this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
374 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
85615 readers
5754 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Maybe this is the kick up the arse companies need to finally start using hCaptcha or even Anubis.
I hope so, but it could easily come the other way. "We are so used to/deeply integrated/in a close strategic partnership with Google therefore we rather lose 5 % of our customers that care about privacy and are a pain in the ass for our data-driven business."
5% is huuuge overestimate. Maybe on a tech site or forum. On a regular website for the general public? Less than a rounding error. Remember, we are in a lemmy bubble
I know, it was largely exaggerated, but a smaller percentage makes the negative scenario drastically more realistic.
One can only hope. I know it likely won’t happen. But one has to have hope.
Maybe it's the kick in the ass they need to just cut out captchas completely, since they do absolutely nothing to block bots.
They do though. The point of captchas isn't to block all bots, that's never going to happen. They are there to block the low effort bot army that's rampaging across the internet which is effectively a DDOS stack on smaller servers.
Big AI companies throw petabytes of Data into their models. Instead of crawling and saving it once, they just index each site worth using and scrap the data each time they train a model. As a server owner you either block the scrappers with a captcha or you blanked ban IP ranges that are known for scraping.
Sure, they may block the most basic of basic bots. But for most languages in which bots are made, there are ready-made libraries for captcha solving that are essentially plug-and-play. To move from "basic" to "makes captcha useless" is an install and about 2 lines of code.
Given that, I highly doubt it blocks bots as effectively as it blocks actual users.
AFAIK all captcha is good for these days is training data.
We've moved to Cloudflare's turnstile and it's significantly less obnoxious.
Unless you use a VPN and run any kind of script blocker like noscript or uBlock Origin's medium or hard modes.
So fucking obnoxious.
Yup. I've had to add exceptions to my VPN for this reason. Mainly food/grocery delivery sites for some reason
Fuck cloudflare in general though...
Please not hCaptcha. It's basically guaranteed to generate infinite loops.
Can’t say I’ve come across that before
It's almost every time for me. Maybe they don't like my ad blocker or my browser's privacy settings but it's rare for hCaptcha to let me through after three or four repetitions.
Usually I give up after ten because of it won't let me in by then it won't let me in after a hundred. I tried.
It should work if you use a Firefox based browser with tracking protection set to strict and resistFingerprinting disabled, then use Jshelter with the following settings.
Then visit fingerprint.com in a normal window, then visit it again in private mode with a VPN or with a dufferent server selected. You will see that the ID is different both times which proves that you're protected.
As for the adblocker, just use uBlock Origin with the Quick Fixes list disabled as it may shadowban YouTube comments because their bot protection is silent.
That is... a rather byzantine list of requirements to get a captcha service to work as opposed to just running a Firefox derivative with tracking protection on standard and a default-configuration uBO (which is the specific configuration that led to the 100 repetitions, not some kind of recommendation).
A standard Firefox is not private and is easily fingerprintable. Those settings give you good privacy but won''t make most captchas fail.
I am perfectly aware that these settings aren't very private and I usually run something a bit tighter. My point was that even a mostly vanilla setup couldn't get past hCaptcha.
Yes just like they all actively support the Firefox browser...