4 ms·

Same here. My SO teases me whenever she sees one on my laptop, because she thinks I’m getting punished for being “bad” at identifying crosswalks and boats. Of c

by gen220 7y ago

Same here. My SO teases me whenever she sees one on my laptop, because she thinks I’m getting punished for being “bad” at identifying crosswalks and boats. Of course she uses chrome and never sees them. I swear the algorithm is: (if isFirefox and isUMatrixLoaded) It makes me wonder, are bots really more likely to use FF and ad blockers? Whenever I write scrapers and want to come off as human, I always use headless chrome spoofing non-headless chrome, and I never get captchas... I’m also vaguely aware of headless chrome botnets used to mine ads. They definitely don’t use uMatrix. :/ Is this anticompetitive in some way?

judge2020 7y ago
Headless browser scrapers might blacklist things they don't need, like ad domains and trackers, since all they do is slow down how long it takes for their desired content to load. The algorithm simply checks to see how often you check in with Google and how "human" your actions are based on the data you send to them via things like Search, Maps Location History, YouTube, Gmail, probably Chrome Sync, etc. If you're using a completely new Google Account and block all of Google's Trackers, choose to use FastMail for your actual email communications, and only occasionally watch YouTube, Google has every reason to believe your IP is a residential proxy that's being used by a bot or perhaps someone in a third world country working at a recaptcha farm. They can't completely prevent the latter from solving their Captchas but at that point all they need is for the farm worker to help Google tune its self driving dataset.
mcpeepants 7y ago
I don't think there's anything going on here explicitly targeting Firefox. Adblock/UMatrix/etc are doing their job, blocking cookies and other tracking and heuristics that allow sites to decide you are "likely human" and skip showing you a captcha. Using Chrome (and being logged in with your account connected to Chrome) is providing a heuristic that Firefox cannot, allowing you to skip captcha since you are being tracked by the browser itself. So it's more implicit than explicit.

by gen220 7y ago

judge2020 7y ago

Headless browser scrapers might blacklist things they don't need, like ad domains and trackers, since all they do is slow down how long it takes for their desired content to load. The algorithm simply checks to see how often you check in with Google and how "human" your actions are based on the data you send to them via things like Search, Maps Location History, YouTube, Gmail, probably Chrome Sync, etc. If you're using a completely new Google Account and block all of Google's Trackers, choose to use FastMail for your actual email communications, and only occasionally watch YouTube, Google has every reason to believe your IP is a residential proxy that's being used by a bot or perhaps someone in a third world country working at a recaptcha farm. They can't completely prevent the latter from solving their Captchas but at that point all they need is for the farm worker to help Google tune its self driving dataset.

mcpeepants 7y ago

I don't think there's anything going on here explicitly targeting Firefox. Adblock/UMatrix/etc are doing their job, blocking cookies and other tracking and heuristics that allow sites to decide you are "likely human" and skip showing you a captcha. Using Chrome (and being logged in with your account connected to Chrome) is providing a heuristic that Firefox cannot, allowing you to skip captcha since you are being tracked by the browser itself. So it's more implicit than explicit.