DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder’s identity in 2023. […] A Tumblr blog post apparently written by the Archive.today founder seems to generally confirm the emails’ veracity, but says the original version threatened to create “a patokallio.gay dating app,” not “a gyrovague.gay dating app.”
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Archive-today-Operator-uses-users-for-DDoS-attack-11171455.html:
By having Archive.today unknowingly let users access the Finnish blogger’s URL, their IP addresses are transmitted to him. This could be a point of attack for prosecuting copyright infringements.
To be fair, your argument has been made by others on the RfC too, comparing the situation with Wikipedia linking to Anna’s Archive.
Truth is, when being honest, Wikipedia should never have started linking there. It probably started out of noble intentions: making sure sources stay available for everyone.
Now a new factor has come into play - that the site is being weaponized. The admin there has surely the ability to modify whatever he wants, create fake articles, change the wording of others and so on, and has now proven - without a single doubt - that he is not trustworthy.
This means that the reliability of all hosted information has to be questioned as well. And here we are.
Wikipedia should have never linked there? There are legitimate reasons it has been used over archive.org presented in this very thread and multiple link archivers is definitely a good thing so I disagree that it should never have been linked to.
For the second point you can make the opposite claim using the same evidence: the admin has almost certainly had the ability to edit pages that have been archived to their site but does not appear to have done so, making them trustworthy. The fact that they are using it as a botnet does not mean that the information is incorrect and certainly not without a single doubt.
First: It’s pirated content. I do not have an issue with playing fast and loose with copyright, but Wikipedia shouldn’t have started linking there, because pirated content of this volume has the side effect of involving authorities pretty fast. Wikipedia has enemies, they are rich and ressourceful, and this is an attack surface they shouldn’t have.
Second: People do not tend to trust others who behave erratically, and when trust is eroded it’s not so easy to fix it again. In reality it’s this way: nobody knows if the content there has been modified, and trust was the only thing holding all this together.