[matheusmoreira]

> pretend they failed the captchas

That explains a lot... I frequently have to solve 10+ captchas when I'm using Firefox, many of them rate-limited. It feels like a punishment for resising surveilance. These things should be illegal due to the accessibility problems they cause if not the fact they're a nuisance.

[floriol]

It's more of an automatic thing (it's usually due to VPN) since many people connect from the same IP at near the same time. It's even worsr with TOR

[matheusmoreira]

Why should people be punished for using VPNs, Tor, an ISP with CGNAT? All of these should be supported regardless of how much abuse originates from them.

[leshenka]

"Oh, you dare to oppose our surveillance? You want to block tracking scripts, fingerprinting and use VPN? You're a baaaad consuumer, we're going to correct your behavior by making your browsing experience miserable or submit to our rules and switch to Chrome"

I'm sorry if that's unnecessarily dystopian

[matheusmoreira]

There's also the double standards involved. It's totally fine when they run their abusive javascript on my computer but if I even so much as scrape their website suddenly it's abuse just because they don't like it.

Everything is okay and justified when rich corporations do it. "Normal" people just have to accept it without fighting back in any way. Company directly and openly transmits malware to people's browsers, collects all personal information and creates detailed profiles of people in order to sell to interested parties? If I did that, I'd no doubt get charged with some sort of crime. They just make it part of their terms of service which nobody ever reads much less agrees to and somehow everything is justified. Suddenly it's not malware but "surveillance capitalism", a totally legitimate activity. And if we try to resist in any way, they use the lack of tracking to say we're indistinguishable from the networks of bots spamming them or DDoSing them or whatever. Since it's part of their terms of service, any attempt on our part to circumvent their fingerprinting is abuse.

> we're going to correct your behavior by making your browsing experience miserable

Hopefully the only thing they'll achieve is the death of their own online community. Imagine if HN forced people to solve a captcha before every single post.

[leshenka]

It's almost as if every dystopian/cyberpunk scenario is coming to life (or will some time in the future)

[fragmede]

Should be, but unfortunately we're still trying to invent a better abuse-resistance system than a captcha. Invent a better one and the world will throw money at you. Telemarketing calls are an example where better abuse-resistant systems would be awesome.

[matheusmoreira]

> we're still trying to invent a better abuse-resistance system than a captcha.

> Invent a better one and the world will throw money at you.

It already exists.

The abuse stems from the fact servers connected to the wider internet are designed to respond to anyone who tries to talk to it. That's the fundamental problem with internet security today: computers talk to strangers they don't know much less trust.

What if computers dropped all packets by default and networked only with authorized users? The risk of exploitation and abuse becomes negligible because to unauthorized users it's like the computer is not even there to begin with.

This can be done with single packet authorization. The internet would lose its mass market appeal but it's much better than normalized widespread surveillance.