Tell HN: Archive.is/ph/md/etc. is redirecting me to HTTPS:// rurtnews – com

This started happening in the past couple hours.

At first, I thought my browser (Firefox ESR 128.8.0) might have been compromised, but I couldn't locate anything malicious.

I searched around and only found one discussion about this. A reddit thread[0] which mentions the exact same behavior:

1. Attempt to archive a page;

2. Get confronted with a CAPTCHA;

3. Before I can even finish doing the CAPTCHA and clicking submit, the page redirects to https:// rurtnews . com, which is Russia Today/RT.

Anyone else experiencing this aside from me and a half-dozen redditors?

I'd note that I was able to get the redirects to stop and archive.org to work properly (well, except for the CAPTCHAs -- but those are pretty much every time now for the past month or so) by setting[1]:

   accessibility.blockautorefresh = true
It's a poor work around, but until I figure out what's going on, it will have to do.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1jkr4pz/archivetoday_redirecting_to_a_weird_russian_news/

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1327430

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43490467

Edit: This is archive.today (archive.is/ph/md/etc.) not archive.org. Fixed the title. Thanks for setting me straight r721[2]!

30 points | by nobody9999 4 days ago

6 comments

  • r721 4 days ago
    archive.org and archive.is/.ph/.today/... are two totally different websites:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive

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

  • jpoesen 4 days ago
    Noticed the same thing this morning 6AM (CEST).

    VPN on and attempting to reach any archive.ph url -> CAPTCHA page -> redirect to RT after about 5 seconds.

  • nobody9999 4 days ago
    I'd add that other browsers (presumably with autorefresh disabled), even Firefox (not ESR) on other systems aren't seeing this behavior.

    Very odd.

    Edit: I take that back. Firefox 135.0 is redirecting as well. However, Palemoon, Chrome and Edge are not doing such redirects. It seems like this may be limited to browsers (perhaps just firefox) with auto-refresh enabled.

  • nobody9999 3 days ago
    Late reply here. It seems that archive.today has gotten their act together and fixed the redirects to rurtnews dot com.

    That was annoying.

  • aaron695 4 days ago
    Can confirm (Chrome)

    Status Code: "429 Too Many Requests" - > Refresh: "5;url=https://rurtnews.com/"

    I guess it's spam/bot filter is accidently blackholing everyone to RT

    And I hate to have to say it, but RT would have been chosen by Archive as a joke.

    [-]
    • KomoD 4 days ago
      > And I hate to have to say it, but RT would have been chosen by Archive as a joke.

      Why do you think that? Just so you are aware, a Russian guy runs it.