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> Wayback Machine being broken in Firefox

Are you getting "Fail with status: 498 No Reason Phrase"? You might have your Referer header disabled.

If that's the case, you can fix it by going to about:config and setting network.http.sendRefererHeader to 2 (or pressing the reset button to the right).



I am! Thank you! Why doesn't it work without REFERER headers? I haven't changed any settings from the Firefox default, and allowing it breaks links to jwz's site.


> Why doesn't it work without REFERER headers?

Don't know. I just spotted that it's the only meaningful difference I had in my traffic between visiting with Firefox and with Chromium. IIRC, it's the fetching of the capture timestamps that fails when the Referer header is missing.

> I haven't changed any settings from the Firefox default

You might have forgotten like I did once.

> and allowing it breaks links to jwz's site.

Do you mean this one?

https://www.jwz.org/blog/

Seems to be working fine for me with the Referer header enabled. Maybe it was a temporary glitch?


It won't if you click a jwz link from Hacker News. It shows you a testicle in an egg cup. This is on purpose.


How does this work? I was under the impression that when I clicked a link in a webpage it just opened that link as if I'd typed it into my URL bar. How does jwz know were I'm clicking from?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

> The HTTP referer (a misspelling of referrer) is an optional HTTP header field that identifies the address of the webpage (i.e., the URI or IRI), which is linked to the resource being requested. By checking the referrer, the new webpage can see where the request originated.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#page-45

> The Referer header field allows servers to generate back-links to other resources for simple analytics, logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped links to be found for maintenance. Some servers use the Referer header field as a means of denying links from other sites (so-called "deep linking") or restricting cross-site request forgery (CSRF), but not all requests contain it.


Thanks!


Can confirm. :(




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