specific mitigations which aren't visible to the end user. In some cases, for instance, they use accounts, but then retroactively modify the DOM to mask this mitigation. [0] While the exact strategy they use for Twitter isn't known to me, they are doing something by their own admission. [1]

        [0] https://blog.archive.today/post/708008224368001024/why-isnt-... compounded with personal observation.

        [1] https://blog.archive.today/post/708008224368001024/why-isnt-...

    • jijijijijan hour ago
      Not excusing this malicious behavior, but I have to say, the mentioned blog post is a major dick move, too. Got quite the impression of a passive aggressive undertone, and there is clearly bittersweet irony in collecting and "archiving" an archiver's personal information from long ago traces. Maybe it's all some feud between two dicks, some backstory untold. Maybe the blog author wanted some information gone from archive.today, but was denied.
      • internetter17 minutes ago
        Perhaps, and yet I've referenced this article numerous times over the years. The most important property of an archive is that it saves an authentic copy of the source material—that is to say, the archive must be trusted. If archive.today is indeed a legitimate archival source first and foremost as it purports to be, the user has a reasonable interest in investigating the people behind it so that they can come to an informed conclusion about if they can trust the archive or not.
  • nativeit3 hours ago
    I just tried in my browser (Firefox on Ubuntu) and got the same result. Deeply curious.
  • Barbing2 hours ago
    Worth blocking the URL for users of that Archive site then, avoid extra burden?
  • mediumdeviation3 hours ago
    Pretty sure that blog is hosted on Wordpress.com infrastructure so it's not like the blog owner would even notice unless it generates so much traffic that WP itself notices.

    That said I don't think there's many non-malicious explanation for this, I would suggest writing to HN and see about blocking submissions from the domain hn@ycombinator.com

  • ventegus8 hours ago
    They might need to tweak a single word. Streisand readers won’t have a clue which.

    Save the page now and compare a week later.

  • self_awarenessan hour ago
    And that's how advertising works, folks. If someone wants a website dead, I want to know more about it.
  • russian_archivean hour ago
    [dead]