Yet another Hacker News

38 points Animats 6 hours ago 12 comments

Infinite Google ReCAPCHA loop trying to access archive.is using current Firefox from Linux. Just started today. Firefox is in "strict" mode. Disabled Privacy Badger for that site, and it didn't help. Tried private browsing, and it didn't help.

Is this part of Google's war against ad-blocking and non-Chrome browsers?

nosioptar 6 hours ago | parent

Yup, I get stuck in a loop.

Sometimes the audio recaptcha works. But, most of the time I can't understand the garbled audio.

Closing the tab always resolves the problem.

KomoD 3 hours ago | parent

archive.today doesn't use a real recaptcha, the cloudflare page isn't real either. it serves that as a punishment for using 1.1.1.1 DNS because the owner doesn't like that 1.1.1.1 doesn't send EDNS client subnets.

foresto 1 hour ago | parent

What do you mean by "a real recaptcha"? I just went to an archive.is page, and it's trying to load a script from www.google.com. Doesn't Google still own reCAPTCHA?

selcuka 1 hour ago | parent

> On 14 January 2026, it emerged that archive.today had silently modified its CAPTCHA page to send repeated requests to Gyrovague, thereby causing visitors to unwittingly contribute to a DDOS attack against the blog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...

cactusplant7374 35 minutes ago | parent

It is telling that HN moderators allow links to archive.is/today

gruez 1 hour ago | parent

They're definitely trying to mimic the cloudflare captcha page, but...

>archive.today doesn't use a real recaptcha

How? It's loading the script from google, and the images/responses are from google to.

bflesch 1 hour ago | parent

This has been happening since many months.

realslimjd 1 hour ago | parent

I frequently have this issue with Safari in private browsing.

gnabgib 1 hour ago | parent

It doesn't work in Chrome either (please complete CAPTCHA/yes you're valid/repeat), it might be a config issue on archive.is (Firefox latest windows, Chrome 151 windows - guest/null profile on both) rather than a war move.

selcuka 1 hour ago | parent

It's an archive.is issue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...

busymom0 55 minutes ago | parent

Not sure about Firefox but lately, if I access Google from Safari on my Mac with Apple's private relay on and private mode Safari, I get an endless captcha loop.

globalnode 29 minutes ago | parent

because of my privacy settings google search outright blocks me as a bot. the only way to search is through an intermediary like startpage. related because if it does give me the time of day i tend to then get endless captchas.