Archive.Today starting to use Google’s QR-based reCaptcha
#recaptcha #degoogle #datahoarder
The site has a few variant domains, unsure why, and archive.md, the one I’d been using, threw the QR reCaptcha just now, as per the attached image, while archive.today directly threw the good ol’ “try to verify a dozen times” version.
The recaptcha may appear even when the user is not using a VPN if it grows suspicious, meaning the site may soon be inaccessible without bending to Google.
You shouldn’t be using it under any of its domains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
(Referring to the abuse of its website’s users to DDoS another website and falsifying archived websites)
Article is rather leghty, so would help pointing the exact problems.
But taking the liberty to try to sift through it myself, from the History section up to the 30 October 2025 situation, nothing sounds conclusive to me.
The French government and CP situation sounds like a grey area - if I understood it right, the French gov. tried to take the contents down without due process?
If that’s the case, I could conjecture the demand was made as part of the internet censorship agenda, where laws and decisions made would induce content hosters to preemptively censor theirs users to avoid massive fines. And usually such agendas advance in the points it’s harder to criticize first to get normalized.
But if it was the due process and I didn’t understand the French legal jargons, then shitty move on Archive.Today’s side.
About the ongoing 2026 situations, those were pretty shitty moves, yeah, and worth being careful at best around the platform.
I’m mostly referring to the 2026 which aren’t just “shitty moves”, but straight up illegal.
They falsified archived information and inserted the name of a person they did not like.
And also, used their websites users as a kind of botnet to DDoS the other website.