Archive.is

archive.is (formerly archive.today) is a beloved, free, on-demand archiving service, but amateur detectives and Wikipedia patriots have used their collective imaginations to dream up an existential threat to Wikipedia's ad-free, money-hating society. Their minds conceived a nefarious criminal enterprise aimed at taking over your PC's with malware and making profits by suddenly introducing ads.

archive.is' owner being presented with newly captured webpages.

archive.is soldiers infiltrating Wikipedia and ready to rape Wikipedia's stash of white women.

Wikipedian opinions in 2013

I prefer this option. It is based primarily on my belief that the IPs were not being used legally. This makes me distrust the motives of archive.is, and suspicious that we are being set up as the victim of a Trojan Horse: once the links to archive.is are established, those links can be rerouted to anywhere. If illegal means were used to create the links, why should we trust the links to remain safe?—Kww(talk) 15:57, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Support after reading User:Kww's rationale. We don't know what the purpose of the links is, and so we can't be sure that they aren't being used as a Trojan horse. If the nature and details of the archive are better known, I may change this to option 1. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:01, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Support with blacklist: The operator of archive.is appears to be acting in extreme bad faith in how he is inserting these links; consequently, I don't feel we can trust the site's contents in the future. --Carnildo (talk) 23:21, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Support - Using zombies to link to this site makes me leery of what could be added to the site in the future. If he's willing to do this, he might add exploits to the site in the future. With this many links incoming from Wikipedia, a fair number of people could have their machines compromised with zero-day exploits. @Kww, I'd notify the WMF and the stewards of this, since it'll probably need a global blacklisting. Reaper Eternal (talk) 00:21, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Support removal of all archive.is links now. After the repeated insertions of links by botnet(s), I have little faith in the ethics of the site owners. They could well turn their site into a malware dissemination tool. There is other corroborating evidence for low ethics like their choice of data storage ISPs and lack of respect for robots.txt (and thus the content/copyright owners' desires). Someone not using his real name (talk) 02:55, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Support The security issues involved are far too plausible to leave these links in Wikipedia without strong evidence that the archive is run by an organization capable of maintaining the archive, and with accountability for any malware or problematic content that may appear later. Big money can be made from infecting computers used to browse the Internet, and someone running a bot operating from multiple IPs demonstrates high motivation and a low regard for ethics. Johnuniq (talk) 00:37, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedian opinions in 2014

Support We should not be linking to sites that could infect user's computers or rely on that functionality to operate. (note: if someone developer a legit peer-type service, that would be different; it's the unknowing potential misuse of compromised systems that's at issue). --MASEM (t) 20:55, 24 June 2014 (UTC)

Support. While the RFC was phrased in a circumspect manner, there's no reasonable doubt that the owner of archive.is used an illegal botnet to add links to Wikipedia, and I mean illegal in the sense of contravening actual law, not Wikipedia policies. We should not use our status as the sixth largest website to provide links to someone that has demonstrated that he will use compromised computers to achieve his goals. That places our users in unnecessary peril.

Further, the use of advertising on a site that takes snapshots of other people's contents raises substantial copyright questions: it's hard to justify taking a complete copy of someone's work and using it to attract people to ads under current copyright law.—Kww(talk) 20:07, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Oppose Archive.is has demonstrated multiple times that they have no scruples in regards to respecting robots.txt rules, Injection of malware, replacement of ads, violation of Wikipedia Terms of Service, and abuse of process. Archive.is and it's advocates should demonstrate by acceptance elsewhere that the internet as a whole trusts them before they can earn our trust back. Hasteur (talk) 22:28, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Oppose - There are too many uncertainties, even as to what law the server is subject to. It is not subject to US law. The domain is registered in Iceland, but the servers appear to be in Prague, and one of the name servers is in Lichtenstein. There are too many uncertainties as to what the purpose of the archive is. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:53, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Oppose If Rotlink is willing to use botnets to spam here, there's no telling what he could decide to make his site do someday. Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:59, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Oppose Whoever is behind archive.is has demonstrated that they are willing and able to do anything, and they cannot be trusted. If thousands of links are established on Wikipedia, the archive operator can later do whatever they want when a link in an article is clicked. Johnuniq (talk) 02:04, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Oppose The archive.is links present a possible (even if not confirmed) threat to readership. Immediate removal is more important that having ~16,000 some articles with dangling references most which can be fixed in time. --MASEM (t) 15:31, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Support They have to go, they present a danger (even if not malignant at the present time) to our readership. Damage control in the safer enviornment can be done later. --MASEM (t) 15:33, 1 July 2014 (UTC)