Rendered at 14:38:29 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
prirun 4 days ago [-]
I've used vultr.com for years with no problems. Recently it wouldn't let me login without solving a Google captcha. I tried private windows, etc and ended up having to cancel my Vultr account and ask for a refund. Fortunately I only used them to spin up test VMs and didn't have any production stuff running there.
I refuse to pay a company for service and then be required to identify motorcycles and traffic lights every time I sign in. I went a few rounds with Vultr customer service and they said (paraphrasing) "It's not something we can fix, you have to talk to Google about it". Right... Google forced you to put their captcha on your web site.
account42 27 minutes ago [-]
CAPTCHA for login should just be outright illegal, especially if it blocks important functionality like closing your account.
PaoloBarbolini 24 minutes ago [-]
A few years ago a service for which we had just implemented a scraper for (they had no API, and the customer needed info from 1000s of accounts) added a captcha right after we had implemented the scraper.
We quickly figured out that the server didn't validate the captcha challenge code with Google. It worked for 3 years until they changed the system to send a code via email to validate your login, and limiting you to 1 session at-a-time. Now we have different problems to deal with...
econ 21 minutes ago [-]
Maybe if the number of failed logins per hour grows by 10000%
It's not that. Archive.today have simply used up their free quota.
pessimizer 1 hours ago [-]
What does this link have to do with anything?
gruez 10 minutes ago [-]
They have some spat with cloudflare, so they "punish" cloudflare users by sending them into infinite captcha loops
wastedpotencial 5 minutes ago [-]
Since last month I've been CAPTCHAed in many Google searchs in Firefox. I assumed either a local device was spamming them or maybe Codex/Claude web search was flagging me as a bot.
So is this CAPTCHAing because I refuse to navigate the ad-infested way? How can I rule out a problem on my end if my router is ISP provided with limited functionality ?
elric 19 minutes ago [-]
Constantly. It's made me stop using Google entirely because I can't run a single search without hitting reCAPTCHA. It's becoming problematic because some services I pay for, such as Bandcamp, also end up pestering me with boatloads of reCAPTCHAs. I enjoy Bandcamp, but I'm going to have to axe it if it keeps up.
Barbing 35 minutes ago [-]
Neat, threads and comments can be reposted [by admins/mods?]:
Note I posted the comment only once a day ago. Thread ID seems the same, but old timestamp is visible in my profile. Important issue for information freedom, HN relevant, so it’s back new on the front page?
I've seen weird situations where I'm objectively solving the captcha correctly yet it still doesn't recognize it as correct.
At this point captchas need to be completely removed everywhere. They aren't effective and just waste time.
deltoidmaximus 4 days ago [-]
Captchas are often used as tarpits. They've already decided you're a bot based on other factors so you aren't getting in until you change those factors. I've seen this happen where I'm stuck in the loop and then change the VPN endpoint and get right in after one try.
Aachen 21 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure there exist examples where people maliciously give tasks (captchas) out that have no chance of getting the person anywhere, but it's definitely not common
radiorental 1 hours ago [-]
This might not solve the problem for you, when I get stuck in a captcha loop, I click the Audio option. I usually get past in 1 try.
fransje26 42 minutes ago [-]
I also have the same issue in Firefox, Chromium and Vivaldi on Linux.
I tried searching the interweb for a cause/fix, but couldn't find anything sensible in the flood of low-quality SEO hijacking webcrap returned by multiple search engines. So I asked AI.
The claim is that it could be caused by the blocking of some DNS providers (NextDNS, Quad9, ..), and it suggested using a VPN or phone tethering.
And lo and behold, both suggestions worked, without any browser setting changes.
It's very annoying and inconvenient.
gnabgib 5 days ago [-]
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.
kotaKat 4 days ago [-]
Dunno, but is anyone else continuing to seem to get what feels like 3-4 minute reCaptcha challenges? I’m getting mentally exhausted having to try to solve the super blurry pick-the-streetlights they keep throwing at me in loops.
It feels like I have to go slowly through it only for it to eventually end in a “please try again” as I sit and wait ten seconds for each square to slowly fade in a new stupid bus for me to click.
How is this fair to the humans?
StilesCrisis 1 hours ago [-]
This is a tarpit. They've decided you're almost certainly a bot. If you're willing to solve the captchas for three minutes straight, they eventually might relent and let you in, or maybe not.
bluGill 31 minutes ago [-]
I doubt any human would solve them for 3 minutes straight, but a bot might. So closing and reloading the page (something a human would do) might work. Of course bots that don't do this will quickly figure out that they should - just like every other attempt to figure out if this is a bot or not...
There is no good automated answer. Things bots do to abuse web pages should be made illegal and then jail (fine...) the people who set the abusive bots loose - but I suspect most abusive bots are foreign and so we can't do anything without sending in an army (obviously unacceptable)
Barbing 1 days ago [-]
Archive.today / Archive.is / Archive.ph issues the past few days. Safari Private w/iCloud Private Relay. See the enterprise free tier exceeded messaging:
This site is exceeding reCAPTCHA Enterprise free quota.
That’s new, but problems/loops aren’t.
dathinab 11 minutes ago [-]
works for me, with uBlock Origin enabled, one captcha solve was enough
but .... my user agent is way more finger printable then it should (e.g. has the Linux x86_64 part) so that might make the difference.
WaasilaAsif 43 minutes ago [-]
Yes. And even after solving the recaptcha it just wont accept and after multiple attemots even if it accepts it just goes on to display it all over again
realslimjd 5 days ago [-]
I frequently have this issue with Safari in private browsing.
adrian_b 4 days ago [-]
I do not think that this is Firefox specific, more likely is is something Linux specific.
For me, hCaptcha has stopped working immediately before last weekend, regardless of the site that uses it.
It goes in an infinite loop, despite solving correctly all challenges.
On Linux, I have tested with 2 browsers, Firefox and Vivaldi, and the browser did not make any difference. I do not use any ad blockers, nor any non-standard extension.
So I think that they deployed a version update last Friday, which for some reason is broken on Linux.
It would not be surprising if both hCaptcha and Google ReCAPCHA have made some similar changes, so now they are both broken on Linux.
Meanwhile, some other "Captcha" applications from other vendors, which are used on other sites, still work like before.
oh_no 39 minutes ago [-]
I get this pretty frequently on windows Firefox after switching to it, note this is my work computer, Firefox works fine at home on more open network
globalnode 5 days ago [-]
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.
tekla 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
KomoD 5 days ago [-]
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.
gruez 5 days ago [-]
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.
KomoD 4 days ago [-]
I recall that the 1.1.1.1 block page doesn't serve the real one,, but the challenge page that they serve normally does. Maybe I'm misremembering? or maybe they changed it.
foresto 5 days ago [-]
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 5 days ago [-]
> 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.
It is telling that HN moderators allow links to archive.is/today
dcminter 1 hours ago [-]
Rather than telling us that it is telling, perhaps you should tell us what it tells you and why?
pessimizer 58 minutes ago [-]
Better to just ignore the anti-Russian and hasbara spam. It's being posted opportunistically. The chance to attack archive.is in an organically posted thread is probably the only reason an intermittent outage (common) of archive.is was upvoted enough to make it to the front page. Look at the top comment.
2 hours ago [-]
busymom0 5 days ago [-]
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.
ectoloph 1 hours ago [-]
I've found that I can often stuck in tarpits on Safari for iOS with Wipr and iCloud Private Relay.
The worst trigger is searching Google from the address bar.
Loading the homepage first makes the problem notably less common. Or getting a couple wrong.
nosioptar 5 days ago [-]
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.
rmortyh 57 minutes ago [-]
I have been seeing this, but it depends on my originating IP. I switched my house from Spectrum to T-mobile and then started getting ReCAPTCHAs on Firefox. Going out through another Spectrum connection on the same machine doesn't trigger the ReCAPTCHAs. It happens far, far less with chrome but it does still happen.
KinetiNode 4 days ago [-]
Yes , it (somehow) worked for me when I used VPN for a few days before not working again
thrust26 2 days ago [-]
Anyone else getting this?
Ich bin kein Roboter.
Diese Website überschreitet das kostenlose reCAPTCHA Enterprise-Kontingent.
I am not a robot.
This website has exceeded the free reCAPTCHA Enterprise quota.
bflesch 5 days ago [-]
This has been happening since many months.
fuzzfactor 1 hours ago [-]
It's garbage all over the place.
Advertisers on Google should be paying a lot less than they were a year ago.
paganel 52 minutes ago [-]
> Advertisers on Google should be paying a lot less than they were a year ago.
I wonder how the Google Search page traffic has been affected by the recent AI surge.
Very anecdotally, of course, but in my social circle (middle-class urban Romanians in their late 30s and early 40s) almost everyone I know has replaced a phrase like "I googled it and I found this and this and this" to "I chatGPT-ed and I found this and this and this" (where "chatGPT" can also be sometimes replaced by Claude and, not that often, by Gemini).
europoorean 4 days ago [-]
Yes. I use Firefox in Linux, with or without private window. Switch to Chrome to test and voilà, all good.
“Um, I know this may be a very personal question, but is it possible that you…could we say…may be…a Robot?”
mcv 1 hours ago [-]
Can we just get rid of reCaptcha? It was fun when it was new, but now it's just pointless busywork to let Google know who we are. Does it do anything other than that? I don't for a minute believe bots can't solve that anymore.
oh_no 37 minutes ago [-]
It still works, bots can solve it but it probably increases the cost of that web call by 10x or 100x for that bot, so it won't bother. Had a recent bad experience with removing recaptcha.
nora-puchreiner 4 days ago [-]
The open secret: the CAPTCHA wasn’t actually being checked against Google’s servers; any answer was accepted as correct – until yesterday, when someone armed with this knowledge launched an AI crawler. Now it’s being checked, so you’ll have to solve it.
OutOfHere 3 days ago [-]
PubMed and PMC use Recaptcha and it's atrocious. It never works with Firefox. It keeps looping even when filled correctly.
NIH support staff is even worse as they refuse to acknowledge the issue and reply with a scripted useless response.
If I remember correctly, Recaptcha doesn't work on GrapheneOS either which is a separate issue.
vient 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting, saw reCAPTCHA infinite loop for the first time in a long time just yesterday, on Firefox, and it was when I tried to access an article on PMC. Disabling uBlock and Enhanced Tracking Protection did not help. It looked like several automatic reloads, then one real reCAPTCHA showed, and infinite reload loop after I solved it.
Does not reproduce today though, and I never had issues with PMC/NIH before that.
If you're seeing an infinite CAPTCHA loop on archive.is, it's more likely that you're on the operator's shitlist than any technical issue. All Finnish IP addresses are on that shitlist already.
bulder 17 minutes ago [-]
Yup. Before they just blackholed Finnish IP ranges instead, accessing the site from one would serve a fake Cloudflare page with a reCAPTCHA challenge and the DDoS script. (The tell of it being fake is y'know, that Cloudflare doesn't use reCAPTCHA)
I can only guess the goal was to keep users on that page longer to keep sending off more spam requests.
pessimizer 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think it has anything to do with google, it's an intermittent issue on the archive sites that usually clears out within an hour or two. You're being successful, then being bounced back out again.
Also firefox from linux. Just leave the pages open and refresh them every 20 minutes or so.
I refuse to pay a company for service and then be required to identify motorcycles and traffic lights every time I sign in. I went a few rounds with Vultr customer service and they said (paraphrasing) "It's not something we can fix, you have to talk to Google about it". Right... Google forced you to put their captcha on your web site.
We quickly figured out that the server didn't validate the captcha challenge code with Google. It worked for 3 years until they changed the system to send a code via email to validate your login, and limiting you to 1 session at-a-time. Now we have different problems to deal with...
It does it for me if I use a VPN (Mullvad) - if I don't use a VPN then I haven't noticed I get them.
But yeah, very annoying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...
So is this CAPTCHAing because I refuse to navigate the ad-infested way? How can I rule out a problem on my end if my router is ISP provided with limited functionality ?
https://i.ibb.co/Q7qTtK16/Image.jpg
Note I posted the comment only once a day ago. Thread ID seems the same, but old timestamp is visible in my profile. Important issue for information freedom, HN relevant, so it’s back new on the front page?
Edit: good job Social-Protocols, its graph accommodates this unexpected (to me) scenario: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49555592
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
At this point captchas need to be completely removed everywhere. They aren't effective and just waste time.
I tried searching the interweb for a cause/fix, but couldn't find anything sensible in the flood of low-quality SEO hijacking webcrap returned by multiple search engines. So I asked AI.
The claim is that it could be caused by the blocking of some DNS providers (NextDNS, Quad9, ..), and it suggested using a VPN or phone tethering.
And lo and behold, both suggestions worked, without any browser setting changes.
It's very annoying and inconvenient.
It feels like I have to go slowly through it only for it to eventually end in a “please try again” as I sit and wait ten seconds for each square to slowly fade in a new stupid bus for me to click.
How is this fair to the humans?
There is no good automated answer. Things bots do to abuse web pages should be made illegal and then jail (fine...) the people who set the abusive bots loose - but I suspect most abusive bots are foreign and so we can't do anything without sending in an army (obviously unacceptable)
but .... my user agent is way more finger printable then it should (e.g. has the Linux x86_64 part) so that might make the difference.
For me, hCaptcha has stopped working immediately before last weekend, regardless of the site that uses it.
It goes in an infinite loop, despite solving correctly all challenges.
On Linux, I have tested with 2 browsers, Firefox and Vivaldi, and the browser did not make any difference. I do not use any ad blockers, nor any non-standard extension.
So I think that they deployed a version update last Friday, which for some reason is broken on Linux.
It would not be surprising if both hCaptcha and Google ReCAPCHA have made some similar changes, so now they are both broken on Linux.
Meanwhile, some other "Captcha" applications from other vendors, which are used on other sites, still work like before.
>archive.today doesn't use a real recaptcha
How? It's loading the script from google, and the images/responses are from google to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...
The worst trigger is searching Google from the address bar.
Loading the homepage first makes the problem notably less common. Or getting a couple wrong.
Sometimes the audio recaptcha works. But, most of the time I can't understand the garbled audio.
Closing the tab always resolves the problem.
Ich bin kein Roboter. Diese Website überschreitet das kostenlose reCAPTCHA Enterprise-Kontingent.
I am not a robot. This website has exceeded the free reCAPTCHA Enterprise quota.
Advertisers on Google should be paying a lot less than they were a year ago.
I wonder how the Google Search page traffic has been affected by the recent AI surge.
Very anecdotally, of course, but in my social circle (middle-class urban Romanians in their late 30s and early 40s) almost everyone I know has replaced a phrase like "I googled it and I found this and this and this" to "I chatGPT-ed and I found this and this and this" (where "chatGPT" can also be sometimes replaced by Claude and, not that often, by Gemini).
“Um, I know this may be a very personal question, but is it possible that you…could we say…may be…a Robot?”
NIH support staff is even worse as they refuse to acknowledge the issue and reply with a scripted useless response.
If I remember correctly, Recaptcha doesn't work on GrapheneOS either which is a separate issue.
Does not reproduce today though, and I never had issues with PMC/NIH before that.
I can only guess the goal was to keep users on that page longer to keep sending off more spam requests.
Also firefox from linux. Just leave the pages open and refresh them every 20 minutes or so.