You could try handwriting and posting a letter to their CEO. I think that sometimes works. Probably not very often but there are more than zero CEOs who read those letters.
https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/2026-rei-board-of-direc...
https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/rei-announces-2026-boar...
https://www.reddit.com/r/REI/comments/1qw14k6/rei_hosts_thei...
I was thinking in the same terms: you put up a QR capcha, you don't get my traffic and money. Just the amount of extra work needed, let alone the Google tracking turns me off. As if traffic lights, crosswalks and bridges weren't enough of a hassle.
On the opposite, if they see reports of many visitors not completing the captcha, they're likely to think "Wow so many bots!!! This defense nowadays is indispensable..!".
Sometimes you need to pass a captcha even to contact them (if you want to tell them that you can't pass their captcha).
Most human visitors will never ever notice the change. reCAPTCHA is completely invisible for most human visitors because they are allowed to pass just by fingerprint.
It's not like an average user is going to have to scan a QR code every time they visit a site via web browser. If it were like this then it would be a non-issue because no sane website would adopt this system. But it isn't.
So every government website. Every website where people simply have no choice (DMV) or where failure to login results in them not claiming the money/benefits they are due (all tax websites). And every website handling post-sale complaints (Airlines, insurance).
Most human visitors will pull out their smartphone and just do it without giving it much thought.
However much I hate it, right now among the sites using reCAPTCHA there are many that I strongly want to use.
Let's find a better solution please
Is there an argument here that Google is creating a monopoly?
Could this be challenged on similar grounds that forced Microsoft to recommend other browsers to users on Windows?
Our antitrust laws have been toothless for decades, and both parties love billionaires controlling the rest of us with an iron fist.
GrapheneOS is looking more and more worth the headache that my limited free time generally does not like. I don't need Google to know my smut fanfiction is written by my IRL.
However he's been on it now for months and every time he shows me something on it I get a little more jealous. Everything seems to be working fine, including e.g. bank apps, and he has interesting features like some kind of app zoning thing limiting permissions on a zone to zone basis.
The only problem is it's only available on massive phones without headphone jacks and SD card slots, so I'm sticking with Xperia for now.
No. Bigger problem created, since there are innumerable government, health care, and educational web sites that use reCAPTCHA.
I'm not going to give up reading the test results from my doctor because of some simplistic ideologue decides that it's "problem solved."
CF turnstile is one, but of course that means Cloudflare owns even more of the web.
HCaptcha is inaccessible and actively discriminatory against individuals with disabilities and refuses to change, to the point that I suspect the only way that they will do anything is to file a class-action against them and sue them into the ground.
And I... Can't think of anything else. Other than to just get rid of Captchas entirely.
Enough to make it so bots are expensive to run.
You could just call them.
But in all seriousness, many services are making it difficult through to impossible to communicate outside of their web or app platforms. Call centres are expensive and messy, and it's now apparently acceptable as a society to treat customers/clients/whatever as adversaries so they can get away with making it hard to communicate with them.
Are you comfortable with anybody being able to ring up the hospital and say "yo, it's majorchord, how are my gonnorhea results?"
No, that's why we have safety protocols in place. When you call a doctor they ask you for your birthdate or sometimes also a PIN/password on your account to protect your data.
How would that still be considered a breach of privacy?
But giving birthdate (available to anyone via a single query in a public database) and (sometimes?! - what?!) PIN over the phone wouldn't really be considered good enough here. Birthdate is, as I said, public knowledge. And a phone is too insecure a medium for transmitting a password.
I'm not super interested in an long argument about whether it's reasonable that this isn't considered secure or not. I'm just letting you know what reality looks like. And the reality is that "just call them" is not a solution, because such information will simply not be handed out over the phone.
It already is a solution, and has been in widespread use for many decades. I don't think it's going anywhere.
Suddenly I have been made aware that, having lost my paddle on Shit Creek, I will eventually be taken downstream to Shit Lake (where it appears I will inevitably drop anchor).
People do care about such things.
I hope the same is true in other EU countries.
> Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? [0]
> dang
> No recent changes, but we do sometimes turn captchas on for logins when HN is under some kind of (possible) attack or other. That's been happening for a few hours. Hopefully it goes away soon.
Not solved at all: 99.999% of users don't give a damn and use a Google-signed Android.
My opinion is that because they don't give a damn does NOT mean regulations should not protect them. What Google is doing here is anticompetitive and they should be fined (antitrust and all that).
At which point you should contact your attorney general, and work to ensure such efforts face legal challenges at every turn.
As for now, when I need to travel to Germany, I just book tickets through the national carrier of my home country, which for cross-border tickets often turns out to actually be cheaper than booking through DB. Thankfully I don't live in Germany proper and my need for travel there is not that high (once or twice a year at most) but I wonder what would I do if I had to move to Germany and use trains there more often.
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Gotta love it.
The finger-wagging about "Use of developer or inspection tools" is just outrageous. Akin to accusing users of thought crime.
The only solution to all this will be through elections and laws.