Disclaimer: This is not technically a privacy matter for the reader, but I believe it is adjacent and important enough for this community.
Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal blog. All users encountering archive.today's CAPTCHA page currently load and execute the following Javascript: setInterval(function() { fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s" + Math.random().toString(36).substring(2, 3 + Math.random() * 8), { referrerPolicy: "no-referrer",…
Far too many netizens still try to ignore this or even come up with reasons why gyrovague is the bad guy here.
Alternative archive pages:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archivebox.io (self-hosted)
But how else to bypass a paywall?
I've read relevant articles and clicked old links - they all seem to be history. The only ones that still work just look for the article in various archives - the subject of this post always amongst them. The same applies to this article, but there's still some good tips.
Here is the original article from 2023: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ and what Patakallio has to say about it today:
The post mentions three names/aliases linked to the site, but all of them had been dug up by previous sleuths and the blog post also concludes that they are all most likely aliases, so as far as “doxxing” goes, this wasn’t terribly effective.
Here is a relevant ArsTechnica article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/
Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.
archive.today (.ph, .is, .md, .fo, .li, .vn) also loads a pixel and javascript from mail.ru. The script mentions lamoda.ru, kommersant.ru, dzen.ru, ad.mail.ru, vk.com, vkontakte.ru, ok.ru, odnoklasseniki.ru. I haven't researched this further, but I think one can assume that your IP address will be spread across all relevant Russian websites. 10 years ago I would have said "so what? The Russians have social media too" but today you can safely assume that all this data is available to the government itself and is actively contributing to the hybrid war.
All in all, archive.today has always been in the "too good to be true" category. Call me suspicious.
And once again because it's important:
The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.”
I tried reading up on this whole thing, and my understanding is that Gyrovague, tired of archive.today bypassing paywalls, decided to dox who the owner of archive.today is. Counterarguments that the info "was already out there" was made, yada yada, and then Gyrovague's blog began getting DDoS'ed and edits on archive.today would replace names with Gyrovague's to make them appear as someone into CSAM.
DDoS'ing is a bit childish, but it's the internet, what weapons besides it do you really have.. Oh right, if you're an archiving site like archive.today is, I guess you could tamper with all your data to make it appear as if the person you're DDoS'ing is a pedophile.. Riiight.
So there's no way of trusting the accuracy of the data on archive.today anymore, it's literally tainted, talk about shooting oneself in the foot, or perhaps more apt: Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
Archive.today - a service about preserving internet history - tampering with content shows that they can tamper with content and are willing to tamper with content.
Archive.today has reduced their own value to 0.
Regardless of any other drama here.
Archive.today has been caught tampering with content it is archiving.
I’m sorry, nobody should use this service, and I’m tired of the “he tried to doxx” excuse.
This is slander and harassment, and if you’re one of the “oh it’s fine, someone told me the other guy is kind of a jerk”, you can fuck off.
Creating fake material to associate an innocent person with CSAM is fucked up, and honestly the founder of this site deserves to be sued and possibly jailed for it.
You don’t do that. Ever.
wdym "tired of"? Their original article from 2023 totally endorses archive.today, and there is no real doxxing happening there. According to the article linked in this post:
And, having read that older article, I totally agree.
Since many many people use this archive service every day, there's also justified and legitimate public interest.
I therefore also disagree with any attempt to portray this as some sort of tiff between netizens. No, gyrovague was very clearly attacked because whoever runs the archive got angry, scared, who knows.
And right now, yeah, it's tainted: