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Comment by darkpuma | Hacker News Reader

reCAPTCHA's tile fade-in doesn't punish bots, it punishes real humans. Your argument might be valid if reCAPTCHA were a true CAPTCHA, rather than compliance/recruiting mechanism used by google to abuse people until they relent and adopt google products.

But yeah, it's free so you can't resist using it. Have you ever stopped to wonder why google gives this service out for free? When you integrate reCAPTCHA into your website, you're selling your users out.

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Humans are the problem, not some mythical AI powering the bots. It costs a fraction of a cent to get a CAPTCHA solved. The only real counter being used is making it take longer to solve a CAPTCHA - which is exactly what the services like reCAPTCHA do, while minimizing the impact on heuristically 'good' users.

Making CAPTCHA solves take 30 seconds or a minute instead of 5 seconds is the state of the art.

The heuristic google uses for 'good' is 'compliance with the google surveillance system.'

And if throttling attempts is in fact the state of the art as you claim, you can do that without pulling in google code at all. I trust you are that competent at least. However the fact that the noscript version doesn't make you wait at all leads me to conclude your excuse for google's behavior is bullshit.

Well, it's something that works. HN uses it, too. Try to create an account over Tor.

It sucks that abuse exists, but it's a real problem and it's only getting easier to do and harder to avoid.

After all, what also bones users is having a platform that's trivial to attack because the developer thought abuse wasn't going to be a problem.

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