Any good archiver will check for an archived copy before making a request, and batch requests. This was very different than the attack you’re imagining — if you opened any archive.today page, it would poll a developer’s personal blog, regardless of whether you were interacting with content from that blog.
Unfortunately, they’ve allegedly modified the contents of some archived articles, so even though they may do better to archive, nothing archived is of any value because it cannot be trusted.
It does more to handle client-side rendering than archive.org, so there are pages that could be rendered by today that were not archivable by org. Also, because of differing usage patterns, it has archives of pages that org didn’t, and even for pages that org does have, at times org doesn’t.
Deeply saddening. Archive.today was a great resource, and stored a vast repository of human knowledge. As the internet turns to slop, we need sites that preserve the history of the web more than ever, and it’s very disappointing that the team at archive.today has failed us so profoundly in our hour of greatest need.
A good article, but as a millennial, I was completely unprepared for the 2 psychic damage I took from this sentence:
Even based boomerware like IRC has to play second fiddle to them.
I’m certain they’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and AI is a convenient way to justify it, rather than admitting they don’t want humans using it to circumvent the paywall. It does solidify for me personally that the LA Times is the paper of record for the United States going forward, rather than the New York Times.