Removepaywall.com Redirecting to RussiaToday
4 gnaegime 1 3/28/2025, 11:28:35 AM
I recently discovered an odd issue where removepaywall.com is redirecting to RussiaToday when trying to remove the paywall of an article. Removepaywall.com is using archive.today.
After further investigation, it appears that when making requests to archive.today, they are redirected to RT only when the referer header is set to removepaywall.com (429 response). If the referer header is absent, the request resolves normally.
Could archive.today be compromised? Or is it a networking issue?
All previously posted links using removepaywall.com (i.e. on X) are now directing to russia today.
To reproduce, you can use this curl command:
curl -v -e "https://www.removepaywall.com/" https://archive.is/newest/removepaywall.com
This will return a 429 status code and a redirect to RT. Without the referer header, the usual response is returned.
Comments (1)
bekdavid893 · 32d ago
recommend using https://removepaywalls.com - with an s - more robust