this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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I disagree. reCAPTCHA requires the use of non free JavaScript that is pretty much spyware. Such software should never be force on a user.
The other issue is that you are forcing users to do work. If I'm going to improve google maps then pay me
You have to do something to stop the bots. Any website allowing user generated content without CAPTCHAs in either submission or account creation is absolutely full of spam.
There are a few open source CAPTCHAs. Those are simple enough that anyone with a GPU can train a network against them and defeat every website using them.
The difficult ones for trivial bots are Google's and Cloudflare's. Both work by observing the user, doing some kind of behaviour analysis, and making you click boxes. Between Google and Cloudflare, I'm kt sure which one is worse to be honest. At least the Cloudflare one is easy to bypass with their Privacy Pass addon, I suppose.
I tried running a website without CAPTCHA of some sort, but bots ruin everything. They're indistinguishable from real people with real browsers, use real consumer IP addresses (through botnet and shady VPN addons), and are rented out for pennies per spam post. No website is safe.
Twitch has found an alternative solution against bots: fingerprinting the browser. That's why you can't log in with resistFingerprinting enabled on Twitch. Honestly, I prefer CAPTCHA in that case.
There is progress within the IETF to make a somewhat privacy preserving standard based on Apple's and Cloudflare's work (which is much less intrusive than Google's attempt) but it'll require signatures generated by a validated root of trust, either online (having the device/OS vendor hand out limited tokens per device) or through local hardware (secure boot + TPM, making browsing the web through Linux incredibly hard).
I'm pessimistic about the future of bot detection. If you think your privacy is being violated now, prepare for things to get worse.
You can try to avoid Google's CAPTCHAs by just not using websites using them, and maybe contacting the website owners with suggestions for alternatives. I doubt they'll bother, but it's worth a shot for the few websites thst do care.
What we need is a better internet...
How often are you going to a site that has a reCAPTCHA but doesn't use JavaScript?...
The issue for me isn't the JavaScript but the black box nature of it. I want code to be libre so I can study and modify it to my needs
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