I have been unable to give my money to Home Depot, REI and a growing list of online retailers because they use Akamai EdgeSuite, which just assumes I am a bot and 403s on protected API calls. This happens consistently on any IP and any browser on my Linux desktop/laptop.

There are not enough words to describe how much I hate Akamai EdgeSuite. So many random validation loops and 403s across different physical computers, different operating systems, different connections and even countries. A couple of services I need use it and it's 30% I'll make it past their stupid "protection".

Same, i'm doing a kitchen reno and gave up on Home Depot because of this

Home Depot at least has a physical presence, which you can go and directly give some much-needed feedback to.

It has a zero percent chance of reaching anyone who can do anything about it.

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.

The point is to spread the word.

REI is allegedly a co-op, maybe there's a committee or something it could be presented to?

Usually that just means the owners of the individual stores are the shareholders.

REI Co-op has an Annual Members Meeting in Seattle, where it announces the results of the board of directors election. The 2026 one happened Feb 5. Apparently the presentation is only 8m long, some saying it's pre-recorded and it's near-impossible for members to submit a question that actually gets answered:

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...

Maybe they'll figure it out when their revenue drops next quorter or the ones after that?

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.

You can also send an email if you're lazy. In both cases the CEO probably won't read it but a more than minimum wage secretary probably will pass it on to corporate customer support which IME is a lot more useful and the regular support that the company wants you to use.

It sure makes debugging headers a pain. curl -sLIXGET https://… never mind, that won’t work, _fires up browser yet again_

One problem with these things is that businesses have minimal visibility on the amount of users they lose.

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).

I wanted to give money to charity and they have whole form protected by recaptcha. So I would have to allow all my personal information and amount donated sent to google (and agree with google terms for data processing). I have contacted them but they did not understand why this is problem they just wanted to protect themself against bots. IMHO unless those things are not disallowed by antitrust laws we have lost.

We wouldn't want bots throwing money at us!

I suspect this is a real problem for charities, though. If those bots are using stolen credit cards, the "donations" are going to cost the charities money after they pay extra fees to the credit card processors. Nonprofits are sometimes used to test stolen credit cards before making more profitable fraudulent transactions, so there's a real risk of it costing them money if they get rid of the captcha but don't replace it with something sufficiently high quality, even after accounting for the occasional lost donation.

Why would they pay extra fees?

Merchants often pay a chargeback fee on top of refunding the main charge. Additionally, merchants with lots of fraud or other chargeback issues are likely to be dropped by payment processors or see their general fees with payment processors get more expensive.

i say technofeudalism, not sure i know what i'm writing about though

Luckily the marketplace of money will ensure that businesses who block their customers shrink and businesses who don't block their customers grow.

> most human visitors will actually be unable to pass the 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.

This is not true, maybe in the US, but in many countries you get captchas all the time with residential connection and also in public places all the time, internet cafe, airports, cafe wifis and so, they'll at least get it once, that way there is a permanent fingerprint correlation with real identity, I can bet that EVERYBODY will get it at some point so Google and other people on board with this atrocity (webmasters are also accomplice) can finish-up the master plan.

>> whether they literally just don't care about having customers

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 actually be unable to pass the CAPTCHA

Most human visitors will pull out their smartphone and just do it without giving it much thought.