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.