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Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

I cannot get past the captcha loop. Is that typical?

Iirc, it has to due with their infrastructure and DNS queries. The short of it, as I understand it, is they try connect you to instances far away from your geo location because it gives them a longer time to process legal takedown requests. So some DNS do something that conflicts with this, and so they serve up the infinite captcha instead. I have this problem if I use cloudflare for domain name resolution, but it goes away if I use something else (like Google, my ISP, etc).

Edit: found it, cloudflare truncates edns, which is why archive sandbags requests that are boot strapped with a cloudflare dns lookup:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970702

I think it is affecting more than just cloudflare users. Also, we should be, imo, pointing fingers at archive and not cloudflare because they strip the edns for privacy reasons. Archive's response is just that they don't store that, which isn't a great excuse. And I think this gets worse with encrypted DNS, which should be fucking standard these days. My reading of it felt like the classic dev move of "that's not my problem, that's other people's problem" (https://imgflip.com/i/8559hq)

> I think it is affecting more than just cloudflare users.

It is absolutely hitting more the Cloudflare users.

It's not that old edns issue (tho might it be tangentially related).

Yeah I think people think it is just cloudflare and so they get blamed when it is archive pulling some fuckery. I mean I get that it's a small team (or just one dude?) but still it is annoying when devs are like "rtfm" (in spirit) but there actually isn't a fm to read... It's why I don't open issues on GitHub...

P.S got a typo there? the -> than?

It's hitting tons of people. ref:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38141513

tl;dr It's not (just) Cloudflare. Lots of (all?) DNS providers are giving out IP addresses that send users to unskippable captcha pages. The DNS providers get those IPs from Archive's own NS. So Archive is the real source.

It depends on where you are in the world. I get Captcha IPs from Quad9 (9.9.9.9) if I query from FL,US - and good IPs if I query Quad9 from Romania.

As of today, these IPs are good:

  5.188.6.118
  23.184.48.154
  94.140.114.194
  178.17.174.208
  179.43.151.41

domains:

  archive.today
  archive.ph
  archive.is
  archive.li
  archive.vn
  archive.fo
  archive.md

No promises about tomorrow or even an hour from now.

They block iCloud Private Relay users. Might be catching you.

Those links rarely ever work on my iPhone, but Internet Archive links always do

They're blocking tons of people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com