Gyrovague

If you don't think this is a DDoS with archive.today visitors acting as an unwitting/unwilling botnet, how do you think this normally works? It's not any more sophisticated. There is not much functional difference between someone telling my smart fridge to ping https://gyrovague.com and a website telling my browser to do it.

Archive.today's attack on https://gyrovague.com is still on-going btw. It started just over two months ago. Some IPs get through normally but for example finnish residential IPs get stuck on endless captchas. The JS snippet that starts spamming gyrovague appears after solving the first captcha.

A bit context if you are confused why Public DNS server blocking websites. 1.1.1.2 is Malware blocking DNS server similar to AdBlock DNS server. It is not 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 Here is the DDoS context https://gyrovague.com

>This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls. You are deliberately misrepresenting the situation. The journalists who block archivist traffic are not in any way connected to the blogger who was attempting to investigate the creator of archive.is. You have portrayed them as related in an attempt to garner sympathy for the creator of archive.is. Here is an account of the facts: https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-att…

> Another private investigation from 2024 comes to a different conclusion. It names a software developer from New York as the alleged operator. According to this investigation, following the trail to Eastern Europe proved to be a red herring. Any pointers to what this "private investigation" is? The other linked blog pointing to Russia (or at least a Russian) seems pretty convincing: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mys…

Great post. I used to work with SMS for a living, and still remember the first time I visited a customer's data center and watched one of their engineers send an SMS... by telnetting directly into the SMSC and punching out a command in raw EMI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMI_(protocol) And an old blog post of mine on why MMS failed but still managed to delay actual mobile internet by 10 years: https://gyrovague.com/2014/06/27/how-sms-set-back-the-mobile-internet-…

Jani Patokallio who runs gyrovague.com published a blog post attempting to dox the owner of archive.today. Jani justifies his doxing as follows "I found it curious that we know so little about this widely-used service, so I dug into it" [1] Archive.today on the other hand is a charitable archival project offered to the public for free. The operator of Archive.today risks significant legal liability, but still offers this service for free. [1]: https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-att… It's weird to see people getting fixated on the DDoS, which is obviously far less nasty than actually attempting to dox someone. The only credible reason for Jani to publish something like this is if he desires to cause physical harm to the operator of archive.today Or are we just looking at an unhinged fan stalking their favorite online celebrity? People were critical of the Banksy piece, but this is much nastier. At least Banksy is a huge business, archive.today does not even make money.

My two bits of advice are: 1) always try to be the dumbest person in the room (i.e., surround yourself with smart people from whom you can learn), and 2) remove the phrase "it works for me" from your vocabulary when dealing with others. The latter may not be something you utter often, and if that's the case, then feel free to ignore it. :) The first should be pretty obvious, but the second is a little less obvious. But think about it this way: if it worked for me, I wouldn't complain about it. Agree? So there are two possible choices: either I'm wrong or your code is wrong (assuming you're an engineer). As a member of a startup, it is generally in your best interest to assume that the complainant is right and your code is wrong. Assume that your code is wrong. Investigate it. Ask for more information if you need it. Track down the problem. If it works for you, then think of all the reasons it might not work for someone who doesn't know how it works. Think of all the edge cases. Clear the cookies. Bust the cache. Make sure it's not Wednesday (http://gyrovague.com/2015/07/29/crashes-only-on-wednesdays/). Whatever it takes to figure out why it's not working for the user (which may or may not mean it works for you!). Maybe the code is wrong -- if so, fix it. Maybe it's a feature -- if so, explain that. Maybe the user made a mistake -- if so, identify why and fix that. Only after identifying the problem and potential solution do you go back to your complainant and say,…

Here's the post by the victim; https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-att… They were targeted because of this unmasking attempt, there was discussion on it; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598

There's at least a strong case that Archive.is is Russian run: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mys…

> all the content in the past 4+ years is about archive.today But it's not? This was published between the two posts about archive.today: https://gyrovague.com/2025/02/23/anatomy-of-a-boarding-pass-how-to-det…

This is more than just a Google search and a whois lookup https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mys…

Not true: https://gyrovague.com/2025/02/23/anatomy-of-a-boarding-pass-how-to-det… There are only two posts about archive.today on the blog, and one of them only exists because archive.today started DDoSing them. I fail to see how you could consider the entire blog to be a "harassment campaign", especially considering that the original blog post isn't even negative, it ends with a compliment towards archive.today's creator.

https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mys… Sparked a controversial subthread elsewhere here. I don’t think this counts as doxxing, but some people apparently see it that way. It was an entertaining read though.

Do you mean this? https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-att… the malicious code wasn't injected, it was served with their captcha. They shouldn't have used users to ddos someone's blog, but this seems like a one off attack against a perceived threat to the service's privacy. I don't condone that ddos attack, but it's been a very useful service over the years.

As another datapoint with Finnish IP from Mullvad VPN: CAPTCHA loop and indeed after solving first CAPTCHA this can be found in page source: setInterval(function(){fetch("https://gyrovague.com/tag/"+Math.random().toString(36).substring(… referrerPolicy:"no-referrer",mode:"no-cors" });},1400);

Currently as far as I know at least both archive.today and archive.is have the same ddos code on the main page. For more details https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-att…

Oof TIL, thanks for the heads up that's a shame! https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/417269/archive-today-started-… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.i… https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-att…

Bizarre. https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-att…

You could specify that you wrote it on the last line of the post, so it clears up any basic speculation. <https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-att…

Gyrovague here, author of the targeted blog post: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mys… In the past week or so, I have received a GDPR takedown attempt of the archive.today blog post (which my hosting provider rightly rejected), a politely worded request to take it down (which was sadly eaten by my spam filter), and now this (thanks to the HN reader who tipped me off). Given that the proverbial cat has been out of the bag for 2.5 years at this point, I'm genuinely puzzled as to what they're hoping to achieve, but this does not seem like a very good way of going about it.

"It’s a testament to their persistence that they’re managed to keep this up for over 10 years, and I for one will be buying Denis/Masha/whoever a well deserved cup of coffee." https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mys… And one where the author's cool with whoever is running archive.today.

Also happens to likely be where the site owner is based https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mys…

Actually, the team behind archive dot today in at least spiegel.de has premium accounts, I presume bought with anonymous credit cards. You can see artifacts when their servers are at queue load and you see the URLs, a few resources have the JWT with the account details in the URL. IIRC the clearname of the account in the token is Masha Rabinovich, with an email account [email protected], an identity that has cropped up in various investigations [1][2]. [1] https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mys… [2] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/145817/who-owns-archive-to…

I wouldn’t call it a minor nitpick. From the Internet Archive’s Wikipedia page: > The Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive In other words, it’s a legal entity and we know who’s behind it. In contrast, we don’t even know who runs archive.today. https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mys…

That's a gold mine! https://predr.ag/blog/wifi-only-works-when-its-raining/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/application-crashes-when-i-drink-coke-k… https://gyrovague.com/2015/07/29/crashes-only-on-wednesdays/

Last note: according to other internet sleuths, this user runs/is closely connected to those who run archive.is https://gyrovague.com/tag/archive-is/ https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/archive-today https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/149405

> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? If you're designing a free to play game and want to make money from it, this is not just good, it's a design goal -- as long as the developer is the one making the real world money. Clash of Clans perfected this model over 10 years ago: https://gyrovague.com/tag/clash-of-clans/

The theatrical aspects are particularly visible when it comes to air travel and border control: https://gyrovague.com/2020/06/12/covid-theater-the-upcoming-gauntlet-o… As a side note, I believe it's Bruce Schneier who came up with the term "security theater".