The Wayback Machine has been archiving posts for years and years, and in many instances, it re-crawls URLs. A blog post that went live in 2006 might have been indexed in 2007 and 2009 and 2011 and 2017. This is important because if Reid’s blog was hacked to insert new posts with old dates, the copies in the Internet Archive’s repository would have recent dates, even if they showed old time stamps on Reid’s site.

It’s not possible to view the Internet Archive’s public stash of Reid blog posts because Reid’s team recently inserted code into the site that prevents the Internet Archive from indexing it.

But the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle confirmed to me that the Wayback Machine crawled Reid’s site back in the 2000s—and that there was nothing suspicious about the way the posts appeared in the archives.

“We saw [the blog posts] in the ’00s soon after they were dated on the blog, and [they were] archived in normal course of operations,” Kahle told me.