Comment by LogicX
7 years ago
For those curious about what is going on here...
Cloudflare has decided for privacy reasons they will not relay eDNS0 client subnet data - which yes, can reveal a portion of the IP of the requestor - but is used by CDN services in order to provide nearest servers or (in some cases) country specific content.
My guess here is archive.is feels they have some need to restrict what content is provided to where in the world, and as a result, without ECS in the request, takes you to a cname which essentially null routes you back to your local loop interface.
Source: Founder of DNSFilter.com - we support ECS, I coded it.
>My guess here is archive.is feels they have some need to restrict what content is provided to where in the world
Couldn't that be done later, by blocking the actual HTTP TCP connections instead of blocking the DNS requests? Maybe it's an efficiency issue, that they want the higher-efficiency blocking by DNS rather than lower-efficiency blocking during HTTP TCP, but that seems a little strange to me.