I don't even use a VPN and have lots of issues solving google's captcha...
Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
by miohtama on Thursday June 27, 2019 @04:08PM
(#20298139)
Potential other causes
- Your ISP is a source of a lot of malicious traffic
- You have some browser extension or other adjustments that makes it harder to analyse you as a genuine web browser
For example, using a browser automation like Selenium testing triggers "hard" reCAPTCHA. Not sure if this because of some automated API that Selenium exposes, or just because your browser profile looks virgin (no cookies) without any prior reCAPTCHA solves.
I use pretty standard extensions... uBlockO, decentral eyes, smart referrer... I just wish that companies would stop using Google's reCAPTCHA service.
Also my IP address rarely changes and I don't think that any malicious traffic is coming from it.
And I have Comcast, so I hope that they didn't blacklist all of us...
(I did talk bad about Google a few times though, maybe that's it)
Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
by saagarjha on Thursday June 27, 2019 @06:18PM
(#20299418)
Those aren’t extensions that an average user would install.
Just Smart Referer alone is a likely culprit. Masking or having no referer is a prime attribute for low-level bots.
oh... so i should not be able to use any websites because of the extensions I use?
Re:Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side
by dodobirdlord on Thursday June 27, 2019 @11:04PM
(#20301139)
You should not be able to use any website that the host doesn't want you to use. That seems pretty straightforward. There's a strong correlation between profiles that look like yours and bots. Why should the web admin do free labor for you to put together a sufficiently nuanced bot-detection system to tell the difference, when the one they have is clearly good enough for them?
Stop using smart referrer. It has no legitimate purposes. Referrer URLs are not the problem. You look like a bot and you going to get locked out of sites.
If you're actually concerned about that kind of data leakage, you want NoScript, full stop.
Also as a VPN user, I found out that migrating to more expensive, higher grade VPN, solved a lot of my problems.
In the end it is not privacy, not your VPN that matters from the service provider point of view. It matters that your IP address is spewing malicious garbage. I do not want to spend time sorting it out, as I can focus my activities to revenue generating tasks. Harming some cheap VPN users in the process is collateral damage, but I rather take it than build a form with a perfect attack mitigation and 10x cost.
I hope to see some alternative for reCAPTCHA that does not come with such a strong privacy oriented risks. hCAPTCHA https://www.hcaptcha.com/ seems to be interesting, also monetization point of view. But they are not yet well established company and I do not know what other risks their approach would bring.