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An update on Wayback Machine access

blog.archive.org

161–170 of 374 posts

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single paid article linked on HN has the way back machine link as the very first comment.

The links are usually to Archive.today (aka archive.ph and a bunch of other domains), not Wayback Machine (which is run by Internet Archive).

Correct:Also, archive.* has actively edited archived sites to promote their agenda. Why folks continue to use them confuses me. One would think the big wikipedia purge would curb such behavior.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#162
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there should be a way for a site to tell an agent it isn't allowed access? I'm not sure where I land on this exactly tbh, so no judgment cast.

I want agents to be able to act on my behalf, that’s the entire point. An agent should be able to do anything I can do sitting at my browser.

Technically, even your browser is an agent. It says it in the HTTP: User-Agent. So is cURL. Every application the user runs is acting on the user's behalf.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#163
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

robots.txt?

Has it been settled whether robots.txt applies to user-driven chat sessions and if things like the crawl delay should be applied to say an end-user, an ip address, a harness provider, etc? My understanding is robots.txt is more for training exclusions, but less so for agent work.

robots.txt applies (or should, in my opinion) to anything that automatically follows a link. Basically any software that is not a human-controlled web browser or single-shot curl command. Everything else: robot.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#164
post #3

> Here’s what’s going on. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we’ve put protections in place to keep the service running. I'm pretty certain this is scrapers that are trying to workaround blocks on accessing original sites by hitting the Wayback Machine copy instead. Appalling behavior. In addition to the load it puts on this vital non-profit piece of Int…

I've personally been using the Wayback Machine more often because I increasingly find myself being blocked from websites who are trying to keep out scrapers even though I'm just a regular person with JS disabled (along with a bunch of other stuff)

Sites are getting too overzealous with blocking IMO. I got blocked for several hours by huggingface simply because my download didn't complete and I had to retry. It gave me error 429, suggested I login, and the login page wouldn't load because error 429.

A popular tech news site blocked my phone because of Apple Private Relay. That didn't last long because their traffic fell off a cliff when that happened.

Many sites are throwing more captchas at the problem, without understanding that captchas don't actually help with LLMs, they just hinder normal users and primitive scripts. LLMs solve captchas just fine.

Some big sites have put up improved paywalls. I'm fine with subscribing to a quality site, however, WSJ and all the other big media sites routinely spit out regurgitated garbage that can be had for free elsewhere (and due to political spin, their garbage is less valuable than the free versions of said content).

Some folks are declaring the internet dead. I wouldn't go that far, however, I will say that a reckoning is going to happen, especially when advertisers figure out that most ads served on basically every website are no longer viewed by humans.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#165

There is a HN article on abusive AI crawlers on the front page almost every week, but we rarely talk about the path forward. Web scraping has been around for as long as the internet, and it was fine because we had established best practices (rate limiting, self-identification, robots.txt, etc.) that the industry agreed upon. Now we have AI labs and their crawlers that don't care about any of this gentlemen's agreemen…

- Find some new way for Cloudflare to acquire paying customers. If their business did not depend on the status quo, they would be exceptionally well positioned to roll out the technical & organizational frameworks that that make massive botnets a thing of the past.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#166

I wonder if they'll end up behind Anubis at some point. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.

Plenty of threads on HN about this, Anubis does not work.

I’ve read a few different experiences with hosts having had success with Anubis to cut down on excessive scraping. One that comes to mind is the Dolphin project.[1]

I’ve read a few of those threads, but often it’s people at cross-purposes with the goals of Anubis. Is there a chance you could clarify the “not working” bit?

[1] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2025/06/04/dolphin-progress-rep...

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#167
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asking users to email them with details of their OS, browser, IP address is just crazy. It's surely to serve as data to help tell humans apart from bots. > Changes made by IA shouldn't become my responsibility. They're a free service. It's ultimately not their responsibility to service you either.

Imagine if Apple or Microsoft introduced a bug and said, ah yes we know about it we did that on purpose and we know it affects a huge number of people, if each of you could email us these details that'd be great. It's just such an insane request. IA have broken it and have no real idea how to make it better so they are going to whitelist IPs or browsers or entire operating systems? Wild.

What is 'insane' here is the shear level of entitlement displayed here, including lumping a niche, free, volunteer supported service in with billion dollar, for profit corporations and demanding they pander to your inflated expectations.

Wild.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they offer bulk torrent downloads as an alternative?

Once upon a time some people explored backing up the Internet Archive. However, that experiment ended. They mention there were some learnings and they then say: > The Internet Archive continues to explore methods and code to decentralize the collection, to have a mirror running in various ways - these include IPFS, FileCoin, and others. The INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK project also added general mirroring and tracking code to…

The Internet Archive's torrents are a sick joke. I've yet to find one that actually manages to complete. They always get stuck at 90-something percent but that final blocks always fail verification and get retried, fail, and the process repeats forever. Because they're web seeds they're hitting IA infrastructure and not offloading to a real swarm. So their broken torrents are just screwing themselves.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#169
post #13

Wow, but I wonder if there's more to it. I've not been able to access web.archive.org from my work computer - I always get the 429 error. But I then pull out my phone and can access it just fine. All along I was assuming my company was blocking it. Still weird that it happens every time from my work PC and never from my home one.

They seem to be aggressively blocking IPv6 source IPs. I ran into this problem over the past month traveling. I got nothing but 429 errors until I switched on my VPN (which is IPv4 only) and magically the Wayback machine worked again. The lack of transparency on the part of IA is very frustrating.

Re: An update on Wayback Machine access

#170
Unrelated, but this week I've been on a memory binge with the Wayback Machine, trying to find old content of mine from the early 2000s. Took me a while but I've finally put together a good bit of info about myself at the time that I'd completely forgotten, and it's all thanks to the Internet Archive storing my little gaming review website from when I was 16. I could barely remember any of the other stuff, it's been genuinely surprising figuring out what I'd forgotten. I couldn't even remember most domains I owned aside from one, which I used as the starting point.

Still can't remember what my Tripod site address was, but that might be lost to time.

Thank you, Archive.org.

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