I played around with Tor a couple of months ago when it hit the headlines again, just to see what it was all about, and the experience was awful. As an exercis

I played around with Tor a couple of months ago when it hit the headlines again, just to see what it was all about, and the experience was awful. As an exercise, I decided to fire up Tor browser today just to see if it's gotten any better. It's worse. Here's what I found: Large Image based CAPTCHA: Tor is slow. I'm on a 75/25Mbps internet connection and it loads images similar to 24k dial-up. The CAPTCHA I was presented with was the highest bandwidth CAPTCHA I've ever seen. I was given a 9 pictures and needed to select "Bodies of Water". Each click yielded a new square. I had to wait for 4 additional images to load before I could click "Validate". This took over a minute. Then, repeat, this time "Store Fronts", which were hard to discern (is it a blurry Apartment Building front or Store Front?). I received a connection error on one site so I had to repeat the process. With Javascript features turned off, it was a little easier, but included the extra step of having to paste a Base64 encoded string into a text box which failed twice. Every site I tried gave me this CloudFlare CAPTCHA page. One of the sites I pulled up had no images. I set my privacy settings to the least protected, enabling JavaScript and HTML5, assuming this was the problem. Nope. They used images from another site and I had to grab the image URL and paste it into a browser to see what was going on. It was yet another CAPTCHA. A few minutes later, the previous site displayed images properly. On to Google. Privacy settings are still at the weakest setting. Type "Google" into the search engine and I get a "wavy text in an image" CAPTCHA. This loads quickly and is easy to answer, but just results in another CAPTCHA. I gave up after 10 tries. Bing, Yandex and Yahoo all worked with Yandex only presenting a CAPTCHA once after the third search I did (simple, like Google, but worked). This is a terrible experience for people seeking to get around oppressive governments. While I applaud CloudFlare for dogfooding their CAPTCHA system, I doubt they did it in a way that truly simulates the experience via an extraordinarily slow internet connection which is what I ended up with when using Tor Browser. I wonder how much slower things would be if my internet connection was 1Mbps or being interfered with by government infrastructure. I understand the trade-off between securing a site from "evil traffic" that is more likely to originate from a Tor exit node, but why must they use such a bandwidth intensive CAPTCHA? A browsing experience that would have taken seconds to complete took me almost 5 minutes (and a lot of frustration) not including actually consuming the content I was looking for. Are the text in image based CAPTCHAs not good enough for this task? Are there other reasons I'm missing?