Why not make a new account? Valve is giving this out for free, partially to get people to use their program more. Why not support them in that small way at least?

You're trying to reason with a person who can't even complete a captcha.

Captchas can be an endless hellhole if you are on a network that the captcha provider happens to dislike. No fault of your own.

I’ve had situations in the past where I tried 10-20 times to complete captcha and it just kept throwing one after the other at me. Whereas when I am at home and not using VPN I always complete every captcha in like one or two attempts.

It appears that the containment system has completely failed.

They may be on VPN. Google recaptcha has dynamic risk-based friction and is prone to serving effectively impossible challenges to users on VPN.

In his defense, the best way to solve a captcha is by pretending you are partially blind. If you actually select all the relevant squares, Google just says “nope lol go again!”.

My theory is that, if the real goal of the captcha is for AI training then you would want to get rid of the people that were close but not quite right (let them proceed) . If the user was 100% correct on the first test, you'd probably want to give them more tests.

the captcha on https://archive.ph is an endless loop of clicking the "I'm not a robot" reCAPTCHA checkbox for me. sometimes i'm lucky enough to get to the "click all boxes that have a bus" and i never know if the one tile that has a fraction of the side mirror counts as being a bus or not. sometimes i guess correctly, and sometimes i find myself in another endless loop of identifying objects. i suspect it's a nanny service on my work machine because if i fire up a windows sandbox instance and archive the site there, i can sometimes get some luck.

it's a stiff price to pay for getting around the data science medium articles that require a sign up, and then an app, and then a subscription.

That’s usually because you’re using Cloudflare’s DNS, either explicitly or implicitly via Apple private relay (long saga you can easily search for)

interesting. i found stuff on WARP and VPN but i’m not using that - just 1.1.1.1 on my router (and you do mention DNS). thanks for the tip.

Steam has had a widely reported issue with the captcha on the password reset page for over a year now.

Presumably the same captcha nonsense.

Is it ok to steal from a liquor store because they require a license shown to buy it and for some reason you can't get yours?

I’d download a car, if that’s what you’re asking.

This is more like them requiring a license, but then also refusing to actually check yours.

If the liquor store is also the DMV that approves licenses and they've been closed for over a year, yeah.

It's also a free giveaway so it's more like grabbing some of the free tasting samples without approval.

It's not stealing, please stop repeating this nonsensical comparison.

Just like if I watch you key in your PIN at an ATM, I'm not stealing your PIN. You can still use your PIN, same as before!

My PIN is 3414, copy it as much as you like.

Indeed.

Copyright infringement is not theft.

did an ai write this

I'd assume AI would come across as more intelligent.

I don’t think you’re gonna make it my guy

Out of curiosity, why wait until just now to torrent it?

I'm not really a game person. The point is that getting things the right way should be a better experience then going to piratebay.

Nonsense like captchas only hurt legitimate users, and when those captchas are asking you time and time again it's simply not worthwhile. Had I wanted to actually spend good money on a game they would have lost a sale, and for what -- to stop a robot asking for a password reset email to an existing account?

Steam is a perfectly fine experience and captchas are the universal standard these days. They lost someone who's 'not really a game person' and wasn't willing to fill in a captcha for a free game, I don't think they're too worried about lost revenue. I highly doubt tracking down and downloading a legit version of the updated Half-Life from a torrent site is an easier option, but you do you.

Steam is a ... somwehat tolerable experience. The client is extremely bloated for its primary function (installing and launching games) and this is only getting worse.

Steam is also dropping support for older operating systems - ones that you originally used to buy your games. That is also NOT perfectly fine.

But it's free and you didn't really answer the question.

Were you looking for a soapbox to stand on?

> but got thwarted by the captcha

...how?

There have been CAPTCHA problems with Steam for at least a year. Search "steam captcha broken" and you'll see endless Reddit threads about it. Last week it took me two days to get it to work - the only solution was to solve the CAPTCHA from a mobile device in order to do a password reset. CAPTCHA just did not work on MacOS or Windows at all. After solving the CATPCHA on mobile and resetting the password, I was able to use it to login via Windows and MacOS.

To add to the problem, there are numerous "solutions" about flushing DNS caches, disabling IPv6, using the audio CAPTCHA, and other tricks that just did not work for me. I tried every "solution" in a dozen threads until the mobile suggestion finally worked.

To add to the confusion, I encountered this about 2 weeks ago and power-cycling my router did fix it. My IP didn't change, so it must have been something cached on the router? It's just so weird that this issue has about 10 different "fixes" that may or may not work for someone.