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Show HN: FriendlyCaptcha – a privacy friendly proof-of-work based CAPTCHA

• theredlotus 6y ago
  Oh this is great! I hate filling in captchas... would be so cool if the web could get rid of that need
• protoduction 6y ago
  I built FriendlyCaptcha over the past 2 months because I was tired of there being no good alternatives to Google's ReCAPTCHA and the like that your users won't hate you for. FriendlyCaptcha is based on proof-of-work (think hashcash): instead the user labeling fire hydrants in images, they commit their device to doing computations for at least a couple of seconds. The idea is that the cost of an attack is not so different for a spammer: instead of running a ML model to label the images (or solve the audio challenge) they would need to solve the proof-of-work challenge. That's probably good enough for most if not all websites, and compares favorably against ReCAPTCHA which has many issues (privacy, accessibility, bundle size & bandwidth, menial tasks, customizability, closed-source). The attacker shouldn't be able to use much more optimized code, which is where WebAssembly comes in: the FriendlyCaptcha solver is WASM based (with JS fallback) which achieves close to native speeds. The solver [0] and widget [1] are all open source so you can play with it or customize it for your website. In case you missed it on the main website, there is a demo here [2]. [0]: https://github.com/gzuidhof/friendly-pow https://github.com/gzuidhof/friendly-pow [1]: https://github.com/gzuidhof/friendly-challenge https://github.com/gzuidhof/friendly-challenge [2]: https://friendlycaptcha.com/demo https://friendlycaptcha.com/demo
• alokjnv10 6y ago
  Nice
• mato93 6y ago
  This is super cool
• satotious 6y ago
  Really interesting. It's good to see an opensource competitor to Google's reCaptcha.