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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

> For example, Steam has a system where if you enter too many invalid passwords, it will present you with a captcha which you can never actually solve.

I call this "login gaslighting" and it's evil. Pioneered by the "do no evil" company.

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ReCaptcha does a similar tactic but rather than unsolvable it's a stream of the most annoying captcha -- "select all of image until none are left". Fail one and you're back at the start. You do have the option to cycle captcha, but 9/10 times it'll be this one. Eventually you'll get locked out of captcha entirely. Anyone who has used Tor on Google has probably experienced this.

The worst cpatcha has got to be Rockstar games support. You have to click all the images of rolled dice that sum up to 13, 5 times in a row. Then another 5 for some reason. If you make one mistake, you go back to 0.

Would it be “Tor on Google” or “Google on Tor” unless you mean you’re running a Tor node on gcp I would think it would be the latter?

> ReCaptcha does a similar tactic but rather than unsolvable it's a stream of the most annoying captcha -- "select all of image until none are left".

In such a situation, I often think: isn't the fact that one makes "stupid mistakes" when attempting to solve a ReCaptcha rather a sign that the entity that is attempting to solve it is a human?

I'm sure they build in tolerance and even take advantage of this signal, yes. The result is still far from reliable, though.

The smug gaslighting and intentional time wasting after an incorrect identification is the worst.

> Anyone who has used Tor on Google has probably experienced this.

Just having a VPN + private mode is enough. That's how Google pushed me into becoming a happy DDG user.

So that's what that was... Was trying to do something legit, MS gave me a puzzle to solve, it was unsolvable in the time given, it wasted maybe 20 mins. Can't remember what it was, I think create an account for visual studio (you had to sign in to an MS account to keep using free VS, the wankers).

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

Well, look at that! Thanks

People reports getting much easier puzzles when they use Edge.

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