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Comment by kentonv | Hacker News Reader

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kentonv

archive.is is malicious -- as in, uses your browser to launch DDoS attacks, and other things.

Stop using it.

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

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> archive.is is malicious -- as in, uses your browser to launch DDoS attacks, and other things.

I think the attack was itself a response to a doxxing attempt. Also, archive.is being a free service doesn't quite fit with claiming they are malicious. The overall picture seems still positive.

I don't care what the attack is responding to, nor do I care what services are being provided.

If, when I visit your site, your site causes my browser to participate in a DDoS attack without my knowledge, your site is malicious.

If you didn't care about the service you wouldn't visit their website in the first place, in which case there is no problem.

Is the person behind archive.today the same operator as archive.is?

Yes, they have a number of domain names, archive.is and archive.today are the most well known ones.

Just run in the console window=null and you are good. It is valuable service until the websites get their shit together and finally fix their payments model.

Is there an alternative?

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.wired.com/story/when-...

Works for me. I use only Tor so it is actually far more accessible. Archive.is uses Google's Recaptcha, which for some reason rejects valid solutions submitted via Tor.

I’m not sure that is always a valid CAPTCHA and not one being proxied to you for solving it on behalf of some bot (presumably a crawler).

I don't know. I think people would notice if Google were being MITM'd on Tor.

You don’t need to MITM it, this was a common pattern for a long time (not sure it still works though). There was no origin verification so you could just use a different site ID and have people respond to captchas you encountered on that site.

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