Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by trevormcneal 1579 days ago
Let's push the idiocracy to the extreme by asking Arkose to add a timeout to their captchas, so people have to solve it fast and make the default puzzle be a prime factorization.

Modern web become so unusable and poluted that I don't think that it can get worse.

5 comments

I read here on HN that Google has come up with new way to buypass all trackers and adblockers and I think things are going to get really bad for web.

I think it's time we build a directory of applications or a search engine which indexes only the websites that do not use any trackers. The damage of tracking industry to whole web is irreparable but I think we have an opportunity to build a new web that can have mechanisms to prevent any sort of tracking.

Kagi.com lets you filter for and signal boost results without trackers. It’s very nice.
I wanted to do something similar for my search engine when I proxied results from Bing (similar to what Kagi.com is doing according to their FAQ), however, it felt like a gimmick because I had so little control over what websites to boost.

The reason I had little control is because Bing's API limit you to requesting 50 results which is usually SEO spam with trackers.. so all I accomplished was e.g. moving Wikipedia from second to first position while 9+/10 of the returned results still contained trackers for pretty much all queries.

If you have access to Kagi.com then I'm curious to hear what results you see when you search for e.g. "Manchester United". I suspect all of them (except Wikipedia) will contain trackers. If that's not the case then I would love to hear how people think they managed to filter out all the bad sites while still displaying other results besides Wikipedia.

Here's the result, using the ad/tracker sort:

https://imgur.com/CXrWsJr

It does say that there are ads and trackers on a variety of those. Though I see for example that it says 0 detected for espn, which is .. uh, dubious I guess. But then again privacy badger blocks nothing there so maybe it's correct?

It also says Twitter and Facebook have no trackers. I think that's technically correct, if they mean "third party" trackers. Difficult to say; I don't disagree with that approach.

And who would moderate it? Who would make sure they don't cheat and don't insert some tracking code at some point in the future? I don't believe automatic checking would work, unless you decide any JS equals tracking (and at this point you'd be better of just disabling JS).
well then I guess the criteria to index websites would be those who have no js.
even if someone did it this way (as a switch in DDG for example), there is no way of guaranteeing that the ebsite didn't implement some JS between the time it got indexed and your visit

honestly, just disabling JS is the only bulletproof way of making sure you don't run any JS

They literally do this on Roblox, I've seen over 20(!) hard puzzles and about 10 seconds to solve each one: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/impossible-roblox-captcha/3214...

For some challenges, this is so impossible that people give up with logging in until it calms down in a few hours, even Roblox employees and full time developers

People have told me that Arkose pay people to run their captchas and present lots of fancy metrics of attacks they've stopped which is why some websites seem to be ok with destroying user experience by running this

If regular users can't log in, that would decrease the load, and that could be presented in those metrics i suppose.

"Look! there was an artificial traffic spike here... but then our systems kicked in and saved the day!" (By locking out paying users and letting in bots, because that's easier for the 'protection' company and gives the same stats for 'back to normal' in the reports)

Careful what you wish for - it can, and probably will get worst. I still get cookie rage every time I have to deal with cookie popups. To put things in perspective, i recommend trying to run with a pihole plugged in your network. Even just for a week or two. The difference is so stark it emphasises how shit things are right now.
Just a friendly reminder to anyone reading this — the "annoyances" lists you can enable in uBlock Origin get rid of basically all cookie popups. I haven't seen one in a couple of years.
Just a note that sometimes this blocks the popup but not the background overlay that goes along with the popup. This makes interacting or even scrolling with the site impossible. It only happens occasionally and it's nothing a quick "zap element" in ublock doesn't fix. But it can be surprising.
Did not know this, just enabled all of them. Thank you!
There is also an extension on chrome and firefox store named 'I don't care about cookies' which is specifically made for this issue.
I had a mixed experience with this extension: very effective but it breaks many sites - initially I didn't understand why, it took me some time to identify the culprit.
I literally made a whole series of annoying puzzles as the confirmation flow of certain destructive actions for a gaming-related site of mine.
99% sure OP is browsing with some shady VPN