Good reminder to pay for journalism.
The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Tageszeitung and many others need subscribers to stay independent of the oligarchs.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Paying for journalism is ideal, but unfortunately makes it difficult to cite/link to a source the way Wikipedia needs as a way to ensure the information remains open and accessible.
Admittedly, I'm not familiar with these outlets enough to know if those paywalls are significant, but the problem with direct article links is that those links can change. Archival services (I suppose not archive[.]is) are important for ensuring those articles remain accessible in the format they were presented in.
I've come across a number of older Wikipedia articles about more minor or obscure events where links lead to local new outlet websites that no longer exist or were consumed by larger media outlets and as a result no longer provide an appropriate citation.
As someone who uses Bypass Paywalls Clean, this is so frustrating.
Bypass Paywalls Clean was chased off of the Firefox Add-Ons site, chased off of Gitlab, and chased off of Github via DMCA takedown notices for copyright infringement. It is now hosted on the Russian Gitflic.ru.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said "fuck it" in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
We have spent the better part of two decades dealing with the DMCA being used as an outright weapon to silence information that corporations and government find inconvenient mostly because that information is wildly incriminating for them. It works especially strongly because a large amount of the world's internet has been consolidated to the US and its vast hosting structures like AWS and Cloudflare, putting enormous amounts of the internet under the direct influence of US laws like the DMCA.
Websites like Anna's Archive, Libgen, and Sci-Hub live because they use hosting in countries that allow them to bypass these kind of restrictions. Russia is one of the most common countries for them to host the data out of due to the lack of enforcement of copyright laws, although it is obviously not the only country that these sites use.
Until we are able to alter international copyright protections to be reasonable instead of their current over-zealously and aggressively abusive nature, we will all suffer having to risk hosting of such sites in countries that are otherwise very unsavory to be associating with.
We live in the kind of world early piracy pioneers such as the original creators of The Pirate Bay were trying to fight from becoming a reality. The American copyright cabal fought tooth and nail to change Sweden's interpretations of copyright law so they could send these men to prison.
I don’t think the issue is paywalls. I think the issue is the personal actions of the owner. I also really don’t think Russia plays into this. Again, the personal actions of the owner of achive[.]today were the reason it was removed. The site was used by the owner to personally attack someone.
Ironically, when Russia was joining the World Trade Organization in early 2010s, one requirement was for them to do something about pirate sites, namely torrent-sharing ones. So iirc the domain torrents.ru was taken away from what is now called RuTracker, and they blocked many other sites, which stay blocked to this day.
I’m with you on this, but let’s be careful here.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said "fuck it" in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
I once made a YouTube video which somehow included a clip from some RT Russian TV bullshit show. (The show was in fact a direct ripoff of Gordon Ramsey’s Hell Kitchen, for which I’m sure they did not get license for.)
Some fucking Russian troll bots then DMCA’d my YouTube video, for using their clip, even though it was clearly “fair use” in US jurisdiction, and YouTube happily sucked their russian dicks and flagged and removed my video.
And my video had probably 15 views, like it wasn’t a big thing.
So they aren’t exactly the Robin Hood of free speech.
Of course they aren't, they will happily block information that they dislike because it's embarrassing and incriminating to them. Skepticism should cut both ways, skeptical of those who use Russian connection to delegitimize valuable tools and the people associated with them, and skepticism of why Russia allows those things to persist providing they impact Western countries but not Russia.
Until the Western copyright situation is amended to something reasonable, we have to be skeptical in all aspects of this situation. I'd rather copyright was a reasonable length with reasonable policies so organizations didn't have to resort to connections with Russia. In the meantime we have to work with the situation we have.
Not sure how this says anything about Russian copyright laws or Russian government.
hey thanks, i had never heard of that bypass paywalls firefox addon
There's also a version for Chrome if you swing that way.
I do not because I don't like ads on Youtube, but thx.
Is your comment in the thread about Wikipedia banning archive.today?
edit: I realised by reading other comments that many used archive.today to bypass paywalls, aside from the archival purpose Wikipedia relied on.
Original post title was:
Until further notice: archive.today/archive.is/archive.ph/... is banned from this community for apparently being a Russian DDOS tool
And linked to the /c/ukraine community which posted it.
Also, from the Ars story:
Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia.
The reason it matters:
It makes people suspect of anything hosted in Russia, which is frustrating because there's a lot of valuable shit hosted there by people who are not necessarily from there, such as Alexandra Elbakyan founder of Sci-Hub, who has had many accusations tossed her way due to her websites association with Russia:
In December 2019, The Washington Post reported that Elbakyan was under investigation by the US Justice Department for suspected ties to Russia's military intelligence arm, the GRU, to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors. Elbakyan has denied this, saying that Sci-Hub "is not in any way directly affiliated with Russian or some other country's intelligence," but noting that "of course, there could be some indirect help. The same as with donations, anyone can send them; they are completely anonymous, so I do not know who exactly is donating to Sci-Hub. There could be some help that I'm simply unaware of. I can only add that I write all of Sci-Hub code and design myself and I'm doing the server's configuration."
We cannot take for granted that one of the reasons we have access to a large amount of archived information on the internet is often because of unsavory countries who refuse to play by the US governments copyright rules.
We also cannot take for granted how connections with those countries are used to delegitimize people providing valuable services. Bypass Paywalls Clean in particular has had a litany of people assume it's untrustworthy because of its current hosting situation because they don't know the history of it and how it's been kicked off of every other public repository that was stateside.
The archive.today person fucked things up and gave people more ammunition to claim that anything and everything associated with Russian internet is untrustworthy.
I don't see as relevant a possible connection of archive.today to someone based in Russia.
The only facts that should be relevant are that the manager of it is an egomaniac, andcannot be trusted.
For anyone curious, I looked into the DDOSing, and what was done is a simple string of JavaScript was added to archive[.]today that made a background request to the blog with a randomly generated search parameter. Every time someone looked at an archive, they unknowingly sent a request to the blog under attack.
How does the paywall circumvention of archive.today works?
I guess that they genuinely owned subscriptions for popular paywalled sites.
It identifies itself as a google (or other) crawler, which sites often allow and give the full content to, for better SEO.
This is understandable, but at the same time, none of the anti-paywall lists are as good as archive.today. They actually have paid accounts at a bunch of paywalled sites, and use them when scraping.
Unfortunately, they’ve allegedly modified the contents of some archived articles, so even though they may do better to archive, nothing archived is of any value because it cannot be trusted.
So are they removing all other websites that post lies or modify their articles to suit their narrative at times?
Fox news? MSN? CNN? BBC? Reuters? AP?
Why the sudden urge to validate the archives? How many articles have been proven to be modified?
Seems like they've been wanting to remove an entity the empire doesn't control and they're using this as a cover to do it.
What if somebody used archive.today to bypass a paywall and then archived that using Web Archive? (So we're sure the content stays the same)
They’re injecting data into the sites during archive so that wouldn’t work.
Good reminder to donate to web.archive.org
While archive.org is good and more trustworthy than archive.is, it isn't as useful for bypassing paywalls.
But Wikipedia doesn't need to bypass paywalls, and you can bypass them yourself with a bit of work.
There's websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can't bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.
That doesn't mean an alternative shouldn't be found, but we also shouldn't pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.
I do hope this move results in more support for the IA/Wayback Machine and helps them to update some of their crawler tech — thanks to the rise of AI, some sites are effectively (thru captchas etc.) or actively (through straight-up greed [coughRedditcough]) blocked from being archived almost entirely, which is frustrating for legit archivists/contributors.
If this is not an announcement, Lemmy lets you edit your post titles so you can correct that mistake instead of luring in people who think lemmy.world is also banning links using archive.today.
I’m not speculating on your intent, only pointing out that you can correct this situation instead of apologizing after the fact.
https://lemmy.world/c/ukraine was where i saw this. i didn't write it. thought lemmy would have linked to the original, was wrong. FYI
I've switched to .md when the community mentioned something was up with the .today domain. Hopefully that one isn't compromised.
It's the same person running all of them, so yeah it is.
Damn.
URL
archive[.]today
archive[.]fo
archive[.]is
archive[.]li
archive[.]md
archive[.]ph
archive[.]vn
archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd[.]onion
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