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Comment by koenvdb | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain why captcha is controlling our digital lives? I mean sure they can force me to find a boat on every picture but other than that they don't really control me as far as I know.

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If the CAPTCHA provider deems you unworthy to proceed, the fadeout delay after each action will get excessively long, and the number of CAPTCHAs you have to complete will just keep increasing without bound, until you give up.

I have experienced this. On VPN I have to select specific countries in order to get through CAPTCHAs. Some countries no issue, some countries it's CAPTCHA after CAPTCHA until I give up.

They add so much noise to the picture, too. It can take over a minute to solve a single captcha. The funny thing is that by doing this, they're punishing the poor offshore workers I hired to solve captchas for me in the first place.

The point of captcha isn't that you find boats on pictures. It's that you score high enough on some opaque metric.

That's why captchas come in different forms: math challenges, sound recognition, snooping on clicks, as well as captchas that will keep serving you challenges forever without ever accepting your answer.

If you can't hit the score, you won't be allowed in.

Test it for yourself:

1. Install Firefox

2. Open Firefox and solve a ReCaptcha

3. Install Chromium

4. Open Chromium and solve a ReCaptcha

Notice the difference between Firefox and Chromium?

Google's ReCaptcha is gracious with Chromium/Google Chrome. You can even make mistakes and it still valid. With Firefox (and maybe other) browsers on the other hand... why not increasing the difficulty/challenge for them? -.-

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