Hacker News Reader

Comment by throaway46546 | Hacker News Reader

If it gets people to switch from reCAPTCHA I am all for it. I have a lot of privacy extensions installed, piHole, etc and reCAPTCHA is a nightmare for me. I often get multiple reCAPTCHAs and my favorite is what I call the "infinite reCAPTCHA" where it keeps on loading in more and more tiles for me to select at a painfully slow rate.

In addition it has been showing up tons of places it absolutely should not be. For example during the pandemic I had to apply for food stamps and unemployment. Both the LA County DPSS website and the EDD website have implemented reCAPTCHA. This is a privacy nightmare. It should be no business of google who is on public benefits, but the state of California and LA county are basically selling this information to google.

View on HN

I agree this is incredibly annoying, and usually leads me to just close the tab rather than try to get past it. Their loss. Obviously you can't do this for food stamps, so when it is necessary to get past one I keep a burner Firefox profile in my .bashrc:

    alias firefox-throwaway="firefox -no-remote -profile $(mktemp -d)"

This creates a command `firefox-throwaway` that starts Firefox with a new profile located in /tmp. Since it's not got any about:config customisations it usually works with reCAPTCHA (as far as Firefox works at all with reCAPTCHA...).

Fortunately (?) reCAPTCHA v3 [1] does not seem to be covered by this patent. Instead of clicking endless traffic lights these sites will just share all your browsing activity with Google for automatic black box verification.

[1] https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3

I would, uh, answer your parenthetical question mark with a huge "no." reCAPTCHA v3 is basically "user tracking, but this time if we can't track them we assume they're a bot."

I think you could (can? can't verify now) set fade:none to at least make it less immeasurably annoying to look at. It's one of my first examples when I talk about hostile software, it cannot have been developed the way it is without some degree of ill intentions, due to its extensive usage online also.

Switch to what? Patent trolls can sue other Captcha users just as well.

The patent is on Captcha, not on using Google. It even appears to be a patent on image Captcha, and Google is the main provider of non image Captchas.

Switch to not using Captchas I'd say. Technology can already beat them a solid percentage of the time, so they're becoming just an obsolete tool for blocking obsolete attacks. With ten years left on the patents, amusingly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com