There’s a comment on one of the HN threads that gives a little more insight - basically it helps him combat abuse by routing requests to the closest server outside of the requesting ips area: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650

Not sure how that argument really holds up to scrutiny but it’s something.

The reason I’m saying use a VPN is because you’re presumably visiting the site anyway, so leaking your full IP to them anyway. You can route your DNS lookups through what server you like, obviously. (Again, the privacy issue would be not that you’re leaking part of your IP to archive.is, but to everyone in the chain of recursive DNS resolvers). You could use TOR too, I think even in this thread someone posted a TOR url for it.

Cloudflare do make the DNS queries from 1 of their 180 locations, so there is some information being passed through about where the request is coming from in terms of load balancing.

I’m not arguing that Cloudflare are doing the wrong thing by omitting ECS data in general. Just that site owners have a right to do as they like WRT people using their website and if that includes blocking Cloudflare, so be it. What he is doing is not legal (or at least grey area) in many countries so anything that makes his life easier is understandable IMO.

Also, ECS leaking does not seem like a real concern for the vast majority of people surfing the net.

Lastly I don’t think Google own 4.4.4.4, did you mean 8.8.4.4?

JavaScript paywalls are not real paywalls. So no, Firefox can’t bypass real paywalls.

Unlucky for your company to have a CISO with such poor reading comprehension.

Archive.is can and does bypass real paywalls. That’s why it’s useful.

You literally called it a fake convenience in your previous comment. Do you have the memory of a goldfish?

Geolocation of users of course does not violate GDPR, don’t be ridiculous.

You have no idea what you’re talking about and clearly don’t understand the issue at hand, so yep, we’re done.

It’s way faster for one. It actively scrapes articles from behind paywalls, using a bank of credentials it has. Archive.org respects robots.txt and will take down copyrighted material on request. Archive.is doesn’t do any of that.

I would view it as complementary to archive.org. it’s more like sci-hub to me. A useful tool, run by one person who likes the idea of providing such a service.

What exactly do you think is being tracked by your ECS being sent along with DNS requests? All it means is that archive.is can’t load balance properly because they don’t know what their nearest server to your location is. If you’re so privacy conscious that leaking a portion of your IP to a DNS provider, then hardcode archive.is IPs into your hosts file or use a VPN. Not that your problem can really be with archive.is, because you’re visiting the site anyway, giving them your full IP.

It just seems like such a non issue to me.

Not really a paywall then, is it? I don’t know why you think it’s fake, it’s a very real convenience.

Violating my rights ? Is geolocating your users violating their rights now?

It might be terrible for you but it’s very handy for the rest of us.

If it’s so bad, maybe just pay to bypass all the paywalls that the site removes from your way. Having your local ISPs details sent through is a small price to pay for the convenience.

I was pretty impressed with it the other day, it converted ~150 lines of Python to C pretty flawlessly. I then asked it to extend the program by adding a progress bar to the program and that segfaulted, but it was immediately able to discover the segfault and fix it when I mentioned. Probably would have taken me an hour or two to write myself and ChatGPT did it in 5 minutes.

Who is this for? People who write lots of regular expressions won’t need it because they know what they’re doing and people who don’t write lots of regular expressions probably won’t find it anyway.

It just seems like a weird type of user who actually wants this.