Google isn't going out of their way to punish you for trying to protect your privacy. They're trying to stop unwanted traffic. By unfortunate happenstance, you appear to be disguising yourself in the exact same way a shocking amount of bad traffic is.
It should be default for the TOR browser for sure, if just a few people use it, it decreases the anonimity set.
The issue with just doing memory-consuming work client-side is that it only marginally slows down spamming. Spammers tend to use compromised machines they don't own. Unless you can make it prohibitively expensive to calculate something using machines you don't pay for - perhaps not a trivial ask - you wind up needing a different set of tools. This is why Google tends to look at things that will exhibit human variation rather than pure computation.
It's not that your ideas aren't good. I'm sure ARGON2 has a use here! It's that this might not be a problem easily solved by consuming more resources.
If you're putting constraints on Tor traffic, it's not because of raw throughput. It's because it's extremely poor quality traffic.
Do you have any data on this?
> On the other hand, anonymity is also something that provides value to online attackers. Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network.
The obvious caveats apply, of course. It's completely possible what Cloudflare saw at the time is no longer true and TOR is no longer mostly spam. It's equally fully possible that the traffic Cloudflare sees is wildly unrepresentative of what TOR traffic actually looks like, and it's mostly people worried about their privacy. This is just the data we have at the moment.
And also, isn't cloudflare also the one to allow booters and stressers to be online behind CF - and they used stolen CC's to boot?
The Tor decisions to screw users over is just the cherry on top. Especially is egregious is when a captcha is demanded on even a simple static page. Seems pretty obvious what's going on here.
We're not robots. We can shun white supremacists and leave everyone else alone. This isn't a slippery slope, it's just good sense (no more white supremacists, hey!). Humankind will get along just fine if we tack on that one extra rule and all follow it.
Murder now, for some, includes abortion.
Censorship now includes, for some, private companies removing bad actors from their private systems.
Come on, that's lazy to dismiss it that way when society literally changes all the time.
Whether or not abortion is a murder is not about definition of "murder" it is about definition of "human being".
There's no doubt that abortion involves killing a living creature, the whole pro-choice vs pro-life debate is basically about one simple question: "is fetus a human being?". If you answer that with "yes", then every abortion becomes a murder, plain and simple.
This also explains why there will never be a compromise between two crowds: it is logically impossible to compromise on yes/no questions.
The definition is commonly agreed upon, and what "white supremacist" means is not at all controversial to most people. It certainly isn't so arbitrary as to be meaningless.
Now, the term may be misapplied at times, as may any term, but for it to be misapplied, it has to have an accepted application to begin with. A term without a definition can't be subject to definition creep, and the possible creep of a term like "white supremacist" is that wide to begin with.
And when you have malicious traffic swimming in an anonymous pool, there's no practical alternative but to block all of it.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass...
Another thing that sets it off is virtual machine usage, I can be logged into chrome and gmail on the same residential IP for hours but the moment I try to search google for a problem inside a VM it's a minute of slow loading captchas.
Have moved to bing instead, that sort of wasted productivity is a burden.
I use Firefox with a few basic extensions (Privacy badger, uBlock, Google Container) yet every time I am presented with having to pick out traffic lights over and over and over again. I usually have about 5 or 6 "challenges" before I give up and use another site.
My timezone has not changed, my IP address and rough location has not changed, my screensize has not changed, my broadband speed has not changed, and my general computer dexterity has not changed, yet I am relentlessly targeted. On chrome I never saw these challenges, but on firefox with the privacy plug-ins I am always always always challenged.
At this stage I think the only signal it is using is "is there a google cookie in this browser? and if so has the google cookie got some 'normal' looking activity logged against it?" I.e. they are checking their server-side logs for a given cookie ID and seeing if that looks normal or not (i.e. seen on google search, seen on youtube, seen ads from a variety of third parties on various different sites, mixed up with time of day and speed of viewing etc etc).
Since I have got Google in a container in Firefox, I am guessing that my google cookie is not present when the captcha loads (due to the containers and privacy badger et al) so there is no identity back in the mothership to compare me against.
That's because Google isn't just profiling "Tor users". They're going after anyone who values privacy in any way or technology.
Simply put, you're being punished for ensuring privacy. And anybody who uses Google's captcha services is an accessory to that.
The clever part from Google's perspective is that you have to trade one of these things to Google in order to get access to sites that do not belong to Google at all. Google convinced site owners to have their users pay a tax to Google.
When someone uses a recaptcha, they should think about why they are doing so. It's one thing to use it to save a business model, but it's another to use it to protect information that should be free anyway. The elephant in the room is government data. Many government agencies think that selling their data can be a nice source of side revenue, and a recaptcha is a good way of enforcing it. In reality, they just increase the costs for everyone, and those with means can obtain the information while those without means cannot.
Governments need to release their data, freely, without captchas or fees for single users and bulk users, no exceptions.
Totally agree. Fortunately the Dutch government is trying to make as much data open as they reasonably can, and regularly organise events to encourage developers to use their open APIs.
The counter argument is that they do a great job with trivial stuff like registered dog's names, and less well with sensitive/important issues like policing.
What's the right way to leverage the platform developed for the first into the second?
captcha is google master blow against ad blockers.
a regular user, who they have all the info, give them dollars per ad impression. You, with your doNotTrack (ha! that was a joke) and privacy addons makes them only cents per ad impressions.
you are google's enemy. remember this when you get stuck in captcha hell (and consequently censored from most sites until changing device/ip)
I rarely see the "I am not a robot" box, and hasn't seen image recognition tasks for a long-long time.
If they lose enough customers over this, they will probably remove the captcha.
My VPN must have gotten white listed (or cracked down on some of their traffic patterns) because that stopped.
This does not agree with my experience. I browse without cookies and severely limited javascript (using umatrix), and I also encounter the myriad of ridiculous inconveniences that the OP was referring to. On the good side, however, the web is much faster and generally less annoying.
Isn't this also something that many bots do (don't run javascript and don't have realistic cookies)? It seems like just another instance of reducing your distance from the "bot" cluster in agent-space.
I personally don't care too much about the hassle, but I really don't like the idea that I'm basically playing Artificial "Intelligence"/doing clickworking for the not so community oriented efforts of Google.
That's a massive load of bullshit. Google has a captcha challenge that only humans can solve. That alone is already sufficient to prevent unwanted traffic. That is how every captcha system works. However google is an exception. If you're logged in to a google account or are using chrome then google can use that information to track your captcha history. Privacy minded people avoid google like the plague and therefore they cannot be tracked.
>Google isn't going out of their way to punish you for trying to protect your privacy. Except this is exactly what happens. It's not "unfortunate". It works like this by design.
If google cannot track you then the captcha will force you to do something that no other captcha system does: give you even more challenges even if you have solved them correctly. You will spend the next 5 minutes solving captchas correctly and then at the end it will tell you you've failed. This again is unique to google: correct answers lead to failure. The problem immediately goes away if you let google track you, it doesn't matter how bot infested the network is. No other captcha system does it this way.
Google is clearly doing this to get free labour to label their datasets, force people to have a google account and encourage them to use chrome.
A lot of the behavior that captcha exhibits is in part a function of feature analysis from ML models - features that may seem ridiculous to layman humans but make sense to a neural net plugged into the data.
If you do everything you can to prevent google from knowing who you are, don't be surprised when they behave like they don't know who you are.
I took that to mean they were blocking cookies
It's not bullshit, it just depends whether your website is being targeted directly or not. We're targeted directly and the robots hitting us are getting the CAPTCHAs solved, presumably with human help.
Also, I’m just not interested in the remaining 10% "legit" traffic from people who are aggressively paranoid about their privacy. Almost all of them ended up being dickheads who were using TOR to abuse other members of our community.
To the people who think every website should treat TOR users with respect, please understand that you are intentionally making yourself indistinguishable from the mountain of robotic junk, abuse and human dickheads. It's not my fault that you have chosen to do this, and it's not my job to provide you with tools to prove you're not a dickhead.
...or maybe voting me down will change the facts.
Yeah, that's totally going to work.
Click all boxes with traffic lights. Ok, well, this one box just barely contains the bottom right corner of the traffic light. Click. Nope, that little corner didn't count. Try again. Ok, well on this one, the right side of the traffic light is only barely over the line, so I won't click it. Nope, that sliver of the light mattered this time. MF!
Thankfully they'll eventually fall back to the "click the images of _object_ until there are no pictures left with a(n) _object_" in it, but those clicking block ones of a specific picture are super frustrating.
Spambots will solve the Sorites paradox!
I'm guessing they do something like load up a batch of images and once N people agree on one, record the answer and remove it from the rotation. You end up left with the ambiguous images where people couldn't agree.
Does this look like a mountain to you? https://0x0.st/zzvr.jpg
Google's image classifier would think that's a mountain. If you disagree, google will classify you as a robot. After failing these sort of challenges a few times the user decides to play along and tell google what they think google wants to hear, rather than the truth.
Especially if this is all used for learning, enough people saying "that is clearly not a mountain" would reinforce that it's, in fact, probably not a mountain. Even if I got classified as a robot, I'm not sure I would think "oh, a system designed to classify images would think this not-a-mountain is a mountain", so I definitely wouldn't double down and keep marking it as a mountain. I'd, well, not. And assume the system is at least as good as classifying the images it chooses to use as I am.
Because every single time it asks me to classify mountains it rejects my answers if I don't click on trees on the horizon (and often trees on the horizon are the only "mountains" presented) and every single time it accepts the answer that such trees are mountains. I've gotten the mountains challenge dozens of times, the results are very consistent. If there is a group of trees on the horizon, that is asserted to be a mountain.
> "enough people saying "that is clearly not a mountain" would reinforce that it's, in fact, probably not a mountain."
Totally irrelevant because if I am trying to get through a google captcha, it's because that captcha is standing in the way of me doing something. My interest is in passing the captcha, not correcting Google's shitty image classifier. So I have absolutely no incentive to make my life harder by insisting on correct answers, and every incentive to tell Google what they want to hear.
I guess this is where the misunderstanding is. You don't think Google wants to hear the correct answer?
Trying to guess at what the daily/monthly flavor of "correct" is seems like it'd do more harm than good, resulting in some kind of nondeterministic guessing game of "well, trees on the horizon are probably assumed to be a mountain" that never settles on actually-correct answers (and, I'd wager, is often more inconvenient to the user than just answering correctly would be, because now there's a layer of indirection on what they think a system thinks of an image, rather than just what they think of that image).
If everyone just answered "no, that's trees" instead of a hand-wavy "I think you think it's a mountain", I feel like this captcha would be significantly easier for us humans (because we could actually give real answers), as well as less inconvenient for people who just want to pass on through and get on with whatever they were doing before a site wanted to verify they weren't a bot (because they can just, well, identify images instead of playing a game of "what does the machine think?").
They may want it but they don't reward it. I don't care what sort of answer they want, I only care what sort of answer they accept. I'm not going to donate my time to these bastards by doing anything more than what's necessary to pass their captcha.
> "If everyone just answered "no, that's trees" instead of a hand-wavy "I think you think it's trees","
That's just not going to happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
My naive assumption is that you should click the "refresh" button in these cases.
Another one is "click the mountains". It typically won't let you through unless you click anything with trees on the horizon, even if the terrain is clearly flat. Google's robot thinks mountains are made out of wood, and any human who disagrees is labeled a robot. It's insanity.
And, does the pole count?
The whole thing is way more stressful than it needs to be for what it is.
It's always annoying though.
The image classifications that you do, however, are used to train the computer vision system.
TOR doesn't protect your privacy, it just lumps you in with—and makes you indistinguishable from—the worst crap on the internet. If you don't want to be treated like crap, don't try to blend in with the crap.
A very good addon against the shit from Cloudflare and Google.
The difficulty is probably cranked all the way up
if you care about all that, run a node without internet exit, and also strive to make your sites available on tor (hate the "hidden service" nomenclature)