reCAPTCHA does not work in China mainland (it does in HK, but that's different for now). But translate.google.cn (note the .cn) works fine. Similar visual recaptchs used on Chinese services tend to focus on Chinese characters on a low resolution picture background. Training for street names? I don't know

Resolving to google.com does not resolve (gmail does, a bit, IMAP but only every few hours or days, depending on connection sans VPN).

if this is true, I'd love to hear the alternate! I use recaptcha and hate that my chinese customers need to do wacky stuff to circumvent it.

See: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/faq

Look under the section "use recaptcha globally" -- this is what I was referring to. However it's not clear to me if this approach enables use in China or not.

Thanks for that. Changing to www.recaptcha.net right now!

Could be a while before I get enquiries from China but there is only one way to find out.

Google did say 'globally'...

Just out of curiosity, why do you use reCaptcha?

Not sure if this is "officially" supported but I believe you can proxy the `api.js` file yourself without issue.

The photos or voice still needs to come from from somewhere. The somewhere is google.com. The .com is blocked.

Please see my other reply in this thread: "recaptcha.net" can also be used. Is that blocked in China too? I can't find a clear answer.

I pinged recapture.net and got a 50ms response time. Baidu would give a 20ms response time. That's on WiFi. That leads me to think the server responding to these pings is in certainly in mainland China, I think in Alibaba's IP range, but probably not a CDN. Interesting, thanks.