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by dlcarrier 52 days ago
I get 401 errors all three time, because I use web browsers that don't leak enough personally identifiable information to prove that I'm not a robot.
3 comments

I doubt you are regularly getting 401s because of this.
Ironically, blocking trackers gives you even more uniqueness.

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

I'm not expressly trying to block trackers; I'm just trying to find a web browser that doesn't eat all my RAM, and WebKit seems to be the best engine for it, but I don't use Apple's hardware, so I end up with some pretty oddball browsers, which also send out less tracking information.

Of course, using an oddball browser in and of itself is easily trackable, but that's not what the bot-detection software is looking for, so it defaults to assuming I'm a bot.

Just fyi, the EFF tool is very minimal, there is fingerprinting methods that are durable cross-browsers, all the methods cited are weak.
You don’t need PII to prove you are not a robot. See Privacy Pass. And I don’t know how a website is somehow going to verify your PII as not-fake, anyway.

Likely you just use a shit web browser.

How a website is going to identify your PI as non-fake? Isn't that the entire business model behind Persona which has been in the news for leaks? (There are a few websites I've had to verify my if I with them for)
the way to pass captcha as a bot is to pay off the company that makes the captcha by using their bot.

cloudflare browser run, superb. no captcha.

You mean you set your useragent to match the one of CloudFlare bot and that avoids captchas on sites?
cloudflare make a remote browser, browser run. you can use it as an API or as an agent tool.

i can let opencode merrily browse the web and it doesn't get stopped. a bit like a drug mule bribing the cops.

i have privacy pass and i really can't make it work.

every time there is a captcha it makes you authenticate. so it's the same thing as the captcha.

maybe i have it misconfigured