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Wikipedia has blacklisted the site archive.today a.k.a. archive.is, .li, .ph, .fo, .md, and .vn), because Wikipedia editors discovered that the pseudonymous owners of the site were altering some archived pages. The alterations inserted the name of a blogger that the pseudonymous person who runs archive.today has a grudge against, because the blogger speculated about their identity.
Wikipedia editors were already debating whether to blacklist the site, after discovering it was being used in a distributed denial-of-service attack against that same blogger. The argument for blacklisting the site was straightforward: archive.today captchas were running malicious code on people's computers. The argument against was that it would be difficult to replace hundreds of thousands of links, an argument that made sense only as long as the saved websites were considered trustworthy.
My decidedly non-expert hunch is that using the site to look at static content behind a paywall is probably safe unless the site asks you to complete a captcha.
Wikipedia editors were already debating whether to blacklist the site, after discovering it was being used in a distributed denial-of-service attack against that same blogger. The argument for blacklisting the site was straightforward: archive.today captchas were running malicious code on people's computers. The argument against was that it would be difficult to replace hundreds of thousands of links, an argument that made sense only as long as the saved websites were considered trustworthy.
My decidedly non-expert hunch is that using the site to look at static content behind a paywall is probably safe unless the site asks you to complete a captcha.
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