How does the tech behind archive.today work in detail? Is there any information out there that goes beyond the Google AI search reply or this HN thread [2]?
[1] https://algustionesa.com/the-takedown-campaign-against-archi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816427
Now it's obviously possible that my VPN was whitelisted somehow, or that the GeoIP of it is lying. This is just a singular datapoint.
setInterval(function(){fetch("https://gyrovague.com/tag/"+Math.random().toString(36).subst...",{ referrerPolicy:"no-referrer",mode:"no-cors" });},1400);
I assume it must be a blanket ban on Finnish IPs as there has been comments about it on Reddit and none of my friends can get it to work either. 5 different ISPs were tried. So at the very least it seems to affect majority of Finnish residential connections.
That's awesome. I wish everyone made sure of their facts. Thanks.
There is evidence of this in the article you're commenting on.
They also tampered with their archive for a few of the social media sites (Twitter, Instagram, Blogger) by changing the name of the signed in account to Jani Patokallio. https://megalodon.jp/2026-0220-0320-05/https://archive.is:44...
I think Wikipedia made the right decision, you can't trust an archival service for citations if every time the sysop gets in a row they tamper with their database.
archive.org also complies with takedown requests, so it's worth asking: could the organised campaign against archive.today have something to do with it preserving content that someone wants removed?
It would be interesting to run the numbers, but I get the feeling that AI generated articles may have a higher LIX number. Authors are then less inclined to "fix" the text, because longer word makes them seem smarter.
There is so much is archived there, to lose it all would be a tragedy.
owner-archive-today . blogspot . com
2 years old, like J.P's first post on AT
They also cannot hijack data with a residential botnet or buy subscriptions themselves. Otherwise, the saved page would contain information about the logged-in user. It would be hard to remove this information, as the code changes all the time, and it would be easy for the website owner to add an invisible element that identifies the user. I suppose they could have different subscriptions and remove everything that isn't identical between the two, but that wouldn't be foolproof.
This particular addon is blocked on most western git servers, but can still be installed from Russian git servers. It includes custom paywall-bypassing code for pretty much every news websites you could reasonably imagine, or at least those sites that use conditional paywalls (paywalls for humans, no paywalls for big search engines). It won't work on sites like Substack that use proper authenticated content pages, but these sorts of pages don't get picked up by archive.today either.
My guess would be that archive.today loads such an addon with its headless browser and thus bypasses paywalls that way. Even if publishers find a way to detect headless browsers, crawlers can also be written to operate with traditional web browsers where lots of anti-paywall addons can be installed.
Thanks for sketching out their approach and for the URI.
I’m guessing by using a residential botnet and using existing credentials by unknowingly ”victims” by automating their browsers.
> Otherwise, the saved page would contain information about the logged-in user.
If you read this article, theres plenty of evidence they are manipulating the scraped data.
But I’m just speculating here…
I guess if they can control a residential botnet more extensively they would be able to do that, but it would still be very difficult to remove login information from the page, the fact that they manipulated the scraped data for totally unrelated reasons a few times proves nothing in my opinion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Advice/comments/5rbla4/comment/dd5x...
The way I (loosely) understand it, when you archive a page they send your IP in the X-Forwarded-For header. Some paywall operators render that into the page content served up, which then causes it to be visible to anyone who clicks your archived link and Views Source.
https://megalodon.jp/2026-0221-0304-51/https://d914s229qk4kj...
The second shows volth's Github notifications. Volth was a major nix-pkgs contributor, but his Github account disappeared.