[techsupporter]

> The Internet is full of these micro-tyrants and I never see anyone complaining about them.

I'll complain about them. They're, at best, poorly-informed people who don't understand the ramifications of what they're doing as it winds up as abuse, or worst they're malicious actors who I hope are condemned to a life of a 300 baud modem over a rural telephone line in a lightning storm.

The hiccup is, these are two different problems. I'm not the service administrator; I'm the user who has to put up with the absolutely onerous "bot prevention service." Frankly, if you're a private entity, I'm mostly of the mind of do what you like. If I encounter a CAPTCHA, I will probably just bounce off the page. Except, of course, that Google penalizes me for doing that, too, because I Might Be A Bot That Got Stymied(tm).

Where my hackles are truly raised is when the government requires me to work through these moronic puzzles. I shouldn't have to do a CAPTCHA to log in to my transit pass or look up county records!

Finally, it's everyone who will handwave away "well, it's inaccessible but whachagondo" without the acknowledgement that we are all on varying levels of "abled" and that level changes throughout our lives, and not just as it relates to age.

[thayne]

I've worked on implementing captcha in a few situations. In every case it was with great reluctance, and we tried to limit it to places that were absolutely necessary.

But the alternative was to go down, or spend an order of magnitude more on abusive requests than legitimate ones, or allow spammers to use our commenting system to send emails.

I don't like the situation any more than you do, but that transit site might have captcha to protect it from getting DDoSed and becoming unavailable. That county records site might have captcha to protect personal information from getting scraped for usage in phishing attacks and other unsavory activities.

Sometimes there might be other ways to provide protection from bots, but those can have their own inconveniences for users. Or they could be prohibitively expensive.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to find better solutions, or that captchas are always necessary. But in many cases, they are there for a reason.

[miki123211]

The problem with the government is that the internet breaks assumptions that the government really doesn't want to break.

Let's take court cases as an example. Imagine your jurisdiction always let people look up cases that they had a case number for, but didn't let them search for all cases involving a specific person to protect the innocent. This worked fine when looking up a case involved taking a trip to the court, scheduling an appointment, giving the case number to an employee and waiting the for the documents to be brought into the reading room.

Then, somebody got the bright idea to move all that to the internet, making life easier for both the people who needed access to cases and the employees who used to provide it. There's one problem, however, a computer system won't stop an unsavory company from the Maldives from querying all the case numbers and building an index of all the cases and their participants, letting people search for all cases involving a specific person, something which the government specifically wanted to avoid. Captchas are the only real way to stop this.

[dns_snek]

Captchas don't stop this, they only add a minor hurdle that any "unsavory company" looking to sell this data will bypass with ease.

[wizzwizz4]

> without the acknowledgement that we are all on varying levels of "abled"

I get this argument, and I even use it myself (it's great for getting through to people who find empathy hard), but shouldn't this be irrelevant? Even if 5% of people were born disabled, and the remaining 95% were abled for their entire lives, shouldn't disabled people still matter?