Ask HN: What's Been Going on with Archive.today? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's Been Going on with Archive.today?

28 pointsmichelangelo9 comments

It’s been months and I’m still confused what’s going on with it.

It often used to redirect to other TLD (ph, is…).

More recently it seems to be not-happy with iCloud Relay connections and it either cannot be reached or gets in a reCAPTCHA loop.

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I want to clarify that the Captcha problem isn't the the earlier CloudFlare DNS issue, the one where Cloudflare DNS was returning IPs that didn't work. (IPs that Archive supplied, btw).

This issue is different. People are getting unsolvable Captcha pages from Archive. A lot. It might be due to DNS again. If so, it's lots of DNS providers and not just CloudFlare.

Back in August, whether you got Captcha depended on which IP you got for archive.is/.today/.ph/etc. Example, if you queried for archive.is and got 198.23.187.186 you got Captcha'd. If you got 89.253.237.217 you didn't. I haven't tracked the issue this closely since Aug, however.

A below poster is having success by statically assigning IPs for Archive requests. I did that too back in Aug. It worked for a while.

What I'm seeing today is get Captcha'd no matter what upstream DNS service I use. What matters is what ISP I use - almost certainly because DNS servers vary their response by location.

The only consistent thing is that whatever solution worked, it stopped working eventually.

The operator wants to ensure that all archives occur across a country boundary, so that any takedowns have to be an international affair.

And as such cloudflare DNS doesn’t work with it for some reason

Yep, I was unable to use it for at least a month due to reCAPTCHA infinite loops, so I stopped using it.

It only happened on iPhone/iPadOS devices. It appears to have been fixed.

The problem now is that the NS records disappear for hours at a time 10% of the time.

archive.is / archive.ph / archive.today ... which all have proper SSL certs

The hacky fix is to edit your /etc/hosts

    178.17.174.208 archive.ph archive.is archive.today archive.li
    23.184.48.154 archive.ph archive.is archive.today archive.li
    179.43.151.41 archive.ph archive.is archive.today archive.li
    5.188.6.118 archive.ph archive.is archive.today archive.li
    94.140.114.194 archive.ph archive.is archive.today archive.li

> More recently it seems to be not-happy with iCloud Relay connections and it either cannot be reached or gets in a reCAPTCHA loop.

iCloud Relay might be using Cloudflare's DNS, which is why it won't work.

as I can grasp its blacklisted, at least such spin was present even earlier in various countries, but now the western realm is mids vast agitprop psyop thus having service where every content member can archive its work its guess risk for the a.i. bots in chase for deepfake overrun of unpleasant news for the euroatlantic realm!?, one can save even archive.org links in archive.is so guess that is additional motivation for the blacklisting!

anyway I can still reach it through TOR Browser with some push pull with the captcha (asks for patience) lets hope euroatlantic authorities will drop their fears and reopen the doors, yet knowing that the war in the fifth realm for them is huge issue so not sure whether that will happen soon!?, pity coz in effect there is no other service where one can get address string for the quoted part in some page i.e. its useful for fast footnoted communication of various quotes and links in same post ...

The operator of that service seems to be opposed to privacy. Those failures are intentionally caused when it detects certain privacy-respecting configurations, e.g., use of a DNS resolver that doesn't send EDNS Client Subnet information.

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion without sufficient evidence. They've implemented partial DNSSEC. I think there is a configuration problem with their NS servers flapping with their registrar because their domains will disappear for hours at a time as evidenced myself and http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com shows that it's also "down".

PS: When there's a DNS problem, I try different resolvers amongst Cloudflare, Google, and various dnscrypt ones.

The site provides an onion service [0] I wouldn't call that "opposed to privacy".

[0] http://archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcb...

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