I use Firefox and Firefox Mobile on the desktop and Android respectively, Chromium with Bromite patches on Android, and infrequently Brave on the desktop to get to sites that only work properly with Chromium (more and more often - another whole separate can of worms too, this…) And I always pay attention to disable google.com and gstatic.com in NoScript and uBlock Origin whenever possible.
I noticed something quite striking: when I hit sites that use those hateful captchas from Google - aka “reCAPTCHA” that I know are from Google because they force me to temporarily reenable google.com and gstatic.com - statistically, Google quite consistently marks the captcha as passed with the green checkmark without even asking me to identify fire hydrants or bicycles once, or perhaps once but the test passes even if I purposedly don’t select certain images, and almost never serves me those especially heinous “rolling captchas” that keep coming up with more and more images to identify or not as you click on them until it apparently has annoyed you enough and lets you through.
When I use Firefox however, the captchas never pass without at least one test, sometimes several in a row, and very often rolling captchas. And if I purposedly don’t select certain images for the sake of experimentation, the captchas keep on coming and coming and coming forever - and if I keep doing it long enough, they plain never stop and the site become impossible to access.
Only with Firefox. Never with Chromium-based browsers.
I’ve been experimenting with this informally for months now and it’s quite clear to me that Google has a dark pattern in place with its reCAPTCHA system to make Chrome and Chromium-based browsers the path of least resistance.
It’s really disgusting…
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Oh, you said your blocking google.com and gstatic.com? Try privacy badger, Google uses a million other domains to track as well (Google Fonts for example) and privacy badger will let you find and block those kinds from domains from tracking or at least from leaving cookies if they are required for the site to work.
Yeah, it’s true but with https://github.com/dessant/buster I don’t give a fuck with their reCAPTCHA xDD
Looks like a great solution but does it still work? Seems to be unmaintained.
It worked for me today, so should work. I hope so…
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Why does nobody want the cloudflare solution? Sounds neat
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I disagree. reCAPTCHA requires the use of non free JavaScript that is pretty much spyware. Such software should never be force on a user.
The other issue is that you are forcing users to do work. If I’m going to improve google maps then pay me
Mega based
How often are you going to a site that has a reCAPTCHA but doesn’t use JavaScript?..
The issue for me isn’t the JavaScript but the black box nature of it. I want code to be libre so I can study and modify it to my needs
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What we need is a better internet…
Keep in mind that basic bots don’t render or process certain page elements - like javascript. So VPN plus noScript/uBlock plus obscured data plus no preexisting cookies and possibly unique fingerprint from all your previous interactions (depending on your privacy settings)… It all adds to possible bot behavior. In my mind, getting caprcha’d is a good thing. It may mean google has low confidence that it knows who I am.
That is possibly the most unique outlook I’ve read about today.
There’s nothing good about captchas: it’s an insult to human intelligence, it’s forced unpair labor and each time I get one, I want to murder someone.
In a normal world, your statement would be utterly insane. But in our dystopian surveillance economy society, it’s actually a rational and interesting point of view, and one that turns captchas into a useful indicator of how well you manage to evade said corporate surveillance.
Interesting. Thank you for that.
However, If you’re right and Googles serves fewer captchas to those they can track better and not just those who run Chromium as I suspect, it also means privacy-enhanced Chromium-based browsers don’t hold a candle to Firefox. That’s not great news considering Chromium is the new de-factor standard and some websites only work okay in Chromium.
You’ve never operated a public-facing website, have you?
In the past 24 hours alone, I’ve had at least 344 bot attempts on my personal site. A handful are harmless crawlers but most are hoping to hit a vulnerability.
Captchas are necessary to prevent malicious bot activity. It’s unfortunate that it also means it’ll be a pain for users.
I deal with that BS all the time, although I don’t have the issue when I don’t use a VPN
I don’t think it’s browser specific or a direct targeting of Firefox; that’s likely confirmation bias. I see rolling captchas and the annoying ones that have a delayed fading in and out even on Chromium forks. I think the biggest reason for seeing them is VPN usage. When I turn off my VPN, I either don’t see any captchas or it just automatically shows the green check when I start them.
That’s weird, I use Waterfox and I occasionally get to do some kind of “puzzle”, but other times I just need to click the reCaptcha and it will confirm itself (with the green check)
Ironically, when I use Vivaldi, the captcha doesn’t even load, and when it loads, it says it’s wrong regardless of the answer I give it, so I’m always locked and that’s quite literally the only reason I stopped using Vivaldi.
On Edge I need to fill in puzzles ALL THE TIME, that’s also why I stopped using Edge (apart from the bloatware and the uBlock not working there)
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The thing that annoys me so much is why every damn website has to depend on gOoGle scripts to function. E.g : most of website depend on googleapis or ajax.googleapis. why don’t you just stop hotlinking everything to 3rd party shits. This is basically spread Google’s domination on web. Remember, those 3rd party libraries are not Free. They take visitors data and make you dependent on their services. So Google has become the gatekeeper of many websites.
I have a website and I coded everything by hands. No 3rd party JavaScript and other 3rd party BS. It makes my website run so damn fast
What you’re referring to is in fact Google Analytics which allows a lot of app to collect intrusive insights on their customers.
If you want to create an app today, you will use JS, Lemmy uses it, everyone uses it. It’s not dominated by Google, it’s just the standard for building web app today!
I am not against JavaScript. I sometimes use JavaScript and I don’t see the wrongs in that. What I am concerned is why so many websites use 3rd party JavaScript. This is disgusting because you sell your visitors out. Besides you can’t control the content of 3rd party scripts and most of them sell your data and spy on you.
In the case of proprietary software yes, but using a CDN for delivering JavaScript is sometimes so useful for open-source.
I see what you’re saying with Sentry, Google Analytics, etc… And it’s laughably hard to escape the influence of big tech in programming today, you are right!
At least when you want to build an app as we know them know… I’m currently working with some other folks on making the web more decentralized through a database that shares his data across peers.
Those peers are the user of the app. Let me tell you, the seeds are planted… just need to grow the tree!
Are you talking about IPFS?
No I’m talking about https://gun.eco — and it’s really interoperable because you could backup the DB files inside IPFS. If you need another lay of decentralisation lol.
Join us! Maybe you’ll like it here!
I just use captcha buster extension in Firefox, captchas are just stupid and it makes more problems for humans than for robots.
Tell that to anyone running a website with a pubic facing form - including register and login forms.
Damn thats a thing? Nice!
especially the newer ones that look like trying to see nipples on scrambled cable in the 90s.
My eyes are already shit that I can barely make out the normal images, how the fuck do you expect me to make out this god damn LSD fever dream shit?
You may have turned on a setting in Firefox that is meant to obscure your browser fingerprint. For me, it seems to force more captchas for me.
I kept the feature on though, because when I signed into Google and got the notification of a new sign-in on my phone, it thought my OS was Windows NT (it’s Linux) so it seems to at least kind of work.
I forget what the setting was off the top of my head (in about.config I think), but could look into it if anyone is curious.
Edit: went and found info on it. It is not just “Enhanced Tracking Protection.” It is specifically about blocking your browser fingerprint: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-against-fingerprinting
Rfp, arkenfox, Mull, torbrowser, Librewolf
It’s probably enhanced tracking protection you’re talking about. I keep it on as well but damn those captchas are annoying. I’d prefer to go back to the unreadable distorted text over the endless AI training ones.
Nope, this is something else: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-against-fingerprinting
Oh interesting! I don’t have that enabled but will be turning it on
Yeah, with that, the enhanced tracking protection, and always-on VPN, I have to solve captchas almost constantly lol… Worth it.
Select the picture with a keyboard (all pictures have weird AI shit that is absolutely not a keyboard) captcha failed
Side note - Firefox for Android recently freezes and crashes when you use the Google search in the private view. Also seems intentional
Private mode is useless, change my mind
Re: rolling captchas, I’ve noticed that when I select one wrong image in addition to or excluing one of their right images, I don’t get rolling captchas. Maybe it a fluke, but its happened times that its become regular practice.
You just have to select exactly three correct images. When there are 4 correct images you only have to select 3
I know. my point is I have been able to avoid rolling captchas by selecting one incorrect image & 2 correct ones. I have no idea if that’s a glitch a fluke or something else.
It works for me, I haven’t dealt with a single rolling captcha since March’23.
Jeez, just faced the forever recaptcha a couple of days back. I used Firefox web and the recaptcha was a sold 5+ kinds (select cars, buses, motorcycle, signals…). I kinda half thought that it was some sort of gag after seeing it go on for what seemed like forever. Thankfully I made it through and it will not change my decision to stick with Firefox.
Wish we had some extension which could skip these CAPTCHA shits. I normally surf on mull (forked Firefox) though sometime have to use cromite (fork of bromite which is a fork of chromium) to access websites peacefully.