[aspenmayer]

I’ve noticed that even on VPNs, US exit points sometimes block archive.is. Not sure if that is DNS related or what. Non-US VPN exit points don’t seem to be blocked at those times that the site navigation fails on US ones.

I believe NextDNS is headquartered in the US, which may be related to the site nav issues we’re both experiencing.

Curiously, uBlock Origin and my blocklists seem to block content on archive.is from loading from mail.ru, which may be related to the blocks, but I have never heard anyone on HN or elsewhere mention this, so I am, so that it can be known and explained if any explanation exists for why mail.ru scripts on archive.is are present. I don’t seem to see those scripts on the Tor version of archive.today, which archive.is is a mirror of today; apparently the original domain is the .is one, in any case.

Consider my curiousity piqued!

More info about the archive.is|.today mirrors including the Tor (.onion) version of the site are on the Wikipedia entry for the site:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today

> archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion

[aspenmayer]

More info about NextDNS (AS34939), which is indeed operated in a US jurisdiction:

https://bgp.tools/as/34939

[eth0up]

I'm sorry I was unable to add anything. Keep digging though and it'll all soon be clear. And if you find anything substantial, butt into one of my comments sometme and let me know

[aspenmayer]

Appreciate the feedback, I will do so more research and see what I can turn up. I had a quick question if you have a sec.

> Note too, that NextDNS blocks archive.is et al by default unless you manually add redirects.

Can you explain a bit about what you had to do to get archive.is to work with NextDNS? I have used their service/app before, but I’ve never dug into redirects via NextDNS, as I didn’t even know that was a thing you could do via the service.

[eth0up]

Yes. But it requires a nextdns account (free).

You simply add New rewrites;

archive.is > 165.140.202.54

In your Settings

[ROBLOX_MOMENTS]

Can you define "block" ? The archive.is owner do a lot of fake blocking behaviour if they don't like your IP , if you try to use an anonymizer

[aspenmayer]

I mean that the page doesn’t even begin to load. I get early and often Google reCAPTCHAs on archive.is and its mirrors under normal operation over HTTPS/Tor, but I was referring to the site not loading in at all, and getting some kind of PTR/SSL error iirc when it happens, which is most/all of the time when using US VPN exit points over HTTP(S). I don’t experience these errors at all over Tor, because their Tor site doesn’t use certificates. I run HTTPS-only mode in the clearnet, so perhaps others don’t experience this issue on their machine(s), but I don’t want any kind of MITM and/or downgrade attacks to slip through the cracks, just in case.