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Stop visiting sites and using services that use reCAPTCHA. Problem solved.
by getpokedagain 5mo ago
Stop visiting sites and using services that use reCAPTCHA. Problem solved.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- tardedmeme 5mo agoWith the new reCAPTCHA this is going to happen because most human visitors will actually be unable to pass the CAPTCHA. It will be interesting to see whether this makes websites ditch reCAPTCHA or whether they literally just don't care about having customers, an attitude that seems to be getting more and more common every day.
- g-b-r 5mo agoOne problem with these things is that businesses have minimal visibility on the amount of users they lose. On the opposite, if they see reports of many visitors not completing the captcha, they're likely to think "Wow so many bots!!! This defense nowadays is indispensable..!". Sometimes you need to pass a captcha even to contact them (if you want to tell them that you can't pass their captcha).
- jbvlkt 5mo agoI wanted to give money to charity and they have whole form protected by recaptcha. So I would have to allow all my personal information and amount donated sent to google (and agree with google terms for data processing). I have contacted them but they did not understand why this is problem they just wanted to protect themself against bots. IMHO unless those things are not disallowed by antitrust laws we have lost.
- vanviegen 5mo agoWe wouldn't want bots throwing money at us!
- sfilmeyer 5mo agoI suspect this is a real problem for charities, though. If those bots are using stolen credit cards, the "donations" are going to cost the charities money after they pay extra fees to the credit card processors. Nonprofits are sometimes used to test stolen credit cards before making more profitable fraudulent transactions, so there's a real risk of it costing them money if they get rid of the captcha but don't replace it with something sufficiently high quality, even after accounting for the occasional lost donation.
- g-b-r 5mo agoWhy would they pay extra fees?
- sfilmeyer 5mo agoMerchants often pay a chargeback fee on top of refunding the main charge. Additionally, merchants with lots of fraud or other chargeback issues are likely to be dropped by payment processors or see their general fees with payment processors get more expensive.
- bar000n 5mo agoi say technofeudalism, not sure i know what i'm writing about though
- chadgpt2 5mo agoLuckily the marketplace of money will ensure that businesses who block their customers shrink and businesses who don't block their customers grow.
- papercruncher 5mo agoI have been unable to give my money to Home Depot, REI and a growing list of online retailers because they use Akamai EdgeSuite, which just assumes I am a bot and 403s on protected API calls. This happens consistently on any IP and any browser on my Linux desktop/laptop.
- drew870mitchell 5mo agoSame, i'm doing a kitchen reno and gave up on Home Depot because of this
- spystath 5mo agoThere are not enough words to describe how much I hate Akamai EdgeSuite. So many random validation loops and 403s across different physical computers, different operating systems, different connections and even countries. A couple of services I need use it and it's 30% I'll make it past their stupid "protection".
- userbinator 5mo agoHome Depot at least has a physical presence, which you can go and directly give some much-needed feedback to.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoIt has a zero percent chance of reaching anyone who can do anything about it. You could try handwriting and posting a letter to their CEO. I think that sometimes works. Probably not very often but there are more than zero CEOs who read those letters.
- komali2 5mo agoREI is allegedly a co-op, maybe there's a committee or something it could be presented to?
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
- raincole 5mo ago> most human visitors will actually be unable to pass the CAPTCHA Most human visitors will never ever notice the change. reCAPTCHA is completely invisible for most human visitors because they are allowed to pass just by fingerprint. It's not like an average user is going to have to scan a QR code every time they visit a site via web browser. If it were like this then it would be a non-issue because no sane website would adopt this system. But it isn't.
- pixel_popping 5mo agoThis is not true, maybe in the US, but in many countries you get captchas all the time with residential connection and also in public places all the time, internet cafe, airports, cafe wifis and so, they'll at least get it once, that way there is a permanent fingerprint correlation with real identity, I can bet that EVERYBODY will get it at some point so Google and other people on board with this atrocity (webmasters are also accomplice) can finish-up the master plan.
- sandworm101 5mo ago>> whether they literally just don't care about having customers So every government website. Every website where people simply have no choice (DMV) or where failure to login results in them not claiming the money/benefits they are due (all tax websites). And every website handling post-sale complaints (Airlines, insurance).
- sumeno 5mo ago> most human visitors will actually be unable to pass the CAPTCHA Most human visitors will pull out their smartphone and just do it without giving it much thought.
- g-b-r 5mo agoYeah, live in a cave, and problem solved. However much I hate it, right now among the sites using reCAPTCHA there are many that I strongly want to use. Let's find a better solution please
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago[dead]
- g-b-r 5mo agosieabahlpark, I probably hate this more than you, you misunderstood
- flatIronSteak 5mo ago> Let's find a better solution please Is there an argument here that Google is creating a monopoly? Could this be challenged on similar grounds that forced Microsoft to recommend other browsers to users on Windows?
- KPGv2 5mo agoThere is, but at least in the US neither party cares. They want to get rid of anonymity online, one to throw anyone who googles "trans" in jail, and the other because their biggest donors are tech companies that want to denonymize everyone. Our antitrust laws have been toothless for decades, and both parties love billionaires controlling the rest of us with an iron fist. GrapheneOS is looking more and more worth the headache that my limited free time generally does not like. I don't need Google to know my smut fanfiction is written by my IRL.
- ggiigg 5mo agoFelt same way about GrapheneOS but a few friends set it up so i gave it a try. It is easy to install and use. As evidence, I gave my 70 year old father one and he loves it.
- 5mo ago
- reaperducer 5mo agoStop visiting sites and using services that use reCAPTCHA. Problem solved. No. Bigger problem created, since there are innumerable government, health care, and educational web sites that use reCAPTCHA. I'm not going to give up reading the test results from my doctor because of some simplistic ideologue decides that it's "problem solved."
- unethical_ban 5mo agoI agree, and I think CAPTCHA is a disservice on public websites.
- majorchord 5mo ago> I'm not going to give up reading the test results from my doctor You could just call them.
- andwur 5mo agoOh just wait, the AI phone service on their side will be more than happy to complete your device attestation key challenge by touch tone. We have to make sure you are still you after all! But in all seriousness, many services are making it difficult through to impossible to communicate outside of their web or app platforms. Call centres are expensive and messy, and it's now apparently acceptable as a society to treat customers/clients/whatever as adversaries so they can get away with making it hard to communicate with them.
- petre 5mo agoI was unable to book a doctors meeting through the clinic's website, so I declared "screw tech" and called their call center, which still worked better. The app just searched for the "first available spot" and never found anything. If they axe the call center I'm going to have to go to their place.
- getpokedagain 5mo agoOr ask for a print out.
- lxgr 5mo agoI'd love to, but I'd not be able to visit many sites anymore thanks to Cloudflare...
- vasco 5mo agoSo what are you doing here? > Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? [0] > dang > No recent changes, but we do sometimes turn captchas on for logins when HN is under some kind of (possible) attack or other. That's been happening for a few hours. Hopefully it goes away soon. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34312937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34312937
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo agoHN uses reCAPTCHA under certain conditions
- getpokedagain 5mo agoI've not hit it but that would suck.
- pixel_popping 5mo agoI doubt they would let users be KYCed to access HN frankly, I seriously hope not at least.
- palata 5mo ago> Stop visiting sites and using services that use reCAPTCHA. Problem solved. Not solved at all: 99.999% of users don't give a damn and use a Google-signed Android. My opinion is that because they don't give a damn does NOT mean regulations should not protect them. What Google is doing here is anticompetitive and they should be fined (antitrust and all that).
- pixel_popping 5mo agoI don't see the correlation with Google-signed android actually, people really want to have this friction when they visit a website? Like having to get your phone from another room, use camera and all that to access a website? This is so anti-pattern and is also disrespectful toward consumers, any webmaster participating into this imo should rethink his career and morality.
- duskdozer 5mo agoThat's great until it's some essential government, medical, educational, etc. service that you have either no alternative to or no alternative that isn't also using the same thing. I'm already being slowly and incrementally softlocked out of some (fortunately non-essential so far) sites either by cloudflare or other more subtle "anti-bot" networks as time goes on, including some like I've listed above. I can only expect this will continue until it's something I can't avoid.
- medvidek 5mo agoFor some reason, I'm softlocked from booking tickets from Deutsche Bahn. The website errors out with a cryptic "Your browser's behavior resembles that of a bot." message with no option to try again or pass a captcha or whatever. The website itself described several possible solutions but none helped (I tried using different computers, different internet connections, even a phone connected to internet using a SIM from a different country). As for now, when I need to travel to Germany, I just book tickets through the national carrier of my home country, which for cross-border tickets often turns out to actually be cheaper than booking through DB. Thankfully I don't live in Germany proper and my need for travel there is not that high (once or twice a year at most) but I wonder what would I do if I had to move to Germany and use trains there more often.
- bluebarbet 5mo agoSame problem but with French equivalent SNCF (sncf-connect.com). I just checked and can confirm nothing has changed. You cannot use up-to-date Firefox on Linux to access the main booking site for French rail tickets. Access is temporarily restricted We detected unusual activity from your device or network. Reasons may include: -Rapid taps or clicks -JavaScript disabled or not working -Automated (bot) activity on your network (IP X.X.X.X) -Use of developer or inspection tools
- duskdozer 5mo agoDoes it work if you spoof the user agent? > -Use of developer or inspection tools Gotta love it.
- mekoka 5mo ago[dead]
- IshKebab 5mo agoOr stop spreading this extraordinarily naive view of how the world works.
- jollymonATX 5mo agoRemoving recaptcha from my sites now actually. Its not much, but its something.