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Comment by cracker_jacks | Hacker News Reader

The other tradeoff is you're giving Google an extraordinary amount of power to decide who is allowed and not allowed on your website with no transparency on how this decision was made. Not sure what company is willing to blindly trust Google with that power.

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Unfortunately, the answer is (basically) all of them. Combined with CloudFlare, even websites that aren't explicitly making that decision are still opting their users into both CloudFlare and Google's tracking.

I use Tor fairly regularly and it's a complete nightmare. I sometimes spend 5-15 minutes solving reCAPTCHA (since your Tor circuit changes every 10 minutes this can result in having to solve the reCAPTCHA several times).

Crummy solution, but get the FF user agent switcher in TBB.

And then set it to Windows/Chrome. And all those Scroogle-captchas are easy-peasy.

I can't help but wonder if that's because of the nearly unique user-agent-string + user-agent-feature-detection combination, allowing it to identify you as belonging to a very small group of people.

can you expound on this? not sure I grok

     1. Download Tor Browser Bundle
     2. Connect to the Tor network
     3. Download a user-agent switcher in the plugin store in TBB
     4. Change user-agent to "windows, chrome"

Plenty of small companies/private website owners might make a simple cost/benefit calculation - 15% less users but in return X reduced false accounts/traffic/...

This is a problem that has to be solved by government regulation, “the market” has already made up its mind: It doesn’t give a fuck.

What is there to regulate? Bots are already illegal and "the market" has decided it does care, which is why reCAPTCHA exists and is widely used. Those companies aren't rejecting legitimate users/customers out of spite.

The last thing the internet needs is "government regulation". If that were to happen, you could kiss everything you love about the internet goodbye. Governments do a horrible job regulating basically everything else other than critical, necessary services, and the jury is still out even on that one. Why would they suddenly do such a better job regulating something we're still all trying to figure out?

Bank of America is...

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