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Comment by seieste | Hacker News Reader

There are government services, such as the USPTO, that rely on Google reCAPTCHA. The new reCAPTCHA has made it difficult for me to access documents, and sometimes they think that I'm a bot and thus deny me access entirely.

Does the government realize the consequences of this? Both that it pushes users to use Chromium-based browsers, and that they're helping to solidify a company that already has a near monopoly in the browser space?

Further, this quote is very creepy:

> To make this risk-score system work accurately, website administrators are supposed to embed reCaptcha v3 code on all of the pages of their website, not just on forms or log-in pages.

With AMP, Google Ads, and reCAPTCHA, Google now has access to pretty much everything that people do on the web.

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To be fair, government at all levels did the same for Adobe by mandating that things be done in the PDF file format. Consistency of government operations sometimes requires that certain private companies be preferred vendors, and of course there's going to be a snowball effect there as big players get increasingly larger shares of available funds. Every government in history has had a government-industrial complex with winners and losers - some of this boils down to human nature.

> Consistency of government operations sometimes requires that certain private companies be preferred vendors

In which case those private companies should now be deemed an extension of the government and fall under all rules a government organization has to abide by. If they do not like it they can forbid the government from using their software/products and can sue if the government does not abide.

You are required to use reCAPTCHA on the California DMV website when making appointments and other functions.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov

It will also log you in to google on the first page.

Additionally, the stations at the DMV all have tablets on stands, showing Google logins for some operations.

When did this start? I used the DMV page without a google account in February with no issues, and the local DMV has no tablets as of May.

It's been quite a while. At some point in the last year maybe with google blocked, it became impossible to register for a DMV appointment. Filling in the forms and pressing submit ended up with an unhelpful "Server Unavailable" and "Call xxx-xxx-xxxx during business hours"

I was amused that Elizabeth Warren's campaign site wouldn't display the content for me unless I permitted scripts from google.com (w/ umatrix) since she is promoting breaking up google.

Although you can be pro break-up-Google while using one, or even many, of their services.

So I don't really see the amusement.

Reminds me of Matt Bors' Mister Gotcha: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha

The belief these days is that when someone does something wrong everyone must shun them and not do business with them. Her website didn't have to use Google services as there are many alternatives.

It seems foolish to me to target Google while simultaneously sending a constant feed of data about people visiting your campaign site.

In this case the only "service" it appeared to be using was hosting for jquery...

It's typical of politicians not to run their own organizations in the same way as they say the world should be run; campaign organizations are a bit fly-by-night, and political platforms are more or less flexible by necessity.

I think it comes from the sad fact that, generally, ambitious politicians create organizations to get themselves elected, rather than previously-existing and purposeful organizations presenting candidates that represent that organization's values to a larger audience.

Makes me wonder if this could cause those sites to run afoul of the ADA? (I'm admittedly not very familiar with the requirements, but thought it was interesting to consider).

I do wonder what these government offices can do otherwise to prevent spam - I can run `curl` on the Georgia DDS appointment listing page and I get back all available slots. Assuming there isn't a captcha later in this process, it would be trivial to build a bot that books fake appointments for the next 5 weeks.

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