Jake Jarvis is a developer who writes practical posts on web hosting, security headers, Cloudflare Workers, backups, and site migration.
HN links his post on Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS and archive.is, which commenters call easier to follow, plus his security headers guide.
This happens if you use 1.1.1.1 as your DNS resolver, the result of a long-running dispute between Cloudflare and Archive.is[1]; searching HN for “archive cloudflare” will get you lots of discussion.
As I understand it: the technical cause is that the Archive.is authoritative DNS server refuses to respond correctly to requests without EDNS subnet information, and Cloudflare refuses to send requests with it. (Cloudflare says this is for privacy reasons, and I believe Archive.is says their response is for legal reasons.) The captcha loop seems to be a recent development; apparently[2] it’s not actually from Cloudflare, just styled to look like it.
[1] https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38174302
I will say that today, for the first time in a long time, I seem to be able to click this link and actually get the page to load... But it has been an issue for a long time.
But, as an explanation:
https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
> ... Archive.is’s owner is actively refusing to resolve their own website for 1.1.1.1 users because Cloudflare’s DNS offers too much privacy.
Archive.is requests EDNS information about the subnet that your system is on. Cloudflare doesn't pass this information along since it can be used to determine your location in part. So when archive.is doesn't get the subnet info, it sends bogus dns results back and you get that error. See https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/ for all the details.
https://archive.is/ is serving a fake captcha page. Cloudflare hasn't used Google Captcha in years, they have their own in-house captcha https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/turnstile/
"Archive.is’s owner is intentionally blocking 1.1.1.1 users." https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
edit: sorry, to answer your question: I see the same
Great overview.
If anyone's interested, I wrote a guide a while ago on adding these headers via Cloudflare Workers, which can be helpful if you're hosting a static site on S3, GitHub Pages, etc. where you can't add these headers directly:
https://jarv.is/notes/security-headers-cloudflare-workers/
Are you using Cloudflare's DNS?
Archive.is purposefully gives bad results to Cloudflare's DNS resolvers as they do not respect and pass along EDNS subnet information which Archive wants to run their own CDN.
https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/