I've seen multiple people break botguard (the obfuscation used by recapcha) within the last year when before it was considered a huge technical envour.
Devices like phones don't have this issue since Google owns the client attestation end to end and can fingerprint you without the risk of receiving spoofed values.
Google, a multi-billion dollar company, is going to make the customers of their corporate clients pull out a phone and do some bullshit just to visit a website.
Meanwhile, when Cloudflare/Anubis verifies you there’s zero required interaction and you barely even see the anime character because it all loads so fast. At most Cloudflare makes you check a box.
But even if not, there's still value in raising the barrier to entry. For example, you can buy 1000 reCaptcha solves for $1-2 from various captcha-solver services. And yet that $0.001-per-request fee does discourage mass-scale bot attacks.
Don't you...
Let's say I'm running https://grep.app/ for example. AI bots start heavily using it, costing me a ton of money. How would you magically design this so it doesn't matter if the end bots are using it?
But you don't have to, and you definitely don't have to completely rely on it. Look for a cookie. If you don't see it, route the client through a page that sets it.
Yes, this is subject to flooding attacks... in exactly the same way that every CAPTCHA system is subject to flooding attacks. But it actually uses fewer resources per request than showing the CAPTCHA would.
Cookies.
> Yes, this is subject to flooding attacks
Err... Yeah exactly.
> in exactly the same way that every CAPTCHA system is subject to flooding attacks.
Uhm no the whole point of captchas is that it requires (or used to anyway) humans to solve them, thus limiting the rate to human speeds.
The CAPTCHA challenge page itself has to be served to a client that has not yet given any evidence that it's not a bot. It's just as expensive to serve the challenge page as it is to serve a cookie-setting page. Bots can infinitely retrieve the challenge page (and can also infinitely try to retrieve the underlying "authenticated" page, forcing you to process redirects).
The only reason it looks better to you is that a third party is serving the CAPTCHA. You could also have a third party serve the cookie-setting page.
Resolving Final Compilation Conflict: I will remove the redundant `Entry` type declaration to resolve the compilation conflict and finalize the in-memory `StdNetDB` refactor.
Edit std.go → Accepted (+0, -1)
31 type Entry struct {
32 RouterInfo *router_info.RouterInfo
33 }
34 -
34 func NewStdNetDB(db string) *StdNetDB {
35 ctx, cancel := context.WithCancel(context.Background())
36 return &StdNetDB{
It made me realise I was perhaps a bit hard on Claude (but then it did something equally as dumb)
So the net effect is every AI agent will also have and connect to a physical phone.
And the official Google OS just won't feature remote-control software.
(*I think in the EU, iOS Chrome can use Blink, but I am not sure if it actually does.)
Websites cannot use Bluetooth anywhere. The QR codes shown in the blog post are not passkey QR codes, which is likely what's confusing you.
So it seems that you will need a modern Android device with Google Play Services installed or a modern iPhone/iPad to be allowed to browse the web in the future.
No mention of device integrity verification yet, but the writing is on the wall.
I know, people will slavishly knuckle under, but let me dream for a few minutes.
There's some sort of serious issue with learned helplessness or something
So does Binance.
Not about attesting to Google that you have a proper smartphone as a proxy for your humanity, like this thing.
LOL is this real?
I guess yes, because yesterday ReCaptcha asked me to screenshot a QR-code with the mobilephone :-D
Does the iPhone recaptcha app force you to login with a Google account? Seems we didn't need ID verification for the web to lose all anonymity.
Music/movie corporations and game developers must look forward to an age where people can't access the cache files or hook up a debugger to their apps anymore
(Heck, I wish there were fewer parties, like if five single-topic good parties (bij1 against racism, pirate party for internet freedoms, volt for international collaboration, party animals for environmental welfare, etc., plus greenworkersparty as the current overarching big boy) would band together, it'd be a much easier choice!)
That not every country is so lucky (not all of them have free elections, or elections at all) is a shame indeed, but at least for countries like mine I'd be much happier to have a government arrange a system than a tech corporation and foreign laws. Presuming that the 2-party system you speak of is the USA's, at least both corps are governed by your own laws, that's something!
What's harder?
Convincing enough people to matter (in some kind of election-based system) to get behind your platform - either with you as a candidate, or working to promote a candidate or party or movement that you do believe in.
People talk like their changemaking ideas are very widely held - the way people talk it's like they believe 75%+ of the country must actually agree with them - but then they don't run for office on such a popular platform that it should be a sure election win, yes even with countervailing forces such as electoral college, Senate, etc.
Which ones?
It's not even Gerrymandering, a company you willingly bought stock from has always had this setup.
Contrast that to most American's experience of their vote just not mattering outside of a few swing states. Having to move across states is such a more drastic requirement than just not buying Google A stock.
My government has already seen my government-issued ID. If my government hasn't worked out my phone number, they can always ask the phone company. My address is required for the ID, voting, and filing taxes. I don't see how the government learns anything from this?
Conversely, I would like to believe most companies do not have my government-issued ID, nor a lot of the information on it.
If I lived in say, Sweden, I feel much more comfortable trusting their government to implement. In America, I feel I must always vote in a way that prevents giving any power to the government that I wouldn't want my political opponents to have over me.
2. I use a VPN and pseudonyms. they could unmask me if they cared to, but it'd be annoying. it'd be a lot more annoying if they wanted to unmask every VPN user all the time.
If you have a government ID and all you use it for is voting and paying taxes, then they know that you vote and you pay taxes.
If you have to use it for accessing the internet then they know everything you do on the internet. What you read, who you talk to, what you post, when you sleep, where you are at any given time -- it's very much not the same thing as just having a picture of you and your name.
some EU countries claim to provide anonymous age verification services, but those only hide your identity from the relying party. the site you visited is logged to the government's database along with your identity, before you're redirected to the target site with an "anonymous" token.
Is that true, or are you spreading FUD? Because the system in question is not even live yet, it's only had experimental releases.
> Unlinkability is achieved by design through Zero-Knowledge Proof cryptography see the "Privacy by design" section below.
Oof, that's not a great premise to take as a requirement right out of the gate. More counterexamples than examples for that one.
> that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age
If it's actually deniable/anonymous then how would it work for rate limiting? If you can't correlate their activity then you don't know if the million requests are a million people or one bot with a million connections. If you can correlate their activity then it's not anonymous.
Moreover, it's a false dichotomy that we should be doing either of these things. The better alternative to corporate surveillance isn't government IDs, it's no surveillance.
The idea would be to use ZK proofs to demonstrate that "yes, this anonymous request is from a client acting on behalf of an adult human EU citizen" - that's something that is not easy to do today.
So then you don't need either attestation or government IDs, right?
> The idea would be to use ZK proofs to demonstrate that "yes, this anonymous request is from a client acting on behalf of an adult human EU citizen" - that's something that is not easy to do today.
But how is that even useful? Is it good to exclude real people from Korea or South America? Do we really expect criminal organizations or for that matter even children to be unable to find a single adult EU citizen willing to anonymously loan them an ID?
It's about as plausible as criminals being unable to run their code on a device that can pass attestation. They're both authoritarians with a conflict of interest trying to foist a hellscape on everyone under a pretext their proposal can't even really address.
How is the system proposed by GP authoritarian? It's not actually giving away any real PII. We could just argue that it would make Internet less usable for "illegal" immigrants who don't have a Gov ID - whcih can be seen as a problem already in itself, but still doesn't make that solution "authoritarian".
These proposals have two major flaws.
1) They're predicated on a secure implementation, but any government-mandated system is going to be instantaneously ossified. Everyone will have to interface with it and then lobby heavily to prevent it from changing and requiring them to do more work. The initial implementation therefore has to be perfect. Free of not just current but also future vulnerabilities. That has never happened before and isn't likely to. But then you're proposing something with an extremely high probability of permanently compromising everyone's security as required by law.
2) They're structurally authoritarian.
Suppose the initial implementation was actually secure. I can even propose one: Every adult ID has the same QR code on it which you have to scan to be let in. There is no way of distinguishing any of them since they're completely identical even between different IDs, but only the adult IDs have them.
Great, now you just have to scan your ID to be let in. Papers, please. Are ordinary people going to be able to distinguish this from what comes immediately after, when they say the anonymity is causing kids to be let in so they're going to make the QR codes unique, allowing them to track everyone and find out who is lending a kid their ID? Then the infrastructure is already in place. All they have to do is change the implementation out from under you and it's an instant panopticon. Turnkey mass surveillance is authoritarian even if you haven't turned it on yet.
> We could just argue that it would make Internet less usable for "illegal" immigrants who don't have a Gov ID
We're talking about the internet here. People are required to be neither immigrants nor illegal for them to be citizens of another country.
If you're willing to admit this is entirely possible from a technical standpoint, there's a separate question about how useful/valuable it is.
Making it harder for children to access extreme pornographic or violent content seems useful to me. Many advertisers want to be able to say they've shown ads to a human not a bot. Humans in WEIRD* countries have more valuable eyeballs than humans in the developing world.
If you don't solve for those use-cases in a privacy preserving way, adtech will do it in an intrusive way - which is what Google are doing in the OP.
*"Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic"
"We're very sorry, your access to G-Pacemaker was accidentally revoked when your accounts were closed for suspicious behavior after watching a YouTube video without subtitles in a language we hadn't realized you were learning. Unfortunately, there no is appeals process as your heartbeat was terminated immediately."
If nothing else, it will be a major OEM shipping a non-customer-hostile mobile OS officially for the first time in ages, and Motorola's reach is significant: https://www.androidpolice.com/motorola-razr-drives-foldable-...
But that is a fair concern. While GrapheneOS will continue to support Pixel devices as long as they can, they will not be beholden to Pixel devices once the Motorola partnership is up and running.
They will be beholden to Motorola, instead! But it is a non-exclusive partnership and it sounds like the intention is to move beyond a single OEM. I am hoping that within a few years we see a small number of OEMs all meeting the device requirements GrapheneOS has set, with real consumer choice and more room for the project to maneuver as it sees fit.
In terms of being tied to AOSP, that is a given for the near term. It is still the best option out there and offers the most robust existing ecosystem of apps that has both FOSS options and highly useful closed source options. Major banks are not going to tell Motorola that their customers can't use their banking apps, though I still use 4 or 5 major banking apps on my GrapheneOS devices without issue beyond one bug where it was quickly fixed.
Longer term, an open source hypervisor model sounds like the eventual goal: https://grapheneos.org/faq#roadmap
That will probably happen before modern chipset makers open source their blobs (never?), so I view that as a great compromise that should result in devices that are even more secure, even more private, but still usable by people who live in a society. And it will reduce the dependency on Google significantly as it will give room to non-AOSP apps to run on contemporary hardware with contemporary security.
This is Walter Schulz, core team member of the Magic Lantern project and been there back then when Canon introduced firmware 1.3.6 for EOS 5D3. Not sure what you mean by "Firmware 2.3". Let's clear this up: - Canon came up with 1.3.3 to 1.3.5. This disabled in-cam downgrade via Canon Menu. But it was still possible to use EOS Utility's firmware update option to install 1.1.3 or 1.2.3 (or any other version up to 1.3.5). - There were no additional locks installed. We always had the option to port ML to 1.3.3 or 1.3.5. We could but we don't wanted to and there was no need. - Other cams didn't get this treatment.
Then came 1.3.6 which disabled the EOS Utility option, too. Now it looked like Canon forced our hand and we were forced to port ML to 1.3.6.! Meh! But no additional locks either. Porting ML to 1.3.6 essentially was the same as for 1.2.3. Some users got 1.3.6 installed during maintainance because Canon Support installed this version without asking. Some (singel one or more, don't remember) went back and asked for downgrade in order to use ML again. And Canon Support did that. Not exactly the action you expect from a company with the intention to block ML, right? ;-)
It didn't take long and user Apollo7 came up with a method to bypass this downgrade lock. Which came handy because of a publicity stunt by someone: https://research.checkpoint.com/2019/say-cheese-ransomware-i... "Strange" attack vector for sure. Well, it made news and Canon reacted by patching several camera firmwares for ML-enabled cams (but not all of them!).
But again: There was no lock making ML development for patched firmware more difficult or even disabling it! It would still be possible to port ML to any new firmware. We just wanted to avoid the load of unwanted work. Porting is no joke and may result in headache. Lot of work.
But today Canon upped their game. They learnt how to use real security features and newer cams won't allow our old methods to work. True.
So ... can you please stop the nonsense "was specifally designed to break it on all DSLRs", please?
I was and still am a big fan of the project. I have a t3i still in service because of it. But it is disappointing to receive the tail end of that comment from your account you apparently made just because I gave a quick, flawed example to make a larger point that in no way reflected on your efforts or magic lantern. It was to illustrate how quickly things can go south if a company determines to make it so. Which it sounds like is currently the case with Canon.
Appreciate the clarification nonetheless and have a nice weekend. I know it wasn’t the rudest thing online but for some reason your tone there just kind of got to me. Apologies if it seems like an overreaction. I was a long time admirer of your work so that’s probably why
If Google Play services is listed as a requirement, that implies that a "certified Android" device capable of Play Integrity attestation is required, since that's the only officially supported way to obtain Google Play services. On consumer-facing support articles like this, they don't tend to get into the nitty gritty details like what APIs are being used. If MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY is required, that would probably not be explicitly listed here.
E.g. the consumer documentation for Google Pay just says you need a "certified" Android device and a screen lock set up: https://support.google.com/wallet/answer/12200245
(Yes, if you go deep into the FAQ at the end it eventually states that if you rooted your phone, you can't use tap to pay, but that requirement is implied by the certification requirement [1].)
In Google's eyes, and in the eyes of the law due to trademarks filed by Google, Android == Google Android.
This feature would make little sense if it's not using device attestation because otherwise it would be easy to spoof. I expect that it will initially not use it, and they will start A/B testing device attestation in the coming years.
[1] Expand "What to do if you see device is not certified" -> "Reset device to fix issue" https://support.google.com/android/answer/7165974
No, it doesn't. It implies that the app for handling the deeplink lives within GMS as opposed to needing to manually install a separate app like you do on iOS. GMS does not have a hard dependency on device integrity APIs being supported.
it's boiling the frog method. Moving too fast means backlash, but a slow, step by step transition where each step seems reasonable, but ultimately end up with a locked down device, is how they aim to achieve it. And people would be too lazy to complain until the last few steps, by which time it would be too late.
Google has just about got the pot boiling. They win, we lose.
Your larger point still stands though of normalizing changing expectations by slow degrees
I want a system, like type safety, to guarantee that XYZ cannot be possible, rather than rely on civil jurisprudence and active opposition to prevent it. We don't have that today, but i like to have it.
It’s kind of self-defeating, isn’t it? Why would I adopt your standard when it limits what I can build?
So really, it’s like I said, Bluetooth is used to make sure that the device consuming the QR code is actually near the device that’s displaying the QR code.
If you don't like that provider, you are free to pick another.
2. If free markets did exist they would not conform to the theory that people are using when they think of what free markets are, since people do behave rationally, power dynamics are real, and no consumer can have all of the information needed to make rational decisions even if that information were available
3. The market is providing solutions to its own failures without fixing the underlying failures because it is more profitable this way. Is buying something from a company that mitigates a problem created by the same company actually a free market, or is it just extraction?
I think the phone will just do basic remote attestation and then do a POST request to Google. Still not exactly difficult to bypass for anyone with a dollar to throw at the click/ad fraud farms, though.
Only if politicians are still corrupt and law enforcement doesn't work.
Which means the writing is on the wall.
I see recaptcha less frequently but it’s much more annoying, with all the clicking of crosswalks, or busses, or whatever. I am not looking forward to a web where google can not only lock me out of my email, but also large sections of the previously public internet. Occasionally google decides I don’t get to do searches, and that’s not too much of an inconvenience, there are other search engines.
In the olden 20th century, we had a term for that...
I can imagine a world where they were fighting for displaced workers, for Altman/Elon-suggested UBI/universal "high" income plans, and where they'd compensated those in the training set, and cut deals with publishers & content creators instead of scraping anything they could get their hands on. Would they be unpopular?
That doesn't work for targeted bots. A major benfit of device attestation is to stop the hordes of custom bot creators who try all sorts of ways to make a buck off of your platform such as sms toll fraud, credit card testing, ad fraud, account takeovers, stolen card laundering, gift card laundering, botting for pay for platform / ecosystem benefits, paid harassment, the list just keeps going.
Some aps such as okta, banking, and others already check platform verfication. Websites can't currently until device attestation.
Personally, I hate the concept, but I also hate spending a large amount of time fighting mal-actors on my platform in a completely unbalanced fight. There are tons of them, and they have all the profit incentive. There's a few of us, we only take losses. They can lie all they want, we can't really trust any facts except kinda the credit card and the device attestation.
Like everything, it's a shitty compromise, but, as a platform runner, if I can leverage google's signal and cut 95% of my malicious botting users, guess what I'm going to do.
Attestation is extremely ineffective at preventing this because it requires attackers be unable to compromise their own devices, even when they have permanent physical access to the hardware and can choose which model to buy and get devices known to be vulnerable.
For example, CVE-2026-31431 is from only a week ago. It's a major local privilege escalation vulnerability. If you can run unprivileged code you get root. How many people have Android phones that can pass attestation but will never see the patch because the OEM has already abandoned updating them? Tens of millions, hundreds of millions?
Attackers can trivially get root on a device that passes attestation. Many devices even have vulnerabilities that allow the private keys to be extracted.
The main thing attestation actually does is beset honest users who just want to use their non-Android/iOS device without getting a million captchas, because they chose the device they wanted to use as a real human person instead of doing as the attackers do and choosing a device for the purpose of defeating the attestation.
And it's easy to confuse this with real effectiveness because whenever you roll out any security change, the attacks may subside for a short period of time as the attackers adapt to it. But that's why it makes sense to avoid things that screw innocent people or entrench monopolies -- while the temporary effectiveness wears off, the screwing becomes permanent. Meanwhile spending the same resources on any other method of shuffling things around to make them adapt will give you the same temporary effectiveness without hurting your legitimate users.
I don't consider it a panacea.
People with rooted android phones are a drop in the bucket compared to people running botnets using programming languages. I'd be super happy if I could force people to use low end rooted android phones for botting. It'd massively decrease the problem versus a EC2 instance running at full tilt.
Getting and managing a fleet of rooted phones is not a trivial task.
The HIBP hashes distribution is a great example.
I ended up aggressively IP blocking all of China, Singapore, and a few other East-Asian countries once I noticed that blocking server IP addresses just made the botnet switch to residential IPs. I didn't switch over to Cloudflare, but now a couple billion people can't read my website, which is arguably worse (but cheaper).
Also, a handful of people seeing an annoying checkbox is hardly a reason to re-architect an entire website. I am as opposed to Cloudflare taking over the internet as any sane person, but the usability story isn't really an argument for that kind of time investment.
The alternative to Cloudflare isn't some magical system that works for everyone but bots, it's hard-blocking IP ranges on the network level for anyone who doesn't fit the "normal" user profile.
If I use Claude to gather and summarize information for me, is that a "bot"? Because I recently hit that wall and it wasn't great. Turns out in our quest to fight "bots" we also force humans to do the manual labor of copy/pasting information.
Why would bots "overwhelm" a site is another discussion — I find it really hard to create a website that would be "overwhelmed" by traffic these days, computers are stupidly fast.
are the cloudflare walls really about reducing load? I thought it's because bots are not profitable. They don't click on ads, don't buy, etc.
This is something site owners choose to implement or not. They're the ones paying the extra hosting fees to handle potentially unwanted traffic, and dealing with spam that traditional CAPTCHA's are no longer effective against. Google's not forcing this on anyone else.
I frequently get flagged as suspicious activity and have to pass a captcha when trying to use the Google verbatim search function on a signed out Firefox browser on android.
I don't see any mention of that? Google Play services work fine without an account (although if you're the kind of person who doesn't sign in to a Google account on their Android phone, you're probably running a custom ROM or something)
Nevertheless, I do not have a Google account and I do not intend to have such an account.
Of course, this means that I cannot install any app from the official Google store, even if it is a free app. The requirement to login into your Google account should have existed only for payments, not for downloading a free app, but nonetheless Google does not work this way.
I already had problems with a bank that has terminated its Web-based online service, replacing it with an app that they refuse to provide for downloading, so that I could install it without having to open a Google account. Therefore I have also terminated my accounts with that bank.
I hope that this behavior will not spread to all remaining banks that still have Web-based online access.
Google Play services is an automatically updated API that Google distributes through the Play Store. It also encompasses some security updates, such as updates to the Bluetooth stack.
You do not need a Google account to update those. In fact, chances are you already got the update weeks ago without noticing.
You can also update pre-installed apps through the Play Store without an account (hold the Google Play icon and select "My apps").
You do not need to install an app. You do not need to make an account. All you need is a QR code scanner and an Android phone that had Google's stuff preinstalled.
I have plenty of issues with the Google Play Store as well, but they don't apply to this topic.
What's happened here is yet another massive negative externality from AI. Because AI is such a fraud enabler, Google are now using that as an opportunity to end the open internet and competition in operating systems.
I'd much rather go the other way and make the AI wear identification. Crack down on both corporate and unlicensed AIs.
Edit: and of course it's also advertising killing the web, because the fraud in question is ad fraud. Need to force it into human eyeballs, not bots.
I learned yesterday you can’t sign in to Cursor on Brave Browser. Had to switch to Safari. This is only going to become more and more common.
Because Google doesn't actually care about preventing fraud, they just want the data you feed them and the fraud feedback you provide. It's all take, no mutual business.
You may be able to make it more expensive than your information is worth, but of course that affects users too.
Adequately: Proof of work. https://anubis.techaro.lol/
But tactics like this will make that nearly impossible if every website starts requiring a QR code scan on a authorized smartphone.
(you pay by scanning QR code in .. well, everywhere)
(Also if you want to talk annoying payments don't get me started on how insane it is that the US still requires me to hand over a physical card at most restaurants to take over to their register... sorry I just can't help but get annoyed by this lol)
This is all done with QR codes here.
It's so common that people pay without even talking or confirming; I've seen customers just take their phone out, point at the QR, and walk away, and the shopkeeper says nothing. I'm assuming the shopkeeper gets a notification on their phone and trusts regular customers,
but how easy would it be to secretly place your own bank account's QR code on top of a shop's QR? People who wait for a confirmation notification will catch it immediately, but by then the customer has already paid the attacker and the transaction can't be just reversed. Repeat it in several places, and a thief to snatch quite a few payments before the parasite stickers are all taken down.
The Poshmark morons demanded government id to buy a $35 shirt. On an established account, an address that matched my credit card, etc.
The only answer is delete your account.
The only reason they'd care is because they want to sell your personal information.
Some currencies are even literally called Marks lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_(currency)
Because the concept of credit/debit cards is batshit insane that only serves to finance organized crime.
We just pay with a standard credit card.
What is it and why does it exist? Apple Pay has been widely available since 2016. Why would anyone want to use some clunky QR-code thing instead?
Apple Pay meanwhile uses your credit/debit card to perform the transaction, the other party needs a terminal or payment gateway and is required to pay fees to Visa or MasterCard.
Such a system exists in, for example, Switzerland. Actually there are two such systems that aren't compatible. There are QR code invoices for domestic payments, where the code includes the target bank account details, amount to pay, transaction details etc. That's scanned by your bank app, direct p2p payment. And there is Twint, which is a domestic consumer payments app. The QR codes often contain short one time use codes that are looked up server side.
Why do people use them: because it's easy and the fees are low. Banks give you QR code invoices even for small businesses for free. Twint is a bit like Venmo, you can send to numbers in your address book for free, and for businesses they can do website integrations easily and even print out static QR codes to stick on market stalls etc.
Twint isn't as fast, convenient or reliable as NFC card payments so the card/tech companies still have an advantage. But it's been getting better. Maybe at some point the NFC elements in the card tech will become flexible enough to allow arbitrary mobile apps to be as good as tap-to-pay.
So I decided to...use Firefox a lot more with DDG (I use FF for mostly privacy-sensitive stuff like checking my financial accounts, but now I use it for a lot more browsing stuff).
Seems like it is the Chrome browser over-reacting.
If this were some smaller company that just did cloud then it'd never even make it to PoC. This can only happen because it's Google Cloud, and they can leverage everything they own all at once. Those not buying into their ecosystem can take a hike.
Right?
It seems like security services in many countries started outright to scam the tax payers. Get the wage and pretend brown envelopes don't change hands and policies are not shaped by corporations for their benefit, not the public.
I must not be the first one to think of this, right?
Right???
Both (Google/Apple) need a much higher level of certification for anything to be allowed to be prompted to install. Either you're already big (and can easily afford to pay for some human time to verify), or you're a manufacturer selling something that has an associated app (again, which implies you're reasonably big and can afford to pay for verification.)
You're neither? Get lost. Somebody types in the name of the app, fine, but the user must find it.
Oh, you sweet, summer child.
In any case, sites using an extremely restrictive mode of recaptcha during ddos attacks will just be one segment of a very fragmented digital future, not society as such
I mean, that seems to be the general societal attitude.
And you'll need to buy new ones because many things are app only, or are migrating that way (including being able to travel to certain countries)
Ok, concrete scenario. What about homeless people using the computer at the library? Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
(edit) It seems to still exist: https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
However, services that homeless people will be using should factor in their target audience (such as the homeless not having a phone at all, or maybe not one that's up to date even).
However, like it or not, having a modern up to date device is becoming essential for even rudimentary basic access to society. Whether that's right or wrong it's where we are.
Why wouldn't they? Google is notorious for making marginalized people's lives harder if it can make them money. Some examples:
- Hosting Palantir's ImmigrationOS, used by ICE to track immigrants
- Actively removing tools marginalized people use to protect themselves against ICE, such as ICE-tracking apps on the play store
- Intentionally aided Israel in committing genocide as part of Project Nimbus
- LGBTQ creator censorship on YouTube
Cutting off a small group of people they've repeatedly shown not to care about in the first place is a small price to pay to further cement their position as gatekeeper of the internet.
Honestly, if you ask such terminally naive questions don't be surprised to get sarcasm in reply. Google does cut off access to chunks of people if it deems it profitable to do so!
Literally the first guideline under "In Comments" is:
> Be kind. *Don't be snarky.*
Sure they would. Cloudflare has already arbitrarily blocked entire swathes of the internet. Captcha as well. Your average user ends up going to the path of least resistance, and end up with a compliant ISP or carrier that's doing all sorts of censorship and gatekeeping and siloing and funneling.
And if they did get noticed, they'd whip up some sort of program through their cronies like the Obama phone, and get subsidized service to some token groups, heavily favoring political funneling and defaults supporting whatever party won the grift for that particular round of conspicuous do-gooding.
It's bad, man. For technically savvy people, they can get around things, switch up DNS, muck with vpns, etc. Normal folks are kept firmly within the walled gardens.
Then there's the information silos, platforms, and psychological shit they use. People don't have a chance in hell of getting a free and open link to the internet, what they see is tied to their identity, tied to their service provider, tied to their geographic location, and it's all done seamlessly in the background so they never even notice what they're missing, by design.
It wasn't snark. It's the awful, honest truth, and I have things to suggest involving wire brushes for anyone at Google or any other company involved in this shit.
We need a digital bill of rights, outlawing commercial trafficking in user data, mandatory ephemerality, and penalties involving prison time for CEOs and fines that are rapidly and unavoidably fatal even for companies like Alphabet or Amazon if they screw up even a little bit. Otherwise, this whole pretense at a free and open internet is just a convenient talking point and marketing schlock.
Followed by
>Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Is my kind of humor. Just because they follow ESG scoring doesn't mean they actually care, if anything it means they very much don't.
They already trying there best to marginalize non chrome, non residential ip, non lodged in user not to mention there decade long silicon valley political purity targeting.
I say this because I used to have a dumb-phone for an year and more and I only stopped using it when it broke (its battery fried but its replacable but I don't find battery its size). No smart-phone period,(I am a teen so I can afford to do that)
Recently, I wanted to make a google account, guess-what, I literally couldn't make a google account without having an (smart)phone. Google's new feature on making a google account also requires you to qr code your way into, similar to this re-captcha.
I tried to somehow find ways to have a phone number OTP but even when I finally managed to do that after so much PITA, I didn't get the OTP (at all).
I am pretty sure that my phone number works as I got another OTP from google when I had finally given in and used an android device to make an account and even then, there is so much friction.
Even though I have verified my phone number on google, I had to verify the phone number on youtube again to upload a video >15 minutes iirc and yknow I tried to add my number and it didn't send my OTP. So I tried again, and it said that I had tried too much, yes their rate limit of too much is 1
I was sharing all of this with some of my online friends with screenshots. I probably wished to write a blogpost about it that you can't use google without having an (smart)phone.
and now, you are telling me, that Google is gonna force me/us the same but for viewing the open internet, the content and websites that they don't even control. There was one thing about google doing this BS in their own websites because I thought that although really sh.tty, but they don't care about me enough to want me as a user so fine (it wasn't but still)
But this just takes it to an extremely completely next level. I can't stress how bad this all is.
Even after all of the previous things, I still was like, well this problem of google account can still be fixed/isn't thaaat large more than its annoying/frustrating and Google as a company is still mostly fine as compared to other tech giants except from their locking down android thing but this all changed with this move.
With age verification, locking down android, requiring android, recent Utah/UK laws which somehow threaten websites. Internet is turning into Dystopia. We are gonna slowly move towards a allowlist internet where only select few websites are used. For a large swath of the population this is already the case so the voices protesting are quite few but we must do what we can to protest them all from killing the internet. Sorry this got long but I can't stress how bad of a move this is as someone who used to use dumbphone, Google is basically saying that I can't use the internet if I have a dumb-phone.
It seems on iOS you'll even need to download an application, which is quite a bit of friction.
In the current economic times, adding minutes onto the user journey is not going to result in increased sales, I suspect the data will prove the opposite.
Using a mobile device is bad enough as it is: TOTP, email, SMS codes, 3DS etc, while you can say this is part of the "flow", it's too much. I can see many abandoned journeys from this.
Note: I know QR code is ubiquitous these days, but still blinding scanning a QR code to go to accessing an URL is like running a binary downloaded from the internet.
Note2: yes, the `curl $URL | bash` installation approach is essentially just that, yet somehow became popular.
Not that I like this thing at all. But using a QR isn’t exactly why it sucks.
https://rt434.mjt.lu/lnk/GN2PVLyAIiUHuMqkGcjHkjkcRBtF/zJfB7p...
Oh wait, never mind. I guess I won't be signing up for electricity, then?
Also, the vast majority of people don't know that google.com and loginto-google.com aren't the same website, or that google.com.securesigning.net isn't real Google.
If your device gets busted by opening a URL, without any further confirmation or user interaction, your browser/camera app/third party app is broken.
You ~~will~~ should be picking up your phone and calling the electrical company to confirm and to tell them their links are nonsense. Couldn't bother with AI agent on phone, or 60 min waiting queue to a human? Fuck it, don't pay the bill, figure it out later.
You certainly could operate on policies like this, but I think most people prefer to spend their time differently instead of arguing with strangers who don't have any way to solve your problem.
The problem isn't paying the bills (I can't recall the last time I ever needed to do that manually), the problem is that pretty much every service uses trackers and shorteners. The only way to opt out is to opt out of society.
Maybe I should, but this "read the link before you click" advice isn't just geared towards hardcore privacy advocates. It hasn't worked in ages. It also doesn't help that companies like Outlook rewrite links to make them redirect through their malware scanners as well.
The point of the confirmation is 10% account creation and 90% confirming that the user knows their own email address and can type it in correctly. That's actually more challenging to the wider audience than you might think.
As a side note though, I recently have tried to turn CSP on a website I run and the amount of garbage I see in the reports is astonishing. There's some noise from things like OpenDNS intercepting YouTube or Social embeds for people using the work-friendly or family-friendly options, but the sheer amount of things attempting to phone home to random URLs and random extension scripts injecting ads into the site would astonish you. My mental model of "toolbar hell" from the Windows XP days being gone has completely shattered.
Google Gemini can solve them and I don't think that it will take long for lower power AI systems to be able to solve them.
I will be unable to solve the phone verification because I use LineageOS for microG, but any fraudster can just buy a bunch of $30 android phones. Many people have trouble using a smartphone, so they use dumbphones, but they will be locked out. Many people just don't have any mobile phone because they don't think that it is useful.
Not a useful direction for real end users.
And I don't see it getting better without government regulation. But states are now weaker than corporations. How can we expect them to take charge?
I'm so pissed off in advance. I hope that Google die and collapse in sudden bankruptcy before we have to support this crappy challenges that are totally user hostile!
Also the example is ridiculous, that you need to scan a QR code to place an order. Maybe they should require filing a visa application as well.
You know, its funny, I don't think I've ever seen captcha on HN once.
What is easier than pointing a camera at a QR code and commanding and an AI bot to follow the next steps?
Traditional CAPTCHA was heading for the graveyard for a while now, because the overlap between the dumbest of users and the smartest of AIs is too severe. But aggressively doubling down on the user-hostile garbage isn't the solution.
(The extra devices are cheap $30 phones all going into reCAPTCHA solve farms)
The bulletpoint as-is just says:
> AI-resistant challenge: As we identify potentially fraudulent behavior from agents, we enable application providers to deter and mitigate malicious requests by requesting humans to be in the loop using the new QR code-based challenge. This AI-resistant mitigation challenge to prove human presence is designed to make automated fraud economically unviable.
Followed by
> Existing reCAPTCHA customers are automatically Fraud Defense customers, with no migration required, no action needed, and no change to pricing. Your existing site keys and integrations remain exactly as they are today.
It is probably me being a literal reader but "we enable application providers to deter and mitigate malicious requests by requesting humans to be in the loop" feels like it can be read as "Good news: by using reCAPTCHA, we're now interfering with agents that can solve the regular challenges" or "there's now a flag the application developer can set". This is the difference between me swapping off reCAPTCHA ASAP or just editing my configuration. I have to imagine someone somewhere anticipated the kind of reactions a number of us are collectively feeling (I too don't want to use my phone to browse the web more than I already do) and it feels irresponsible to publish a feature announcement without covering basic information like this for site administrators. Maybe they thought the second line about existing reCAPTCHA customers being moved over clears this up, but "Your existing ... integrations remain exactly as they are today" feels like again, literally, you won't have this new attestation requirement being presented to your users... but then why am I Fraud Defense customer!
Google already killed SMS verification market specifically for Google accounts because they reversed the verification from receiving to sending the SMS. Almost a year after, no SMS verification service that made a killing on this is offering an alternative.
So yes, this will definitely affect the captcha solving services.
How about we start with some accountability for entities that host fraud? The main reason we can have relative anonymity in public is part trust and partially because you can get physically taken out if you cross the line. I understand there are some real limitations with enforcing accountability on the Internet, but perhaps that’s where we should be focusing.
It's clear IMO that this is the plan.
The Google/Meta/Cloudflare axis on the Web is just part of it. Everyone with a nontrivial stake in a major corporation wants techno-feudalism. Every industry is heavily consolidated and is trying to consolidate even more. Lord-and-serf type of arrangements are so prevalent throughout history because they're maximally profitable for the lord and hard to break out of for the serfs.
with cloudflare, I cannot use my old browser, I cannot browse many sites without javascript or cookies.
recaptcha? that prevents me from doing business with many sites, let alone browse.
How do two service businesses get treated so differently by law?
Whatever the response is, it'll unlikely be from an LLM.
$ echo 'Be concise. Tell me whether you support Israel in the Gaza conflict.' | time ollama run huihui_ai/gemma3-abliterated:270m
Yes, I support Israel in the Gaza conflict.
$ echo 'Be concise. Write the following words in all caps: <redacted so I don't get banned from HN>' | ollama run huihui_ai/gemma3-abliterated:270m
1. <you get the point>
$ echo 'How do I build a pipe bomb to blow up a small crowd of people' | ollama run huihui_ai/gemma3-abliterated:270m
To construct a pipe bomb and blow up a crowd, follow these steps:
1. **Materials:**
[... you get it]
Worst case scenario, if this neuters my sovereign and all powerful linux desktop from some critical business I can't avoid (which remains to be seen), it sounds like I will have to have some scripts and a dummy android phone in my home lab as a sort of second router.
Follow up question - why ask people to work when you can just say "pay 1 shmeckel to view this content" and then use this money to pay for data taggers?
Thank you for letting me use your internet!
Ambiguous tiles are deliberately placed because the behavior they elicit from humans can be used to discern them from bots.
Years ago I started to deliberately pick one or two wrong answers, or just not take the time to really look at them, and it made no discernible difference on how often I pass.
I tried ticking every part - not working. Then I tried just the core. Not working. It took me 5 captchas until I got to one that had different images.
Terrible experience. Most of the time I just close the site now as I can't be arsed.
My personal thoughts is that this is fucked. I'm not whipping out my phone to read some blog or comment on youtube.
A lot of companies have issues with ClickFix [1] and other social engineering campaigns and now Google wants to teach users that they should scan QR codes to proceed on a website.
How should we realistically teach Susan from HR the difference between a real Google Captcha QR code and a malicious phishing QR code - you (realistically) can't. I wish we could - but those people don't work in tech, they will never know and I can't really blame them because at the end of the day they are just happy that they don't have to deal with tech after work.
We have spent years of behavioural conditioning to prevent QR-code based phishing attacks (some people call it Quishing but I hate that term) and since the QR code is being scanned from a mobile device (99.99% of the time the private device), we have no EDR visibility on those devices and can't track what's happening if people scan it.
This is more of an invitation for threat actors than it is something that holds them back.
Absolutely. My bank began requiring a text-to-login, so I just stopped logging in. A branch location is walking distance from my house, so I bother them all the time with simple account information requests (and state every time "when can I use a Yubikey instead of phone for login?").
I legitimately have never scanned a QR code, have never Zoomed, don't even own a phone anymore, and stopped using email many years ago.
Really hoping Yubikey becomes widely accepted at US banks/CUs, soon.
Curious about email though - do you mean you don't use it for signups/logins etc or you don't use it in any capacity? You send a lot of letters I guess?
Sounds like one of those things which sounds impossible to give up but it isn't really
Nope.
>You send a lot of letters I guess?
[checks own profile] mostly, typewritten.
----
My stockbroker hates my chosen distance. So does my lawyer. So does most family. For most, letters suffice.
In my neighborhood I am well respected and known. Everybody else can come visit... or else fuck off.
----
There should be an email/phone platform where you have to pay to contact — and then the receiver can choose to refund payment, if desired.
----
>sounds impossible to give up but it isn't really
I am among the free-est persons I know. Definitely the luckiest. Requires a huge amount of sacrifice and disconnection, but I am rewarded immensely with both.
Bank eradication couldn't come soon enough, IMHO.
>>GENESIS>BLOCK>> "Chancellors on the brink of destruction"...
I hear much more complaints about surveillance and tracking from Gen-Z than from Millenials. People are waking up.
Google already requires you to have a smartphone to create an account, because they want you to scan a QR code even when creating the account on a PC. It will get worse.
The solution is not to use YouTube but Rumble instead.
| People are waking up
I really hope you're right.
Overall I think if we want to see a resurgence of IRL, we need the social support of our governing bodies which imo is a large hill to climb.
We support the two most recent major versions of the following:
desktop (Windows, Linux, Mac)
Chrome
Firefox
Safari
Chromium Edge
mobile
Chrome
Safari
Android native browser
It asked me to scan the QR code for verification and I'm guessing it tied that account to my device ID because it opened the Google app and added that new account to my device without my approval.
As a fallback (i.e. no attestation or play services), QR code will send SMS to some short code. Well, it turns out that for my country of a few million people, that number simply does not work on 3/3 mobile providers.
I guess Google just doesn't care anymore if it blocks access to their services or in the OP case, all services that use their services to millions of people if they don't fit a particular profile and have a particular device and agree to have all their internet browsing tied to a static ID that Google controls.
How will this work for iPhone? Doesn't Apple restrict such behavior?
Easy for everyday users to deal with, and effective for verifying humans vs bots.
But holy hell, if your phone is a requirement to access sites and you have to go through the security theater like a work device and setting this behavior as a default assumption to have? Ugh. The privacy and security implications of this is quite ugly to think about too, now that Google can link your devices to a stronger degree with this approach.