The paywall circumvention online platform Archive.today, along with various related domains (such as .is and .ph), has been made inaccessible by Russian officials. This was evidenced by error messages displayed when attempting to access its web pages.
Access to these sites seemed to be obstructed starting Monday, observed TechCrunch during its visits from the U.S. East Coast.
A Russian-language page stated: “Access to the Internet resource is restricted by governmental decision,” referring to Roskomnadzor, the Russian state body in charge of internet oversight.
Roskomnadzor’s entry for Archive.is indicated official confirmation that “access to the page is restricted.” However, no justification was provided when this information was published. Interestingly, Archive.today did not appear on TechCrunch’s block list during its verification.
Roskomnadzor’s representative did not promptly reply to TechCrunch’s questions, as the inquiry was made after Moscow’s business hours.
Despite the apparent restriction, TechCrunch managed to reach the Archive platforms from diverse devices and networks, successfully saving a web page. The full scope of this blockage, or its origin, remains uncertain.
Archive.today serves as a prominent online service for preserving website snapshots, encompassing material often concealed by paywalls or requiring subscription access. Recently, Wikipedia’s editors opted to delete hundreds of thousands of hyperlinks pointing to Archive.today. Their reasoning was based on a discovery that Archive.today’s programming utilized visitors’ web browsers, unbeknownst to them, to flood the site of a blogger critical of its activities with excessive network data.
The individuals managing Archive.today’s website did not reply to a solicitation for their comments.
(h/tRyan O’Horo on Bluesky)
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