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Comment by notpushkin | Hacker News Reader

It's not even Cloudflare, just made to look like it. reCAPTCHA widget is a dead giveaway, real Cloudflare pages use their own implementation.

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Oh. That's kind of weird. Why/who would ape Cloudflare for their detect-a-bot interstitial?

I've only seen it on archive.today (& Co.) so I suspect it's an in-house solution. As for why, perhaps it's just because people are already familiar with the Cloudflare one, and they don't want to startle people with a new one? Not sure, but it's my best guess here.

Edit: oh, I think I've figured out the why! From the JS comments, I think it's used to get around captchas on archived sites (well, at least LinkedIn) sometimes:

    var widgetId = grecaptcha.render('g-recaptcha', {
      'sitekey': '6LeQbtsSAAAAAHevV56qhVr_0JhQI7N-zTPoOoWJ', // my
      //'sitekey': '6Lc7CQMTAAAAAIL84V_tPRYEWZtljsJQJZ5jSijw', // linkedin's
      'callback': function(response) {
        // [...snip]

Interesting. Why would they present it to the user? Are they presenting captchas to sites they're trying to scrape to their users?

Yeah, I think it's just a cheap way to get around anti-scraping captchas.

The alternative would be to use an anti-captcha service that outsources captcha solving to people in low-wage countries, but that's probably a bit expensive given archive.today's scale.

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