Archive.today = archive.is - which is added via comment on a huge percentage of posts on HN.

Link to comment explaining the discovery:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...

edit: Maybe I should have titled this "claim to have discovered" as there is no external verification, and no write up. I thought I should post this in any case.

Again? This happened before, if you remember this: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/search-engines/archive...

Previous HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740

If you're brave enough to want to see it yourself, visit https://archive.ph/jXv3A#:~:text=filed%20on%20Tuesday then click on the "Filed on Tuesday" link.

It redirected me to https://stolidityseashellshotter[.]com/ezrsb5dd1268e6f6ebaad... which then redirected me to a fake clone of RT news: https://rurtnews[.]com/

Unlike the Reddit mods, I'm not getting redirected to the malware site, just the fake RT site.

Edit: I clicked it a few more times and its redirecting me to either the fake RT or https://gullible-thanks[.]com/w5FDGi, which redirects to either https://sportshard[.]com/ or https://eatcells[.]com/land/?token=[a random string]

I had to disable uBlock Origin, since it does something to block many of these redirects.

They really need to show some evidence for this! Just this suggestion means I won't ever use it again

Not sure what to believe here. Wouldn't it be possible to create a site that has some js embedded that is able to be aware of archive's process so that the archived page renders a different page than the original? Could that secondary page be what is trying to deliver the malware, using archive as an unwitting laundry? That matches the MO of malware delivery via other services, no? I'm baffled as to why the mods don't provide any details whatsoever. There are more links to the controversy between the blogger who sought archive's webmasters identity than details of this incident. The mods in this subreddit are doubling down on not sharing details under the guise of "not our job to be infosec". Perhaps a write up is in due time but at the moment this feels like a sketchy extension of the aforementioned drama

Edit: Another r/seattle moderator (not the OP of the original post) has posted their technical writeup of the malware, which is detailed and definitely more in line with what we'd expect with this kind of PSA. While I stand by all criticisms of the OP moderator and their initial handling of the disclosure, you can find the details of the incident in this excellent write up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...

A few hours after I posted this: I am so glad that r/seattle mods found this, and the HN community requested/forced a prelimiary write up [0] (sorry Jaco_Belordi and the unnamed woman who actually found this + rest of team - you probably have other jobs as well :). This is the system working as intended. This is the best of the modern Internet.

Here are my suppositions and questions:

The frontier labs feel free to use the path of least resistance to acquire more data. Currently, one of those paths must be archive.today. Proof of that is that an archive.is link is posted here on HN, for any news post, right? I certainly find those links useful.

So, now that we know that archive.today is the easiest path to paywalled data, is a threat actor, and can poison training data...

1. What is their valuation?

2. Will the labs stop using them? Is it even fair to assume that they are?

3. ... ?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xhf6qp/archivetod...

I read through the comment thread there. There's almost no explanation of what's going on, not even the offending URL. When someone asked, he got downvoted a bunch and ridiculed, which reminds me of why I don't have a Reddit account. I don't trust archive.today because of its track record but don't trust this particular allegation either. The news is simply that a subreddit moderator blacklisted archive.today.

I think it's a shame that copyright laws don't allow us to host a non shady alternative to this. The only reason people use such dubious sites is that there's no other way to share a link to a news site without risking that the text will be altered later or hidden behind a paywall.

The writing had been on the wall for a while. Hopefully this'll finally drive the usage of the site down.

Is there an alternative service people like?

But…why?

I guess that we know how they pay the bills now

"We investigated the "filed on Tuesday" link in an archived NYT article (hxxps://archive.ph/jXv3A). It's supposed to lead to a lawsuit PDF hosted by the plaintiff's law firm. Instead, clicking the link leads to an ad/phishing network and intermittently serves instructions to run elevated cURL commands, advertising pages, and ZIP-downloads.

Archive.today's /o/ endpoint itself returned the instruction to redirect, not the original source URL. We observed this in more formal testing on October 28, 2026, at approximately 07:35 UTC.

The link's actual href on the archived version of the page was:

hxxps://archive.ph/o/jXv3A/https://schenklawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wan-v-o..."

As it happens, and this is quite common, use of archive.today was not necessry

https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wa...

No "bot protection"

Beware that wallhop.io sometimes forwards requests to archive.{today,is,md,ph,etc.}, e.g., for WSJ

Until somebody invents a solution for bypassing paywalls at scale, they are not going away. It's like people asking "why don't AI companies release their training data".

Disappointing but not that surprising; it's been banned from Wikipedia for months because it was enlisting viewers' computers in a DDoS against an investigative journalist for trying to figure out who was behind it. But it's the only way I've found to access a lot of information that is otherwise lost. So, what do we do?

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That sucks I guess but until there’s an alternative I don’t really care.

Wikipedia has blocked it for years. Glad everyone else is finally getting around to it.