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Comment by beefhash | Hacker News Reader

> That means Google services are entirely off-limits over Tor

If only it was Google services alone. CloudFlare loves serving up a ReCAPTCHA for Tor users before they can even passively read site contents. That hugely expands the damage done.

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Install the PrivacyPass Firefox or Chrome extension. It was developed by Cloudflare, Firefox, and Tor in partnership. It has you answer a ReCAPTCHA and using some crypto magic, generate a bunch of CAPTCHA bypass tokens that can't be traced to your specific computer.

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500199265...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-the-math/

https://github.com/privacypass/challenge-bypass-extension

Does not work with Tor.

The plugin requires "privacy passes". Those passes can be obtained by solving captchas, but when trying to do so, one is greeted with this message about being blocked: https://i.imgur.com/qXJfl6J.png

Try rebuilding your Tor circuit when this happens.

https://tb-manual.torproject.org/managing-identities/

This sort of breaks tor though, doesn't it? Tor works really well if you stay on the same circuit for a while since it reduces the chances you have a compromised circuit. If you start getting recaptcha to block every exit node except those you control, you essentially have amplified your effective strength on the tor network.

Tor is already broken for an adversary with that capability.

Slightly off-topic, but the users who use Tor regularly, how do you do that? For me, it has been terribly slow every time I tried to use it.

On Tor I get roughly 700 KB/s speeds, which isn't terrible for me

And what is that compared to any regular browser?

This sounds pretty good, but you still have to pass a captcha in order to get a pass, and sometimes that is impossible (or at least I just give up because I lost interest after 20 puzzles).

If it was developed in conjunction with Tor, how come it doesn't come bundled with the Tor browser or Tails?

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