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Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

No, that’s just them blocking your DNS provider. You’re using cloudflare, quad9, or similar. Google “cloudflare archive.is” for details.

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nope. archive.is has their cloudflare configuration set to "i am under attack mode"[1], which makes the cloudflare captcha come up every time a tor / vpn / "bad" IP address visits it. its been like this since 2015. if you aren't familiar, cloudflare just serves tor / vpn / "bad" IP captchas for every domain you visit. the captchas themselves are broken half the time. in 2018 cloudflare then added deep packet inspection to see if you're using tor browser and then let you not solve the captcha [2]. but if you're in "i am under attack mode" or some other non default cloudflare configuration, your users will get the captcha

1. or something similar, been a while since i went through cloudflare's configuration options

2. this is also why you will never be able to browse the internet with links / lynx / w3m or use curl / wget ever again without using your bare IP

It's pretty well documented that archive's owner doesn't like the way Cloudflare reports EDNS for 1.1.1.1, and causes problems for people who come via that dns:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495204

and its pretty undocumented that cloudflare has blocked all tor users plus any other major shared IP since 2010 and only in 2018 added the condition i mentioned above, and you still get blocked from all cloudflare sites if you do anything special like change your user agent or the Accept header

Then why do I get a captcha loop if I use 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9 as my resolver ... but if I use 8.8.8.8, I don't?

I can switch back and forth and reproduce it perfectly each time.

ah okay well both are true: if you use tor / vpn (regardless of what DNS server is used) you are blocked from archive.is. if you use bare IP but 1.1.1.1 as your DNS, then i guess you get blocked too

archive.is doesn't use Cloudflare. The captcha is reCAPTCHA.

they literally have used cloudflare since 2015 or earlier, for every minute that service existed. if you tried to open it with tor from then until now, you get:

" One more step Please complete the security check to access "

"Why do I have to complete a CAPTCHA? Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property."

which is cloudflare's classic tor blocking page

The captcha has reCAPTCHA written on it and the Tor Browser does like 15 requests to google.com domains. None of the archive.is|li|ph|today domains use Cloudflare name servers and resolving archive.is from all over the world returns not a single Cloudflare IP.

I'm pretty sure they don't use Cloudflare.

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