Ask HN: Can you make me not feel like a robot? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can you make me not feel like a robot?

2 pointsseeing4 comments

I've been using Tor to read HN.

Each time I open Tor HN asks me to prove I'm legit by solving a CAPTCHA. No biggie, that's a small price to pay to read your favorite website.

Once you start clicking on stuff to read on HN though, you get more CAPTCHAs. Not from HN but probably from Cloudflare, like CAPTCHAs from medium.com. You even get them from jobsites under /jobs.

The irony of it all is the CAPTCHA asks you to check a box that reads "I'm not a robot."

What's the way forward? Does permanently having privacy equal permanently acting like a robot?

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Yes, or emulator normal behavior of many people. You could obtain relatively similar privacy by buying VPSes or VPN services with ZeroCoin/Bitcoin/whatever else you have that might be sufficiently private and then using those. The IP would be unique and not from Tor exits, the transactions would be irreversible so the providers don't mind that you're from onionland for fraud reasons. Once you've got the VPN or VPS, access it only over Tor. The risk now is that while your VPS purchase is relatively anonymous, you're now psuedonymous with your new VPS IP and your actions can be associated, just not all the way back to you. Depends on what your use case is whether this is acceptable or not. But it'll get you past captchas.

I follow two rules when faced with CAPTCHA while browsing through Tor:-

1) Don't solve CAPTCHA

2) Ignore the site and move on if it isn't reachable after asking Tor Browser to select a new circuit a few times.

To follow these rules is to protest (in a small way), but it might be better to email the site operators with one's concerns in the case of a favourite site.

But if there were no CAPTCHAs, presumably the site you want to visit would not exist (DDOS) or would be in such a state that you would not want to visit anyway (spam).

Is the only difference between DDOS or spammer requests and those from people who value privacy and anonymity that the latter are able to solve a CAPTCHA? Or could could Cloudflare et al do a much better job?

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