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Comment by meruru | Hacker News Reader

I recommend the privacy.resistFingerpriting about:config mentioned. It's been available for a while and does other things too, like changing your user agent.

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I've been using privacy.resistFingerprinting for a while and also recommend it, but there is one major "side effect": your reCAPTCHA score will drop to 0.1 making many websites really tedious to use. It's a price I'm willing to pay though...

Making recaptcha worthless by making it so intrusive no one will use it.

I love this idea. Recaptcha is god awful.

It could work if Firefox had as much marketshare as Chrome...

reCAPTCHA is a Google thing so it gets blocked in my browser already anyway (by uMatrix). If I need to load it to see a website, I close the tab immediately and go somewhere else.

You need reCAPTCHA to log into HN (or at least I do when I'm working from some parts of the middle east)

I log into HN almost everyday, each time from a different location (Tor) and I've never seen a reCAPTCHA on HN.

Sounds like you might have been going through some sort of proxy...

I use a mobile app and have gotten errors saying I need to solve a captcha. Since I can't do that on this app, it just means I'll stop commenting for a couple days until HN decides to stop bothering me.

That's happened twice, and it really hasn't been a big deal. I've never actually done a captcha for HN, it's just not worth it to me.

Which HN app are you using? Materialistic (Android) and Hackers (iOS) have worked for me with no CAPTCHA issues, even with a VPN.

https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic

https://github.com/weiran/Hackers

Do you never buy anything online or log into anything? They're blocked for me too but I will unblock them temporarily when the need arises.

Just another one of 10 thousand reasons why reCAPTCHA is utter cancer on the web. I've been traveling a lot for the past few years and public wifi combined with a bunch of other things makes _my_ reCapatcha ask me to answer multiple queries every single time.

By this point if I see reCaptcha I just close the window unless it's something _really_ important.

Also reCaptcha isn't any more secure than any other recent captcha solution when it comes to bot protection FYI.

Just install Buster, it'll solve reCaptcha for you (just make sure to set a non-google STT engine)

No wonder reCAPTCHA sucks so hard. I hardly ever run into it, but it's a PITA.

> ne major "side effect": your reCAPTCHA score will drop to 0.1 making many websites really tedious to use.

I instantly leave a website that has this aggressive reCaptcha that uses free labour to train algorithms.

Dito. This thing must be boycotted

I personally take the route of training the algorithms poorly. It wants me to select streetlights? Fine, I'll pick all but one streetlight and maybe even a tree. Do I have to click more boxes because of this? For sure. Is it worth it? Yep.

>Is it worth it? Yep.

It is not. 100_000s of people got/will get the same picture and marked squares correctly.

Is there any reason this isn't on by default? I don't know exactly how it works, but to my understanding anti fingerprinting tech generally works better when everyone uses it (otherwise you stick out as the "anti fingerprinting" browser)

It can decimate useability for the average user.

Every time you see a Captcha, you may have to do four or five to be considered "human" because the system struggles to determine who you are.

> "because the system struggles to determine who you are. "

Is the tile fade-in also the system struggling to figure out who you are? No, it's vindictive. Punishment for not browsing the web the way google wants you to.

Or maybe it's to make it obvious that a tile has changed...

No, sorry but that's nonsense. reCAPTCHAv2 doesn't do the tile fade in unless your v3 score is low. The fade in I'm talking about can take one to five seconds per tile, plainly designed to annoy the user.

Here is a video of the fade-in in action: https://youtu.be/zGW7TRtcDeQ?t=89

(Note that you do not need to be on a shared IP to experience this. Merely using firefox with resist fingerprinting and a adblocker is enough to trigger this behavior on an IP google normally 'trusts' when using chrome.)

>Here is a video of the fade-in in action

Okay, I agree that's punitive. I've never seen a fade that slow, so it must be at the lowest levels of trust.

If you use a VPN (a popular one like PIA or ExpressVPN) you will almost always get a fade in that slow. And it is really annoying.

This happens to me all the time at home, I use Safari with uBlock Origin and reCaptcha never fails to decide to fuck with me.

I have a static IP address, and Google will happily give me a not-dick captcha if I use another browser without anti-tracking features enabled (even with a clean profile).

I submit all the time before realising one has started to change. It's terribly frustrating.

It'll considerably deteriorate your browsing experience due to various layers of "bot detection" stalking the web.

In addition to what other posters have said I noticed it hides timezone so messaging apps had timestamps which looked wrong because it thought I was somewhere else. Haven't used it in a while though so this may have been changed.

Aside from the downsides mentioned in other comments, this significantly reduces JS timer accuracy which will make games and WebGL laggy and unusable.

In about:config if you search for 'resistFingerprinting' there seem to be sub-settings which you can tweak to disable the timer modifications, but even after tweaking them I wasn't able to get performance to be as smooth as when resistFP was completely disabled.

Changing your user agent will do terrible things to captchas. I actually change my user agent specifically to test the fail state of captchas. I'd suggest only turning that on if you know what you're doing.

Which means its working well because captcha is a tracking tool.

Remember when first iteration of recaptcha was designed for to help digitize books?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ-xzwj_p_4

Now it's used for tracking and training proprietary road image recognition for some mega corporation that had a slogan of "do no evil", which is quite hysterical really.

There is no doubt in my mind that recaptcha data will be used to kill people in the future. Its all very useful for drones.

I agree it's wonderful. Helps with fighting trackers

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