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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

I'm using a RasPi running Debian as my daily driver at home. It works pretty well except that I have to solve way more captchas with it than with any other computer on my home network.

Switching to a more common user agent recently helped only a little bit. At least that is what I believe, unfortunately I haven't done any measurements. It might well be that it helped not at all.

The irony is also that I'm permanently signed in to more services on this computer than on any other one in my household and that it is the only computer where cookies don't get purged regularly.

Also, I never used the RasPi for any automated tasks or anything else that could be interpreted as bot traffic.

The worst offender is Yandex, which is pretty much unusable because it let's me solve the captcha every few mouse clicks.

Any ideas how make a RasPi useable as a work computer?

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i run non default browser settings (disable canvas and force my fonts)

i see captcha everywhere. and try to avoid when i can. basically if it is a comercial site, bye. but gov sites are using it too now.

from time to time i even get into captcha hellban. which should be criminal since they are used in gov sites. hellban is specially cruel as your entire IP is served the same 10 round of images infinitelly.

I wonder how hard it would be to write a bot that would reliably hellban an IP. Then one could just drive around and get every open WiFi hellbanned.

I use a allow-only javascript setup. I've found that for the web browsing I do that cuts out essentially all extraneous junk. YMMV.

Log into Google, Yandex, Facebook, etc. These could very well be throwaway accounts (with real profiles locked into Firefox Container Tabs for example). This seem to work even with VPNs and non-residential IPv6, so hopefully it helps.

Not sure if the parent comment has been edited, but they did say they're already "permanently logged in" to a bunch of the services in question.

That's the strange thing about it. Being logged into regularly used, long-standing, healthy, real accounts that have only ever been used totally legitimately doesn't seem to help at all. Quite to the contrary I fear to damage the reputation of my decade old accounts by using an unusual device.

That's pretty odd, I doubt it has anything to do with the architecture and more to do with weather or not you're logged into a Google account.

I don't have a google account and use a desktop Linux-based OS on my phone. I have to solve the same captchas there as on my desktop.

Do you have IPv6 enabled? That seems to be a major contributor to the captchas I run into.

Why are you using yandex? Just curious, never heard of anyone outside of Russia using it, and even many Russians try to avoid it apparently.

Why not? Diversify your techno-overlord portfolio beyond DARPA.

Also using yandex quite a bit. Especially around heavily censored topics like covid-19.

Interesting. Didn’t think about that… are you not worried about things getting censored in the other direction?

Absolutely, always consider potential bias and motivation when searching and judging content. I probably censor search results myself in the form of selective link-result clicking and phrasing of search queries :-)

Can you give some examples of things you've been able to find out using Yandex that were censored on Google?

Try searching for "possible negative long term effect of mrna vaccines". Google will show lists of fact-check sites, WHO approved all pro-vaccine results. Yandex will show alternative sites like childrenshealthdefense.org, www.naturalnews.com with a contrarian view. I am not saying these are trustworthy sites but I want to see various viewpoints and not have the search engine be the judge. I think mRNA vaccines could be a game changer, but I also want an open discussion about the risks, especially long term, as in say negative effects on newborns from mRNA vaccinated woman.

Isn't DDG somehow related to yandex, hence all the Cyrillic results?

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