So it seems that you will need a modern Android device with Google Play Services installed or a modern iPhone/iPad to be allowed to browse the web in the future.
No mention of device integrity verification yet, but the writing is on the wall.
NotPractical 12 hours ago [-]
> No mention of device integrity verification yet
If Google Play services is listed as a requirement, that implies that a "certified Android" device capable of Play Integrity attestation is required, since that's the only officially supported way to obtain Google Play services. On consumer-facing support articles like this, they don't tend to get into the nitty gritty details like what APIs are being used. If MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY is required, that would probably not be explicitly listed here.
(Yes, if you go deep into the FAQ at the end it eventually states that if you rooted your phone, you can't use tap to pay, but that requirement is implied by the certification requirement [1].)
In Google's eyes, and in the eyes of the law due to trademarks filed by Google, Android == Google Android.
This feature would make little sense if it's not using device attestation because otherwise it would be easy to spoof. I expect that it will initially not use it, and they will start A/B testing device attestation in the coming years.
it's boiling the frog method. Moving too fast means backlash, but a slow, step by step transition where each step seems reasonable, but ultimately end up with a locked down device, is how they aim to achieve it. And people would be too lazy to complain until the last few steps, by which time it would be too late.
charcircuit 10 hours ago [-]
>that implies that a "certified Android" device capable of Play Integrity attestation is required
No, it doesn't. It implies that the app for handling the deeplink lives within GMS as opposed to needing to manually install a separate app like you do on iOS. GMS does not have a hard dependency on device integrity APIs being supported.
blueg3 9 hours ago [-]
They said "capable of Play Integrity attestation". It's a weasel statement. If you have GMS, you're capable of performing PIA attestation, you just might fail. So it's strictly true, but doesn't tell us anything about whether it requires PIA.
ikr678 46 minutes ago [-]
And you must be signed in.
I frequently get flagged as suspicious activity and have to pass a captcha when trying to use the Google verbatim search function on a signed out Firefox browser on android.
hellojesus 12 hours ago [-]
This is going to make my grapheneos journey a bit more exciting. How wild to force users through an official google identification for web browsing.
Does the iPhone recaptcha app force you to login with a Google account? Seems we didn't need ID verification for the web to lose all anonymity.
lucb1e 11 hours ago [-]
I'd rather have to do ID verification at a government site that gives out blindable RSA signatures to browse the web with using open source software, than this overseas tech company needing to lock down the whole device and tech stack and not have to 'show ID' at all. One of these two holds elections...
Music/movie corporations and game developers must look forward to an age where people can't access the cache files or hook up a debugger to their apps anymore
batrat 15 minutes ago [-]
Sorry, I trust Google more than my government for my data. I mean I trust photos, youtube, music, gmail, wallet, keep, etc. what is that I have left anyway? It's sad that we started from open web, but we ended up in the hands of few. Apple/Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Amazon decide basically how I live my life. I don't want to (and sometimes I try to hard), but I don't want to give up the convenience also, but not only mine, also for my family is in the same pot.
x______________ 9 minutes ago [-]
Google will comply if your government needs information on you. Are you sure your trust isn't misguided?
broken-kebab 6 hours ago [-]
I guess history made us different. Personally I have reasons to be equally distrustful to anyone who wants to know too much about me, but much more afraid of my gov't than overseas entities.
handoflixue 2 hours ago [-]
In this specific case, why fear the government?
My government has already seen my government-issued ID. If my government hasn't worked out my phone number, they can always ask the phone company. My address is required for the ID, voting, and filing taxes. I don't see how the government learns anything from this?
Conversely, I would like to believe most companies do not have my government-issued ID, nor a lot of the information on it.
wyldberry 54 minutes ago [-]
From an American perspective, i don't trust the government with the implementation details, nor do I trust our political climate, misaligned incentives, and general disinterest in good governance to implement something so sensitive.
If I lived in say, Sweden, I feel much more comfortable trusting their government to implement. In America, I feel I must always vote in a way that prevents giving any power to the government that I wouldn't want my political opponents to have over me.
slaw 7 minutes ago [-]
the grass is always greener on the other side
userbinator 6 hours ago [-]
I'd rather have no ID verification at all. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile.
realusername 51 seconds ago [-]
Same, I've never seen any app or website where an ID registration would make sense. No thanks.
xbmcuser 4 hours ago [-]
one of these also rounds up people and sends them of to overseas concentration camps without due process. I think maybe white people still don't get what the rest of the world is living or experiencing.
LorenPechtel 9 hours ago [-]
One of them pretends to hold elections.
xp84 9 hours ago [-]
Does it only count as an election if one’s favorite side wins?
8 hours ago [-]
achierius 9 hours ago [-]
What if neither side represents your interests? What "election" is there in that case?
lucb1e 8 hours ago [-]
There's more than two sides here. None of the 14 parties with >1 seat in parliament fully represents my best understanding of how to improve the country and world on any time scale (long or short), but quite a few of them come reasonably close and I would vote for them without much hesitation
(Heck, I wish there were fewer parties, like if five single-topic good parties (bij1 against racism, pirate party for internet freedoms, volt for international collaboration, party animals for environmental welfare, etc., plus greenworkersparty as the current overarching big boy) would band together, it'd be a much easier choice!)
That not every country is so lucky (not all of them have free elections, or elections at all) is a shame indeed, but at least for countries like mine I'd be much happier to have a government arrange a system than a tech corporation and foreign laws. Presuming that the 2-party system you speak of is the USA's, at least both corps are governed by your own laws, that's something!
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8 hours ago [-]
Simply live somewhere that doesn’t have a broken electoral system.
zx8080 6 hours ago [-]
Like the Moon or Mars? The power is not something for the people for free.
microtonal 47 minutes ago [-]
Some Western European democracies have a well-functioning democracy. The people voting are still humans, a substantial portion votes for racist parties that economically only benefit big corporations and not them, but the damage is limited because there is no winner-takes-all. Everyone has to accept compromises.
g-b-r 8 hours ago [-]
Can you candidate yourself in that election?
xp84 5 hours ago [-]
I'm sure many are tempted to dismiss this comment, but I think it's actually great. It's incredibly easy to complain about the options out there, really easy to vilify any or all of the parties as controlled by satan/evil corporations/communists/fascists.
What's harder?
Convincing enough people to matter (in some kind of election-based system) to get behind your platform - either with you as a candidate, or working to promote a candidate or party or movement that you do believe in.
People talk like their changemaking ideas are very widely held - the way people talk it's like they believe 75%+ of the country must actually agree with them - but then they don't run for office on such a popular platform that it should be a sure election win, yes even with countervailing forces such as electoral college, Senate, etc.
lesuorac 7 hours ago [-]
Which public corporation do you think doesn't hold elections?
hn_go_brrrrr 3 hours ago [-]
Google. The Class B stock setup means Class A shareholders are shouting into a void.
Velocifyer 9 hours ago [-]
I will be unable to solve the phone verification because I use LineageOS for microG, but any fraudster can just buy a bunch of $30 android phones. Many people have trouble using a smartphone, so they use dumbphones, but they will be locked out. Many people just don't have any mobile phone because they don't think that it is useful.
blueg3 8 hours ago [-]
Google is mostly interested in abuse that happens beyond the scale of how many $30 phones you can buy.
duskdozer 2 hours ago [-]
They're mostly interested in having a complete record of all users' internet activity tied uniquely to their identity.
Barbing 6 hours ago [-]
I'm expecting a pretty hard identity verification requirement to connect to the internet, which should solve for the burner phone thing.
2ndorderthought 8 hours ago [-]
Google is interested in, like other tech companies, identifying users by tying them to their phones. Other ai defense companies are trying to get photos and IDs. This is just another take on the same subversive activity.
snailmailman 9 hours ago [-]
I’m already sick and tired of seeing cloudflares “making sure you aren’t a bot” checkbox everywhere. Sometimes it locks me out entirely and decides I don’t get to view pages.
I see recaptcha less frequently but it’s much more annoying, with all the clicking of crosswalks, or busses, or whatever. I am not looking forward to a web where google can not only lock me out of my email, but also large sections of the previously public internet. Occasionally google decides I don’t get to do searches, and that’s not too much of an inconvenience, there are other search engines.
Gander5739 9 hours ago [-]
But what's the alternative? Sites need a way to prevent bots overwhelming them, and there's no perfect way to distinguish real users from bots.
rkagerer 5 hours ago [-]
One alternative is to make simple, efficient, and where appropriate even static sites that can scale to meet the demand.
The HIBP hashes distribution is a great example.
kube-system 2 hours ago [-]
“Demand” has very little to do with any of the problems bots cause on the internet today.
BirAdam 6 hours ago [-]
The alternative would be tar traps that only a bot would “see” and interact with and thus be caught by. Default to annoying machines not people.
grogenaut 3 hours ago [-]
Your idea works for generic crawlers.
That doesn't work for targeted bots. A major benfit of device attestation is to stop the hordes of custom bot creators who try all sorts of ways to make a buck off of your platform such as sms toll fraud, credit card testing, ad fraud, account takeovers, stolen card laundering, gift card laundering, botting for pay for platform / ecosystem benefits, paid harassment, the list just keeps going.
Some aps such as okta, banking, and others already check platform verfication. Websites can't currently until device attestation.
Personally, I hate the concept, but I also hate spending a large amount of time fighting mal-actors on my platform in a completely unbalanced fight. There are tons of them, and they have all the profit incentive. There's a few of us, we only take losses. They can lie all they want, we can't really trust any facts except kinda the credit card and the device attestation.
Like everything, it's a shitty compromise, but, as a platform runner, if I can leverage google's signal and cut 95% of my malicious botting users, guess what I'm going to do.
andrepd 9 hours ago [-]
You're right, we need big tech to protect us from the problems big tech created.
In the olden 20th century, we had a term for that...
2ndorderthought 7 hours ago [-]
You know that protection racket where the mobster came to my corner store and says if I don't pay him he will come later and rough me up? This is a worse deal than that.
PeterStuer 2 hours ago [-]
Better turn on that 'free' Cloudflare 'bot' protection. Would be a shame if our, ahem, I mean, those botnets ddos'ed your site.
mannanj 7 hours ago [-]
this is the modern version of that.
2ndorderthought 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe ai companies should have invested any of those billions of dollars into safe and equitable ways of rolling out their new surveillance machines. Oh right that was never the point and this only serves to further that. Got it.
Barbing 6 hours ago [-]
I think they'd be OK w/o the surveillance machine part of it, but they have never seemed to care about anything besides advancement of the tech or its side projects.
I can imagine a world where they were fighting for displaced workers, for Altman/Elon-suggested UBI/universal "high" income plans, and where they'd compensated those in the training set, and cut deals with publishers & content creators instead of scraping anything they could get their hands on. Would they be unpopular?
anonym29 8 hours ago [-]
mCaptcha, ALTCHA, Cap, Friendly Captcha, Private Captcha, Procaptcha, Anubis... there are literally dozens of open source alternatives that aren't feeding the Do Be Evil company... not to mention all of the commercial alternatives - if for whatever reason, you do feel like paying for a service that costs nothing to offer
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8 hours ago [-]
Gen off it. Fraud detection is nontrivial and requires ongoing effort. It’s reasonable for people to be compensated for that.
sieabahlpark 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
negura 7 hours ago [-]
reminder that any company which has a legal obligation towards you (GDPR requests, refunds, filling a complaint etc) can be contacted directly and forced to do it manually if you cannot use their web interface due to being blocked by Cloudflare & other captchas
nerdsniper 12 hours ago [-]
I believe you'll also need bluetooth enabled on both devices. At least you do for those "scan this QR code displayed on your computer to authenticate using the passkey on your phone" feature, which this seems analogous to. Bluetooth is used to ensure that the two devices are actually physically co-located.
hellojesus 7 hours ago [-]
My desktop doesn't have Bluetooth. Does this mean I'd be doomed even if I had a compatible mobile device?
nerdsniper 4 hours ago [-]
Yes. The technical name for this FIDO2 QR code flow is caBLE (Cloud Assisted Bluetooth Low Energy).
2ndorderthought 7 hours ago [-]
We might need to redo this whole Internet thing because this is insanity.
CalRobert 7 minutes ago [-]
Maybe it’s time to get in to Ham radio or some other hobby
ai-x 7 hours ago [-]
In a free market, the content provider is free to put whatever guardrails they feel appropriate. Loginwall, Paywall, CaptchaWall.
If you don't like that provider, you are free to pick another.
PeterStuer 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not 'free' to pick another government site. There is only one.
Eisenstein 7 hours ago [-]
1. Free markets do not exist
2. If free markets did exist they would not conform to the theory that people are using when they think of what free markets are, since people do behave rationally, power dynamics are real, and no consumer can have all of the information needed to make rational decisions even if that information were available
3. The market is providing solutions to its own failures without fixing the underlying failures because it is more profitable this way. Is buying something from a company that mitigates a problem created by the same company actually a free market, or is it just extraction?
g-b-r 8 hours ago [-]
In passkeys the bluetooth is used for the actual authentication protocol...
nerdsniper 4 hours ago [-]
Sometimes, sort of. Most passkey usage doesn’t involve bluetooth. When it does, there’s no real data being sent over bluetooth, just a meaningless hash that can be confirmed using a secret inside the QR code.
So really, it’s like I said, Bluetooth is used to make sure that the device consuming the QR code is actually near the device that’s displaying the QR code.
duskdozer 2 hours ago [-]
No surprises here, though of course disappointment when it comes to fruition.
Hizonner 12 hours ago [-]
... or you'll need to stop using reCAPTCHA if you want to get any traffic on your Web site.
I know, people will slavishly knuckle under, but let me dream for a few minutes.
tardedmeme 12 hours ago [-]
99.999% of people don't give a shit and don't even know what this means. They'll follow the instructions. These are the same 99.999% of people who press win+R ctrl+V enter when the captcha prompts them to. Because do this to see the dancing bunnies.
KellyCriterion 10 hours ago [-]
> press win+R ctrl+V
LOL is this real?
I guess yes, because yesterday ReCaptcha asked me to screenshot a QR-code with the mobilephone :-D
duskdozer 2 hours ago [-]
People are constantly made to jump through strange hoops to do things on the internet. Unless you're really keyed in to what's going on, it's easy to fall for stuff like that.
snailmailman 9 hours ago [-]
It’s a common thing for malware. But people are going to be more likely to fall for it when mainstream sites ask you to complete weird tasks with your phone to verify your identity.
EvanAnderson 10 hours ago [-]
It is. There are fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs on pwned Wordpress sites that instruct users to run Powershell scripts.
ronsor 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is going to turn into another malware vector, isn't it?
tardedmeme 12 hours ago [-]
Discord has a feature where you can log into your account on your PC by scanning a code on your phone.
So does Binance.
xp84 9 hours ago [-]
Those are good things though? They’re about logging in, on purpose.
Not about attesting to Google that you have a proper smartphone as a proxy for your humanity, like this thing.
tardedmeme 2 hours ago [-]
To prove you're not a bot, scan this QR code with Discord.
EmbarrassedHelp 9 hours ago [-]
But none of those options are requirements to access the service.
tardedmeme 2 hours ago [-]
They're requirements to access my website though! To prove you're not a bot, scan this QR code - with Discord.
mystraline 10 hours ago [-]
So does Signal.
warkdarrior 9 hours ago [-]
But Signal is secure(TM)!
mrguyorama 12 hours ago [-]
They will do exactly as it says while also ceaselessly complaining, completely unable to connect their choice to use a website with the pain of using that website.
There's some sort of serious issue with learned helplessness or something
gowld 10 hours ago [-]
It's almost like some people aren't IT hobbyists.
Hizonner 10 hours ago [-]
I'm not a heart surgery hobbyist, therefore I don't chop people's chests open, no matter who suggests it.
nonamesleft 11 hours ago [-]
I have blocked it for years with ublock origin, if a site doesn't work, ctrl-w.
Nowadays i cannot even use google search because of this, any search will trigger a captcha, hilarious (atleast on chromium-based browsers, firefox lets me get a page or two).
Leonard_of_Q 10 hours ago [-]
Ditch Google Search as well then, use something like SearXNG or another meta-search engine. You'll get more representative results, no tracking and no captchas. Sometimes some of the engines may return captchas but they're kept from the search results, i.e. those engines don't get used for the query. You can run your own instance of SearXNG or one of the alternatives or use one of the available public instances, your choice. The fewer direct interactions with the likes of Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc. the better.
conradfr 10 hours ago [-]
The thing is even a contact form without something like reCaptcha is doomed on today's web: spam all day.
10 hours ago [-]
crazygringo 8 hours ago [-]
Do you have an alternate solution? When we hear so many stories from HN'ers of their websites being hammered by out-of-control crawling and fetching and new levels of AI slop spam?
This is something site owners choose to implement or not. They're the ones paying the extra hosting fees to handle potentially unwanted traffic, and dealing with spam that traditional CAPTCHA's are no longer effective against. Google's not forcing this on anyone else.
PeterStuer 2 hours ago [-]
Investigate the anti-bot sellers.
varispeed 10 hours ago [-]
> but the writing is on the wall.
Only if politicians are still corrupt and law enforcement doesn't work.
Which means the writing is on the wall.
throwaway613746 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
everdrive 12 hours ago [-]
I've been saying for years that it does not make sense to browse the web on a smartphone. Eventually things will get bad enough that people will agree with me.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8 hours ago [-]
“On an infinite timescale, I’m eventually right, so it never makes sense to not heed my advice” is silly. We’re all going to die eventually so it’s not worth browsing the web on any device.
fsflover 11 hours ago [-]
Smartphone is just a small computer. I don't see hiw what you say makes sense.
everdrive 10 hours ago [-]
It's a small computer that I don't really control with a horrible UI, horrible privacy, and nothing but perverse incentives. ("download the app!")
pocksuppet 31 minutes ago [-]
You need LineageOS or GrapheneOS
Forgeties79 8 hours ago [-]
There’s no going back unfortunately. There’s no world where smartphones go away barring a new tech as significant and useful as a smartphone.
esseph 10 hours ago [-]
Sounds like Windows
xp84 9 hours ago [-]
And Mac
codedokode 8 hours ago [-]
Wow. So you will need a mobile device in future to browse the web, and Google will use mobile device identifier to de-anonymize you. And I assume they also carefully designed this to make life little harder for alternative search engines, their competitors. And probably they will not provide collected user data to competing advertising platforms to make them less competitive as well.
Also the example is ridiculous, that you need to scan a QR code to place an order. Maybe they should require filing a visa application as well.
giancarlostoro 8 hours ago [-]
I will stop using those websites altogether.
You know, its funny, I don't think I've ever seen captcha on HN once.
f33d5173 1 hours ago [-]
You need one to sign up lately I believe. Which is really all it takes if your identity is required for the captcha and gets associated with your account forevermore.
RobRivera 7 hours ago [-]
Well, internet is dead anyway so they can keep the keys to the kingdom. I frankly do not care anymore. The meek shall inherit the Earth
orion7 2 hours ago [-]
Like many, I've already trained myself to commit to giving up immediately after the second bus or traffic light or puzzle (some of which I don't even understand anymore). Sounds like my life will not be all that different.
Worst case scenario, if this neuters my sovereign and all powerful linux desktop from some critical business I can't avoid (which remains to be seen), it sounds like I will have to have some scripts and a dummy android phone in my home lab as a sort of second router.
devy 10 hours ago [-]
I can't believe promoting the QR code-based challenge as the agentic way of fraud defense. Having non-human readable data input is dangerous if somehow the QR code is comprised with a zero-day URL, it's game-over.
Note: I know QR code is ubiquitous these days, but still blinding scanning a QR code to go to accessing an URL is like running a binary downloaded from the internet.
Note2: yes, the `curl $URL | bash` installation approach is essentially just that, yet somehow became popular.
xp84 9 hours ago [-]
But a QR is a URL. If visiting a certain URL pwns your device, complain to whoever made the device or browser.
Not that I like this thing at all. But using a QR isn’t exactly why it sucks.
olyjohn 5 hours ago [-]
It's a URL that you can't read. It's literally exactly what we tell people to not do to be secure. LOOK AT THE FUCKING URL BEFORE YOU VISIT THE SITE.
shye 2 hours ago [-]
No, we don't, or shouldn't ask people to check the URL itself, because of homonym attacks are a thing. Goal is to make sure that your credentials can't be compromised by surfing the wrong website (e.g. by using Passkeys instead of passwords).
PeterStuer 1 hours ago [-]
Whoever told you that is the same person that advocated complex password rules with montly resets and no repeats.
a2128 6 hours ago [-]
2020s will be remembered as the decade when companies stopped behaving in a trustworthy way, and normalized scanning random QR codes, downloading random apps, uploading photos of your face or documents, all as strange convoluted "verification" procedures. Scammers will love this
gwerbin 4 hours ago [-]
Companies were doing this all along. The 2020s will be remembered as the decade when we realized, too late, that the world began ending in the 2010s.
shit_game 7 hours ago [-]
Whats to stop malicious actors (bad extensions, compromised cdn, etc.) from painting over the qr code or injecting their own? This is so incredibly terrible.
dunder_cat 6 hours ago [-]
Doesn't have to even be that advanced, people get conditioned to stuff like reCAPTCHA and friends & Cloudflare's interstitial landing page (when "I'm under attack" mode is on) and they won't bat an eye. That's how we get people piping `curl | bash` into their terminal to "solve" fake challenges.
As a side note though, I recently have tried to turn CSP on a website I run and the amount of garbage I see in the reports is astonishing. There's some noise from things like OpenDNS intercepting YouTube or Social embeds for people using the work-friendly or family-friendly options, but the sheer amount of things attempting to phone home to random URLs and random extension scripts injecting ads into the site would astonish you. My mental model of "toolbar hell" from the Windows XP days being gone has completely shattered.
baalimago 2 hours ago [-]
Captcha suggestion: force users to write something offensive/vulgar (we have a few "banned words"). Or to take a stance in Israel/Palestine.
Whatever the response is, it'll unlikely be from an LLM.
hhh 2 hours ago [-]
This is such a flawed view of LLMs. Sure it may block out frontier models but every local abliterated (and some non) will just say whatever you want.
nine_k 2 hours ago [-]
But to use vulgar words an age attestation must be passed first! /s
driverdan 11 hours ago [-]
Any company that requires me to scan a QR code to make a purchase is losing my purchase.
comboy 11 hours ago [-]
You would not last long in China ;)
(you pay by scanning QR code in .. well, everywhere)
nohell 4 hours ago [-]
Adding friends, shopping, logging in on PC, binding accounts for after-the-fact SSO, etc..
This is all done with QR codes here.
gonzalohm 10 hours ago [-]
They don't like contactless technology or what? I don't think that scanning a QR code is significantly more involved but it's enough to be annoying
xp84 9 hours ago [-]
I think partly because Google and Apple controlled the contactless bits of the phones for many years, the non-OS-makers like WeChat and AliPay made use of the open technology of QR codes. I think theoretically you could build equivalent things as they have with NFC today on those platforms but on the other hand being able to set up a “POS” with nothing more than a printer does have an appeal to it, even if writable nfc stickers cost 5 cents you still have to go buy some.
charcircuit 5 hours ago [-]
I think there is also something about how easy it is for a business to adopt a QR code by just needing to print one out instead of having to go out and buy a whole payment terminal.
codedokode 8 hours ago [-]
In Russia they tried to use bluetooth after being sanctioned from using NFC.
pyreko 6 hours ago [-]
Having been there recently, it's about as annoying as taking out your phone to pay for something. Some systems also support NFC now, though the most common is still QR. Also helps that their QR scanning tech/transaction processing is really fast, many transactions were as fast or even faster than me scanning with a card from my experience.
(Also if you want to talk annoying payments don't get me started on how insane it is that the US still requires me to hand over a physical card at most restaurants to take over to their register... sorry I just can't help but get annoyed by this lol)
627467 8 hours ago [-]
QR payments in china was already prevasive before contactless payments became prevasive in the west. And as others say: not all phones supported nfc at the time. Remember iBeacons on iP5? Wechat and Alipay was already everywhere by then
maest 7 hours ago [-]
Only because you typo'd twice: it's "pervasive".
ZeWaka 9 hours ago [-]
It's all WeChat Pay (or AliPay).
esperent 9 hours ago [-]
Lots of phones don't have NFC. All phones have cameras.
driverdan 6 hours ago [-]
Thankfully I don't live in China. Unfortunately the totalitarian government is a larger concern than the QR codes.
joquarky 5 hours ago [-]
Which one?
bartekpacia 2 hours ago [-]
lol how edgy of you
Razengan 1 hours ago [-]
Also in adjacent countries like Vietnam etc., where even ragtag street food vendors have a QR code sticker on their stall/cart.
It's so common that people pay without even talking or confirming; I've seen customers just take their phone out, point at the QR, and walk away, and the shopkeeper says nothing. I'm assuming the shopkeeper gets a notification on their phone and trusts regular customers,
but how easy would it be to secretly place your own bank account's QR code on top of a shop's QR? People who wait for a confirmation notification will catch it immediately, but by then the customer has already paid the attacker and the transaction can't be just reversed. Repeat it in several places, and a thief to snatch quite a few payments before the parasite stickers are all taken down.
PeterStuer 1 hours ago [-]
Scanning QR in your bank app for payment is near universal in Europe. In fact, it is considered very annoying if a site does not provide the option.
tjoff 1 hours ago [-]
Looks similar but is a different thing entirely. That is for allowing a someone to take money from your account.
Because the concept of credit/debit cards is batshit insane that only serves to finance organized crime.
kps 10 hours ago [-]
Where are those ‘mark of the beast’ cranks when you need them?
ethagnawl 6 hours ago [-]
On their knees, praying to their Orange Antichrist.
Lammy 10 hours ago [-]
A few millennia too late for that: the “mark of the beast” is just money — “so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark”. How does one buy or sell without money? Otherwise we would call it bartering.
Many sit-in restaurants enforce QR codes ordering. Started during covid, but keeps happening, especially outside US in my experience.
kccqzy 10 hours ago [-]
They don’t enforce in my experience. Just don’t bring a phone and they will bring you a paper menu.
ale42 10 hours ago [-]
Or if you want to play a bit, have a browser with some extension that breaks websites and show them "it doesn't work on my phone". Pranks apart, in my experience, I always got a paper menu when I asked for it.
x0x0 10 hours ago [-]
It's coming.
The Poshmark morons demanded government id to buy a $35 shirt. On an established account, an address that matched my credit card, etc.
The only answer is delete your account.
EmbarrassedHelp 9 hours ago [-]
Why the hell would they care who is buying it? They're getting paid either way.
The only reason they'd care is because they want to sell your personal information.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8 hours ago [-]
That is an incredibly long bow to draw from someone that obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is willing to make massive jumps to conclusions. Do you know how ecommerce works? I agree that it is a bit absurd, but not nearly as absurd as your claim of “the only reason”.
bryan_w 7 hours ago [-]
People on this site don't really think deeply about what they type. They just say whatever is the most cynical in order to farm up votes
xacky 13 hours ago [-]
The fact that mobile devices are now mandatory to prove "humanness" means that Google no longer trusts desktop/open platforms anymore.
pixelmelt 9 hours ago [-]
Im in the community reverse engineering web CAPTCHAs, it's because they are too easy to reverse engineer with Claude now.
I've seen multiple people break botguard (the obfuscation used by recapcha) within the last year when before it was considered a huge technical envour.
Devices like phones don't have this issue since Google owns the client attestation end to end and can fingerprint you without the risk of receiving spoofed values.
dredmorbius 12 hours ago [-]
Where is this specified? I don't see that in TFA.
luma 11 hours ago [-]
The example they give in TFA is having the user scan a QR code, presumably from a mobile device.
bryan_w 7 hours ago [-]
But that's not a specification
skinfaxi 11 hours ago [-]
I think they are jumping ahead but it does seem like a logical conclusion. Would tie in nicely with the online ID verification stuff popping up everywhere.
charcircuit 10 hours ago [-]
Does anybody trust it? MacOS seems to be the only desktop platform I see be trusted.
dangus 5 hours ago [-]
I think the pathetic thing about this is that it’s so much less intuitive than stuff like cloudflare and Anubis.
Google, a multi-billion dollar company, is going to make the customers of their corporate clients pull out a phone and do some bullshit just to visit a website.
Meanwhile, when Cloudflare/Anubis verifies you there’s zero required interaction and you barely even see the anime character because it all loads so fast. At most Cloudflare makes you check a box.
Velocifyer 9 hours ago [-]
reCAPTCHA is already so hard that I often can't solve the visual challenges, and Google has been blocking the audio challenges on VPNs (that is horrible for blind people) and also now the audio challenges are super hard.
Google Gemini can solve them and I don't think that it will take long for lower power AI systems to be able to solve them.
I will be unable to solve the phone verification because I use LineageOS for microG, but any fraudster can just buy a bunch of $30 android phones. Many people have trouble using a smartphone, so they use dumbphones, but they will be locked out. Many people just don't have any mobile phone because they don't think that it is useful.
BoxedEmpathy 4 hours ago [-]
I think you're spot on. This will block and inconvenience legitimate users while fraudsters have no problem buying more phones.
Not a useful direction for real end users.
user3939382 3 hours ago [-]
The GitHub one I recently tripped on was the worst of all time. Part one of 9 or something, which of these three next sounds are bees? Or some small man rotating around spaces on a map. I have an eInk screen and it was nearly impossible to see. Extremely painful and ridiculous.
The QR code feature looks like it could be spoofed to become a Pegasus deployment method once people get used to them.
fg137 10 hours ago [-]
Scan QR code -- you don't have our "captcha app" installed, automatically redirect to Play store -- download malware because Google Play's horrible screening -- profit
I must not be the first one to think of this, right?
Right???
gwerbin 3 hours ago [-]
Does it hurt Google if that happens? No, not really, unless it happens a lot and one of the victims happens to be a US senator or something. The value of the control this gives them, if adopted widely, is immeasurable, not to mention the ad-targeting value of identifying more people across devices.
andrepd 9 hours ago [-]
Hey at least in September they're going to stop you from installing F-Droid. For your safety, citizen!
LorenPechtel 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, idiots would fall for it.
Both (Google/Apple) need a much higher level of certification for anything to be allowed to be prompted to install. Either you're already big (and can easily afford to pay for some human time to verify), or you're a manufacturer selling something that has an associated app (again, which implies you're reasonably big and can afford to pay for verification.)
You're neither? Get lost. Somebody types in the name of the app, fine, but the user must find it.
EA-3167 11 hours ago [-]
Overall it’s a reason to sigh deeply and thank our fellow “visionary leaders” for making everything that little bit worse. At least we’re getting an AI paradise out of the deal right?
Right?
varispeed 10 hours ago [-]
It's not really about leaders, but people who are supposed to ensure they are not corrupt.
It seems like security services in many countries started outright to scam the tax payers. Get the wage and pretend brown envelopes don't change hands and policies are not shaped by corporations for their benefit, not the public.
PeterStuer 2 hours ago [-]
This is just Google competing with Cloudflare in laying the foundation for erecting their toll booths on the internet.
semiquaver 10 hours ago [-]
Serious question: what if you don’t have a (smart)phone?
observationist 10 hours ago [-]
That means you're a peasant, and don't matter.
Don't worry, they'll work with telecoms and carriers to ensure devices matching your budget are subsidized and made available at every possible opportunity.
semiquaver 10 hours ago [-]
I expected mostly snark from my earnest question, And got it.
Ok, concrete scenario. What about homeless people using the computer at the library? Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
observationist 8 hours ago [-]
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Sure they would. Cloudflare has already arbitrarily blocked entire swathes of the internet. Captcha as well. Your average user ends up going to the path of least resistance, and end up with a compliant ISP or carrier that's doing all sorts of censorship and gatekeeping and siloing and funneling.
And if they did get noticed, they'd whip up some sort of program through their cronies like the Obama phone, and get subsidized service to some token groups, heavily favoring political funneling and defaults supporting whatever party won the grift for that particular round of conspicuous do-gooding.
It's bad, man. For technically savvy people, they can get around things, switch up DNS, muck with vpns, etc. Normal folks are kept firmly within the walled gardens.
Then there's the information silos, platforms, and psychological shit they use. People don't have a chance in hell of getting a free and open link to the internet, what they see is tied to their identity, tied to their service provider, tied to their geographic location, and it's all done seamlessly in the background so they never even notice what they're missing, by design.
It wasn't snark. It's the awful, honest truth, and I have things to suggest involving wire brushes for anyone at Google or any other company involved in this shit.
We need a digital bill of rights, outlawing commercial trafficking in user data, mandatory ephemerality, and penalties involving prison time for CEOs and fines that are rapidly and unavoidably fatal even for companies like Alphabet or Amazon if they screw up even a little bit. Otherwise, this whole pretense at a free and open internet is just a convenient talking point and marketing schlock.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8 hours ago [-]
They just didn’t want a Temu Cory Doctorow answer.
warkdarrior 9 hours ago [-]
US govt used to have a program to sponsor mobile phones for homeless. Is that still around or did DOGE kill it?
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they? Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Honestly, if you ask such terminally naive questions don't be surprised to get sarcasm in reply. Google does cut off access to chunks of people if it deems it profitable to do so!
otterley 8 hours ago [-]
It doesn't matter how "naive" you think a question is. Nobody here deserves sarcastic remarks in response to a good-faith question.
Literally the first guideline under "In Comments" is:
Oh please. It wasn't even that snarky. It's also still a valid and correct (as far as anyone can tell) answer to the question.
bramhaag 9 hours ago [-]
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Why wouldn't they? Google is notorious for making marginalized people's lives harder if it can make them money. Some examples:
- Hosting Palantir's ImmigrationOS, used by ICE to track immigrants
- Actively removing tools marginalized people use to protect themselves against ICE, such as ICE-tracking apps on the play store
- Intentionally aided Israel in committing genocide as part of Project Nimbus
- LGBTQ creator censorship on YouTube
Cutting off a small group of people they've repeatedly shown not to care about in the first place is a small price to pay to further cement their position as gatekeeper of the internet.
whatsupdog 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8 hours ago [-]
Be quiet, American.
CursedSilicon 8 hours ago [-]
No person is illegal
867-5309 7 hours ago [-]
"person is immigrating illegally"
not
"illegal person is immigrating"
aboringusername 9 hours ago [-]
Well, it depends on the application and context. I don't think a homeless person at the library is going to be booking a $1000-a-night room in downtown Los Angeles.
However, services that homeless people will be using should factor in their target audience (such as the homeless not having a phone at all, or maybe not one that's up to date even).
However, like it or not, having a modern up to date device is becoming essential for even rudimentary basic access to society. Whether that's right or wrong it's where we are.
edelbitter 9 hours ago [-]
Then you have already have not been very present in the analytical data that these business decisions are based on.
Imustaskforhelp 9 hours ago [-]
I shuddered when I realized that Google would require (smart)phones for recaptcha.
I say this because I used to have a dumb-phone for an year and more and I only stopped using it when it broke (its battery fried but its replacable but I don't find battery its size). No smart-phone period,(I am a teen so I can afford to do that)
Recently, I wanted to make a google account, guess-what, I literally couldn't make a google account without having an (smart)phone. Google's new feature on making a google account also requires you to qr code your way into, similar to this re-captcha.
I tried to somehow find ways to have a phone number OTP but even when I finally managed to do that after so much PITA, I didn't get the OTP (at all).
I am pretty sure that my phone number works as I got another OTP from google when I had finally given in and used an android device to make an account and even then, there is so much friction.
Even though I have verified my phone number on google, I had to verify the phone number on youtube again to upload a video >15 minutes iirc and yknow I tried to add my number and it didn't send my OTP. So I tried again, and it said that I had tried too much, yes their rate limit of too much is 1
I was sharing all of this with some of my online friends with screenshots. I probably wished to write a blogpost about it that you can't use google without having an (smart)phone.
and now, you are telling me, that Google is gonna force me/us the same but for viewing the open internet, the content and websites that they don't even control. There was one thing about google doing this BS in their own websites because I thought that although really sh.tty, but they don't care about me enough to want me as a user so fine (it wasn't but still)
But this just takes it to an extremely completely next level. I can't stress how bad this all is.
Even after all of the previous things, I still was like, well this problem of google account can still be fixed/isn't thaaat large more than its annoying/frustrating and Google as a company is still mostly fine as compared to other tech giants except from their locking down android thing but this all changed with this move.
With age verification, locking down android, requiring android, recent Utah/UK laws which somehow threaten websites. Internet is turning into Dystopia. We are gonna slowly move towards a allowlist internet where only select few websites are used. For a large swath of the population this is already the case so the voices protesting are quite few but we must do what we can to protest them all from killing the internet. Sorry this got long but I can't stress how bad of a move this is as someone who used to use dumbphone, Google is basically saying that I can't use the internet if I have a dumb-phone.
8 hours ago [-]
aboringusername 10 hours ago [-]
Go fuck yourself?
I mean, that seems to be the general societal attitude.
And you'll need to buy new ones because many things are app only, or are migrating that way (including being able to travel to certain countries)
MichaelNolan 11 hours ago [-]
I’m trying to use my phone less and less. Ideally I’d like to even switch a dumb phone.
But tactics like this will make that nearly impossible if every website starts requiring a QR code scan on a authorized smartphone.
ale42 10 hours ago [-]
Which means, it's urgent that more and more people realize there are alternative to the everything-on-the-phone situation they live in. And that owning one is not mandatory and should not be (by the way, politicians should also wake up).
jcgrillo 4 hours ago [-]
Tactics like this will make me get a dumb phone and stop using those websites. If that means no more credit cards, online shopping, etc so be it. You have to draw the line somewhere.
PyWoody 11 hours ago [-]
What funny timing: After being hounded with CAPTCHAs every time I tried to search from the URL bar for the past week, not two hours ago I switched everything over to DDG. Great work, Google!
programmertote 5 hours ago [-]
I thought it's just happening to me. I tried to watch my computer's network activity to see if anyone has hijacked my IP. I closed Gmail and YouTube tabs because I find that they are the ones which pings to the outside world a lot more than other tabs I have opened. I even restarted my modem two times. Didn't work.
So I decided to...use Firefox a lot more with DDG (I use FF for mostly privacy-sensitive stuff like checking my financial accounts, but now I use it for a lot more browsing stuff).
Seems like it is the Chrome browser over-reacting.
akersten 6 hours ago [-]
Hmm, that QR code workflow doesn't look very accessible. Can we preemptively ADA this thing out of existence somehow?
BirAdam 5 hours ago [-]
Probably, but then sites that do not work on a screen reader should be ADA killable too… yet no one has tried this.
SoKamil 13 hours ago [-]
Google clearly wants only Google approved models to traverse the web.
jcfrei 9 hours ago [-]
They only want dumb humans doing the shopping not some hyper-focused bot that wont add any extra items into the shopping cart.
1 hours ago [-]
thekevan 7 hours ago [-]
I will STRONGLY consider not using any site that tries to make me do this.
dunder_cat 6 hours ago [-]
Is the QR code check mandatory and if not, is it the default?
The bulletpoint as-is just says:
> AI-resistant challenge: As we identify potentially fraudulent behavior from agents, we enable application providers to deter and mitigate malicious requests by requesting humans to be in the loop using the new QR code-based challenge. This AI-resistant mitigation challenge to prove human presence is designed to make automated fraud economically unviable.
Followed by
> Existing reCAPTCHA customers are automatically Fraud Defense customers, with no migration required, no action needed, and no change to pricing. Your existing site keys and integrations remain exactly as they are today.
It is probably me being a literal reader but "we enable application providers to deter and mitigate malicious requests by requesting humans to be in the loop" feels like it can be read as "Good news: by using reCAPTCHA, we're now interfering with agents that can solve the regular challenges" or "there's now a flag the application developer can set". This is the difference between me swapping off reCAPTCHA ASAP or just editing my configuration. I have to imagine someone somewhere anticipated the kind of reactions a number of us are collectively feeling (I too don't want to use my phone to browse the web more than I already do) and it feels irresponsible to publish a feature announcement without covering basic information like this for site administrators. Maybe they thought the second line about existing reCAPTCHA customers being moved over clears this up, but "Your existing ... integrations remain exactly as they are today" feels like again, literally, you won't have this new attestation requirement being presented to your users... but then why am I Fraud Defense customer!
ACCount37 7 hours ago [-]
Prime "drink verification can" bullshit. If you don't have a Google Approved Phone, the solution is to go fuck yourself. But what else would you expect from modern day and age Google?
Traditional CAPTCHA was heading for the graveyard for a while now, because the overlap between the dumbest of users and the smartest of AIs is too severe. But aggressively doubling down on the user-hostile garbage isn't the solution.
davemp 5 hours ago [-]
I think it’s becoming hard to ignore that the Internet has fundamental flaws from a game theoretical view. I hope that we can skip the step of having Google as the feudal lord who saves us from anarchy though.
How about we start with some accountability for entities that host fraud? The main reason we can have relative anonymity in public is part trust and partially because you can get physically taken out if you cross the line. I understand there are some real limitations with enforcing accountability on the Internet, but perhaps that’s where we should be focusing.
basch 11 hours ago [-]
Is this why google was repeatedly telling me I was displaying patterns of being a bot yesterday because I click too fast? I've never gotten the error message as many times as I did yesterday.
m463 3 hours ago [-]
google and cloudflare are becoming the master gatekeepers.
with cloudflare, I cannot use my old browser, I cannot browse many sites without javascript or cookies.
recaptcha? that prevents me from doing business with many sites, let alone browse.
fireant 5 hours ago [-]
I don't really get how this stops captcha solving as a service, which is the actual way that scaled recaptcha solving is done? Those things are incredibly cheap and are staffed by humans anyway. Instead of selecting grainy busses, they will just scan the image with their phones.
stupidgeek314 12 hours ago [-]
Why can't an AI scan the QR code? Just fire up an emulator if necessary
tardedmeme 12 hours ago [-]
The app that scans the code talks to the TPM in your phone to prove that your phone is running an unmodified Google OS.
postalrat 10 hours ago [-]
So openclaw or whatever future software will run or control unmodified google os devices.
hellojesus 12 hours ago [-]
I know that's the final destination, but I didn't see that listed in the requirements page linked above. Any proof of this affecting the current implementation?
themafia 12 hours ago [-]
Which would be meaningful if phones weren't remotely controllable.
So the net effect is every AI agent will also have and connect to a physical phone.
duskdozer 29 minutes ago [-]
One can expect it will be tied to a government ID, at which point they ban you from the internet if you disobey them.
tardedmeme 12 hours ago [-]
The attestation will include a unique ID of the phone, so that if you get banned you have to keep buying new phones and keep paying money to Google. Google won't stop this because it makes them money.
And the official Google OS just won't feature remote-control software.
lucb1e 11 hours ago [-]
There's also remote control hardware (a printer-like device can operate a touchscreen). But the first point stands, yes. Be it a phone or another hardware attestation device, they and Apple will be giving "I am human, let me participate in society" checkmarks out, directly or indirectly for money
Hizonner 12 hours ago [-]
... which is why you'll get locked out if you happen to visit an unusual number of sites in a day.
nerdsniper 11 hours ago [-]
Bluetooth is generally used to prove that the two devices are co-located, which makes it more complex to do your proposed kind of deployment at-scale. Bespoke solutions could perhaps work around for some smaller number of devices, this QR code layer by itself isn't intended to stop 100% of workarounds.
halapro 11 hours ago [-]
No browser supports Bluetooth.
nerdsniper 11 hours ago [-]
These passkey QR codes don't need to use Web Bluetooth API, because they utilize the WebAuthn API. The website itself isn't given access to the bluetooth, the task is handed off to the browser, which as a native application, can access bluetooth and abstracts the bluetooth away.
LoganDark 11 hours ago [-]
Chrome does...
drusepth 11 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, only on desktop/Android and not iOS it seems.
LoganDark 11 hours ago [-]
Chrome on iOS uses WebKit, so that makes sense.
(*I think in the EU, iOS Chrome can use Blink, but I am not sure if it actually does.)
bigger_fish 4 hours ago [-]
You mean like the Google login QR I can already bypass with an extension? I'm not sure this is a real step forward in the arms race, and I'm cool with that.
Kim_Bruning 5 hours ago [-]
the mobile phone requirement would mean I end up avoiding sites that use that method. I'm not sure how many friends and family can be convinced, but I can try
. (most people tend to give up any and all security measures if it means getting to see the fluffy kitten though, so my hopes aren't very high)
graphememes 10 hours ago [-]
yeah im not doing that
donmcronald 8 hours ago [-]
You don’t need to. As long as the dumb majority goes along with it, your options are to capitulate or get locked out of society.
orion7 2 hours ago [-]
An increasing percentage of the dumb majority are opting for dumb phones and plenty of people still use laptops, it doesn't have to be anywhere remotely close to a majority for many analytics-obsessed site owners to see the drop in sales and opt for another solution.
In any case, sites using an extremely restrictive mode of recaptcha during ddos attacks will just be one segment of a very fragmented digital future, not society as such
userbinator 6 hours ago [-]
Your only option is to sway the "dumb majority" in the other direction.
2001zhaozhao 7 hours ago [-]
Inb4 Google 2027: "we sold 30% more Android devices YoY!"
(The extra devices are cheap $30 phones all going into reCAPTCHA solve farms)
10 hours ago [-]
MASNeo 2 hours ago [-]
The efforts by Googles, Meta, TikTok, X and AWS etc. to fight fraud and other financial crimes are probably largely deficient. They earn significant revenue from crime and criminal activity. Compared to banks which are required to prevent financial crimes up to personal criminal liability of employees there are no comparable rules for social media platforms.
How do two service businesses get treated so differently by law?
x3sphere 10 hours ago [-]
I ditched reCaptcha and switched to Cloudflare Turnstile recently. It’s been a lot more effective. Not sure about this but I won’t be switching back for the time being.
duskdozer 23 minutes ago [-]
Why not hcaptcha or anubis? I had to block Cloudflare JS due to abuse, so I can't use any sites that require it.
g-b-r 8 hours ago [-]
It's hard to say which one is more maddening annoying
doublerabbit 9 hours ago [-]
From one egg basket to another; both are flawed in design.
mafriese 2 hours ago [-]
As someone who is working in incident response and malware analysis I have to say that is one of the worst ideas I have ever seen.
A lot of companies have issues with ClickFix [1] and other social engineering campaigns and now Google wants to teach users that they should scan QR codes to proceed on a website.
How should we realistically teach Susan from HR the difference between a real Google Captcha QR code and a malicious phishing QR code - you (realistically) can't. I wish we could - but those people don't work in tech, they will never know and I can't really blame them because at the end of the day they are just happy that they don't have to deal with tech after work.
We have spent years of behavioural conditioning to prevent QR-code based phishing attacks (some people call it Quishing but I hate that term) and since the QR code is being scanned from a mobile device (99.99% of the time the private device), we have no EDR visibility on those devices and can't track what's happening if people scan it.
This is more of an invitation for threat actors than it is something that holds them back.
Those who don't read articles: Google is pushing QR codes as captcha.
My personal thoughts is that this is fucked. I'm not whipping out my phone to read some blog or comment on youtube.
super256 6 hours ago [-]
Looks like Cloudflare has the only user friendly captcha of them all.
throwaway85825 5 hours ago [-]
Google has a lot of fraud because they have absolutely no standards when it comes to advertising scams and frauds as the first result. Google is a services company for the global crime industry.
mayama 13 hours ago [-]
The site doesn't mention this. But, are they locking down QR code auth for only safetynet authenticated devices and with mobile number verification?
bobbiechen 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I had the same question myself. I think that's what you would want to do to make it airtight (plus some amount of rate limiting or flagging for devices that are part of dedicated device farms).
But even if not, there's still value in raising the barrier to entry. For example, you can buy 1000 reCaptcha solves for $1-2 from various captcha-solver services. And yet that $0.001-per-request fee does discourage mass-scale bot attacks.
Hizonner 12 hours ago [-]
... You... think... it would be a good thing.
Don't you...
IshKebab 11 hours ago [-]
I do. It has downsides of course, but what's the alternative at this point?
Hizonner 9 hours ago [-]
Depends on your specific problem. Usually redesign your system not to need to care if the other end is a bot or not.
IshKebab 9 hours ago [-]
How though? Can you also avoid DDoS simply by designing your system to not care if the requester is a bot or not.
Let's say I'm running https://grep.app/ for example. AI bots start heavily using it, costing me a ton of money. How would you magically design this so it doesn't matter if the end bots are using it?
Hizonner 9 hours ago [-]
Rate limit individual clients.
bryan_w 3 hours ago [-]
Let's play this out: how do you determine individual clients? By ip? By seasionid?
intended 11 hours ago [-]
I suspect that the HN crowd is somehow insulated from the river of crap and fraud that is the internet experience for a majority of the population.
comboy 11 hours ago [-]
Just show us your face and transactions history, it's about the kids.
DeathArrow 2 hours ago [-]
Does not seem to anyone that Google is wielding too much power over our digital lives and the Internet?
walletdrainer 55 minutes ago [-]
Who are the engineers building this technology? Make their identities known so displeasure about these systems can be delivered directly to those who most deserve it.
aboringusername 10 hours ago [-]
I suppose it's now become a default assumption every customer is going to own a smart phone that complies with this requirement?
It seems on iOS you'll even need to download an application, which is quite a bit of friction.
In the current economic times, adding minutes onto the user journey is not going to result in increased sales, I suspect the data will prove the opposite.
Using a mobile device is bad enough as it is: TOTP, email, SMS codes, 3DS etc, while you can say this is part of the "flow", it's too much. I can see many abandoned journeys from this.
ifh-hn 11 hours ago [-]
Can I confirm that this is more shit from Google trying to lock people into their ecosystem (or Apples) under the guise security?
amazingamazing 12 hours ago [-]
How are people stopping bots reliably?
pocksuppet 10 hours ago [-]
The first step is to write down why you are stopping bots and which bots you are stopping. If an LLM is buying things from your web store, that's good. You are making money on that, and you shouldn't stop it.
charcircuit 7 hours ago [-]
The lifetime value of a LLM may be less than a real person. Especially if you consider things like word of mouth marketing.
hephaes7us 11 hours ago [-]
You can't, really. If a user can access the site, so can a bot.
You may be able to make it more expensive than your information is worth, but of course that affects users too.
yjftsjthsd-h 9 hours ago [-]
Perfectly: They're not; that's not really possible.
Before the age of AI, most bots aren’t sophisticated at all. They might be a script running curl in a loop, or at best some standard browser automation tool like selenium or playwright. People couldn’t stop bots reliably but they could easily stop 99% of bots. That is of course no longer true which is why reCAPTCHA had to evolve.
arian_ 12 hours ago [-]
Google building harder walls against bots while simultaneously building AI agents that need to get through them is peak 2026.
tardedmeme 12 hours ago [-]
They're expecting everyone to whitelist Google agents because Google has the market share for people to complain if Google agents don't work.
throwaway67743 12 hours ago [-]
With the apparent competence that built Gemini, I have zero faith in Google building or doing anything that works anymore.
throwaway67743 8 hours ago [-]
To counter the idiot downvotes, I proffer this as a prime example of Gemini:
Resolving Final Compilation Conflict: I will remove the redundant `Entry` type declaration to resolve the compilation conflict and finalize the in-memory `StdNetDB` refactor.
Edit std.go → Accepted (+0, -1)
31 type Entry struct {
32 RouterInfo *router_info.RouterInfo
33 }
34 -
34 func NewStdNetDB(db string) *StdNetDB {
35 ctx, cancel := context.WithCancel(context.Background())
36 return &StdNetDB{
That and the cli keeps exiting 0, without hinting why... Quality like the "AI Overview" that hijacks an entire page and isn't even relevant to the search terms - uBlock still doing god's work.
It made me realise I was perhaps a bit hard on Claude (but then it did something equally as dumb)
Analemma_ 11 hours ago [-]
It’s the same thing with Sam Altman and Worldcoin: create the problem, then sell people the solution (which also just so happens to shred more privacy). Play both sides and profit; it’s great work if you can get it.
mandeepj 12 hours ago [-]
Point On! Probably done by two different teams, who don't know about each other. I hate this (re)captcha so bad. They assume everyone is bad.
kajman 11 hours ago [-]
This would not have ever been announced while Lina Khan was running the FCC.
otterley 10 hours ago [-]
What does the FCC have to do with this?
kajman 10 hours ago [-]
Anti-trust. They're selling part of the problem (inference via Gemini) and now they're selling a solution. They also dominate web standards by developing the dominant browser. And they control one of two dominant phone platforms that will collaborate to enable this solution.
If this were some smaller company that just did cloud then it'd never even make it to PoC. This can only happen because it's Google Cloud, and they can leverage everything they own all at once. Those not buying into their ecosystem can take a hike.
otterley 9 hours ago [-]
The FCC doesn't enforce antitrust law. That's the FTC. (The FTC is also the commission that Lina Khan chaired for a while.)
kajman 8 hours ago [-]
Oops, Yes. I got 2/3 of the letters correct, though. I think that might be a better rate of success than their court cases during those years.
jimz 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ilia-a 6 hours ago [-]
Another nail in the web anonymity sounds like
nalekberov 8 hours ago [-]
I am almost certain that labs in India and China have already developed a solution to bypass the “Scan this QR” method.
What is easier than pointing a camera at a QR code and commanding and an AI bot to follow the next steps?
greatgib 9 hours ago [-]
> we enable application providers to deter and mitigate malicious requests by requesting humans to be in the loop using the new QR code-based challenge.
I'm so pissed off in advance. I hope that Google die and collapse in sudden bankruptcy before we have to support this crappy challenges that are totally user hostile!
catlikesshrimp 9 hours ago [-]
How do I fit TOR in this? Do anonymous users get to use a more anonymous app?
doublerabbit 8 hours ago [-]
No. Just more rejection and labelled as a terrorist.
arewethereyeta 10 hours ago [-]
Two mdashes in the first sentence...hmm.
KellyCriterion 10 hours ago [-]
++1
oybng 10 hours ago [-]
just how evil can google be?
LoganDark 11 hours ago [-]
Human verification via QR code does not mitigate labor farms.
kccqzy 11 hours ago [-]
Does reCAPTCHA ever claim to detect or block labor farms? From its old name it just seems to block bots only. (Bots are nowadays called agents.)
wslh 10 hours ago [-]
I imagine again a worldwide search for the cheapest labor. Mechanical Turk on steroids.
ptrl600 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe soon there will be a market for a phone specifically for use as a dummy, to get past all this nonsense.
mrguyorama 12 hours ago [-]
Google and the reCAPTCHA network aren't even that good with fraud prevention. You would think being literally omniscient over the whole internet would make it trivial to catch account takeovers, and Gmail has a proven track record at resisting account takeover, but when we tried to integrate their fraud signals, they were worthless, worse than the rest of the industry, worse than our homegrown trash from a decade ago.
Because Google doesn't actually care about preventing fraud, they just want the data you feed them and the fraud feedback you provide. It's all take, no mutual business.
andrepd 9 hours ago [-]
We are much MUCH closer to "drink verification can" than to the time that greentext was written. Like many things in 2026, it's beyond fucking wild, it's a parody of itself.
And I don't see it getting better without government regulation. But states are now weaker than corporations. How can we expect them to take charge?
liamwei 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
scotty79 10 hours ago [-]
"This AI-resistant mitigation challenge to prove human presence is designed to make automated fraud economically unviable."
Oh, you sweet, summer child.
eddy-sekorti 11 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing
Rendered at 07:11:15 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
So it seems that you will need a modern Android device with Google Play Services installed or a modern iPhone/iPad to be allowed to browse the web in the future.
No mention of device integrity verification yet, but the writing is on the wall.
If Google Play services is listed as a requirement, that implies that a "certified Android" device capable of Play Integrity attestation is required, since that's the only officially supported way to obtain Google Play services. On consumer-facing support articles like this, they don't tend to get into the nitty gritty details like what APIs are being used. If MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY is required, that would probably not be explicitly listed here.
E.g. the consumer documentation for Google Pay just says you need a "certified" Android device and a screen lock set up: https://support.google.com/wallet/answer/12200245
(Yes, if you go deep into the FAQ at the end it eventually states that if you rooted your phone, you can't use tap to pay, but that requirement is implied by the certification requirement [1].)
In Google's eyes, and in the eyes of the law due to trademarks filed by Google, Android == Google Android.
This feature would make little sense if it's not using device attestation because otherwise it would be easy to spoof. I expect that it will initially not use it, and they will start A/B testing device attestation in the coming years.
[1] Expand "What to do if you see device is not certified" -> "Reset device to fix issue" https://support.google.com/android/answer/7165974
it's boiling the frog method. Moving too fast means backlash, but a slow, step by step transition where each step seems reasonable, but ultimately end up with a locked down device, is how they aim to achieve it. And people would be too lazy to complain until the last few steps, by which time it would be too late.
No, it doesn't. It implies that the app for handling the deeplink lives within GMS as opposed to needing to manually install a separate app like you do on iOS. GMS does not have a hard dependency on device integrity APIs being supported.
I frequently get flagged as suspicious activity and have to pass a captcha when trying to use the Google verbatim search function on a signed out Firefox browser on android.
Does the iPhone recaptcha app force you to login with a Google account? Seems we didn't need ID verification for the web to lose all anonymity.
Music/movie corporations and game developers must look forward to an age where people can't access the cache files or hook up a debugger to their apps anymore
My government has already seen my government-issued ID. If my government hasn't worked out my phone number, they can always ask the phone company. My address is required for the ID, voting, and filing taxes. I don't see how the government learns anything from this?
Conversely, I would like to believe most companies do not have my government-issued ID, nor a lot of the information on it.
If I lived in say, Sweden, I feel much more comfortable trusting their government to implement. In America, I feel I must always vote in a way that prevents giving any power to the government that I wouldn't want my political opponents to have over me.
(Heck, I wish there were fewer parties, like if five single-topic good parties (bij1 against racism, pirate party for internet freedoms, volt for international collaboration, party animals for environmental welfare, etc., plus greenworkersparty as the current overarching big boy) would band together, it'd be a much easier choice!)
That not every country is so lucky (not all of them have free elections, or elections at all) is a shame indeed, but at least for countries like mine I'd be much happier to have a government arrange a system than a tech corporation and foreign laws. Presuming that the 2-party system you speak of is the USA's, at least both corps are governed by your own laws, that's something!
What's harder?
Convincing enough people to matter (in some kind of election-based system) to get behind your platform - either with you as a candidate, or working to promote a candidate or party or movement that you do believe in.
People talk like their changemaking ideas are very widely held - the way people talk it's like they believe 75%+ of the country must actually agree with them - but then they don't run for office on such a popular platform that it should be a sure election win, yes even with countervailing forces such as electoral college, Senate, etc.
I see recaptcha less frequently but it’s much more annoying, with all the clicking of crosswalks, or busses, or whatever. I am not looking forward to a web where google can not only lock me out of my email, but also large sections of the previously public internet. Occasionally google decides I don’t get to do searches, and that’s not too much of an inconvenience, there are other search engines.
The HIBP hashes distribution is a great example.
That doesn't work for targeted bots. A major benfit of device attestation is to stop the hordes of custom bot creators who try all sorts of ways to make a buck off of your platform such as sms toll fraud, credit card testing, ad fraud, account takeovers, stolen card laundering, gift card laundering, botting for pay for platform / ecosystem benefits, paid harassment, the list just keeps going.
Some aps such as okta, banking, and others already check platform verfication. Websites can't currently until device attestation.
Personally, I hate the concept, but I also hate spending a large amount of time fighting mal-actors on my platform in a completely unbalanced fight. There are tons of them, and they have all the profit incentive. There's a few of us, we only take losses. They can lie all they want, we can't really trust any facts except kinda the credit card and the device attestation.
Like everything, it's a shitty compromise, but, as a platform runner, if I can leverage google's signal and cut 95% of my malicious botting users, guess what I'm going to do.
In the olden 20th century, we had a term for that...
I can imagine a world where they were fighting for displaced workers, for Altman/Elon-suggested UBI/universal "high" income plans, and where they'd compensated those in the training set, and cut deals with publishers & content creators instead of scraping anything they could get their hands on. Would they be unpopular?
If you don't like that provider, you are free to pick another.
2. If free markets did exist they would not conform to the theory that people are using when they think of what free markets are, since people do behave rationally, power dynamics are real, and no consumer can have all of the information needed to make rational decisions even if that information were available
3. The market is providing solutions to its own failures without fixing the underlying failures because it is more profitable this way. Is buying something from a company that mitigates a problem created by the same company actually a free market, or is it just extraction?
So really, it’s like I said, Bluetooth is used to make sure that the device consuming the QR code is actually near the device that’s displaying the QR code.
I know, people will slavishly knuckle under, but let me dream for a few minutes.
LOL is this real?
I guess yes, because yesterday ReCaptcha asked me to screenshot a QR-code with the mobilephone :-D
So does Binance.
Not about attesting to Google that you have a proper smartphone as a proxy for your humanity, like this thing.
There's some sort of serious issue with learned helplessness or something
This is something site owners choose to implement or not. They're the ones paying the extra hosting fees to handle potentially unwanted traffic, and dealing with spam that traditional CAPTCHA's are no longer effective against. Google's not forcing this on anyone else.
Only if politicians are still corrupt and law enforcement doesn't work.
Which means the writing is on the wall.
Also the example is ridiculous, that you need to scan a QR code to place an order. Maybe they should require filing a visa application as well.
You know, its funny, I don't think I've ever seen captcha on HN once.
Worst case scenario, if this neuters my sovereign and all powerful linux desktop from some critical business I can't avoid (which remains to be seen), it sounds like I will have to have some scripts and a dummy android phone in my home lab as a sort of second router.
Note: I know QR code is ubiquitous these days, but still blinding scanning a QR code to go to accessing an URL is like running a binary downloaded from the internet.
Note2: yes, the `curl $URL | bash` installation approach is essentially just that, yet somehow became popular.
Not that I like this thing at all. But using a QR isn’t exactly why it sucks.
As a side note though, I recently have tried to turn CSP on a website I run and the amount of garbage I see in the reports is astonishing. There's some noise from things like OpenDNS intercepting YouTube or Social embeds for people using the work-friendly or family-friendly options, but the sheer amount of things attempting to phone home to random URLs and random extension scripts injecting ads into the site would astonish you. My mental model of "toolbar hell" from the Windows XP days being gone has completely shattered.
Whatever the response is, it'll unlikely be from an LLM.
(you pay by scanning QR code in .. well, everywhere)
This is all done with QR codes here.
(Also if you want to talk annoying payments don't get me started on how insane it is that the US still requires me to hand over a physical card at most restaurants to take over to their register... sorry I just can't help but get annoyed by this lol)
It's so common that people pay without even talking or confirming; I've seen customers just take their phone out, point at the QR, and walk away, and the shopkeeper says nothing. I'm assuming the shopkeeper gets a notification on their phone and trusts regular customers,
but how easy would it be to secretly place your own bank account's QR code on top of a shop's QR? People who wait for a confirmation notification will catch it immediately, but by then the customer has already paid the attacker and the transaction can't be just reversed. Repeat it in several places, and a thief to snatch quite a few payments before the parasite stickers are all taken down.
Because the concept of credit/debit cards is batshit insane that only serves to finance organized crime.
Some currencies are even literally called Marks lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_(currency)
The Poshmark morons demanded government id to buy a $35 shirt. On an established account, an address that matched my credit card, etc.
The only answer is delete your account.
The only reason they'd care is because they want to sell your personal information.
I've seen multiple people break botguard (the obfuscation used by recapcha) within the last year when before it was considered a huge technical envour.
Devices like phones don't have this issue since Google owns the client attestation end to end and can fingerprint you without the risk of receiving spoofed values.
Google, a multi-billion dollar company, is going to make the customers of their corporate clients pull out a phone and do some bullshit just to visit a website.
Meanwhile, when Cloudflare/Anubis verifies you there’s zero required interaction and you barely even see the anime character because it all loads so fast. At most Cloudflare makes you check a box.
Google Gemini can solve them and I don't think that it will take long for lower power AI systems to be able to solve them.
I will be unable to solve the phone verification because I use LineageOS for microG, but any fraudster can just buy a bunch of $30 android phones. Many people have trouble using a smartphone, so they use dumbphones, but they will be locked out. Many people just don't have any mobile phone because they don't think that it is useful.
Not a useful direction for real end users.
I must not be the first one to think of this, right?
Right???
Both (Google/Apple) need a much higher level of certification for anything to be allowed to be prompted to install. Either you're already big (and can easily afford to pay for some human time to verify), or you're a manufacturer selling something that has an associated app (again, which implies you're reasonably big and can afford to pay for verification.)
You're neither? Get lost. Somebody types in the name of the app, fine, but the user must find it.
Right?
It seems like security services in many countries started outright to scam the tax payers. Get the wage and pretend brown envelopes don't change hands and policies are not shaped by corporations for their benefit, not the public.
Ok, concrete scenario. What about homeless people using the computer at the library? Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Sure they would. Cloudflare has already arbitrarily blocked entire swathes of the internet. Captcha as well. Your average user ends up going to the path of least resistance, and end up with a compliant ISP or carrier that's doing all sorts of censorship and gatekeeping and siloing and funneling.
And if they did get noticed, they'd whip up some sort of program through their cronies like the Obama phone, and get subsidized service to some token groups, heavily favoring political funneling and defaults supporting whatever party won the grift for that particular round of conspicuous do-gooding.
It's bad, man. For technically savvy people, they can get around things, switch up DNS, muck with vpns, etc. Normal folks are kept firmly within the walled gardens.
Then there's the information silos, platforms, and psychological shit they use. People don't have a chance in hell of getting a free and open link to the internet, what they see is tied to their identity, tied to their service provider, tied to their geographic location, and it's all done seamlessly in the background so they never even notice what they're missing, by design.
It wasn't snark. It's the awful, honest truth, and I have things to suggest involving wire brushes for anyone at Google or any other company involved in this shit.
We need a digital bill of rights, outlawing commercial trafficking in user data, mandatory ephemerality, and penalties involving prison time for CEOs and fines that are rapidly and unavoidably fatal even for companies like Alphabet or Amazon if they screw up even a little bit. Otherwise, this whole pretense at a free and open internet is just a convenient talking point and marketing schlock.
(edit) It seems to still exist: https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...
Honestly, if you ask such terminally naive questions don't be surprised to get sarcasm in reply. Google does cut off access to chunks of people if it deems it profitable to do so!
Literally the first guideline under "In Comments" is:
> Be kind. *Don't be snarky.*
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why wouldn't they? Google is notorious for making marginalized people's lives harder if it can make them money. Some examples:
- Hosting Palantir's ImmigrationOS, used by ICE to track immigrants
- Actively removing tools marginalized people use to protect themselves against ICE, such as ICE-tracking apps on the play store
- Intentionally aided Israel in committing genocide as part of Project Nimbus
- LGBTQ creator censorship on YouTube
Cutting off a small group of people they've repeatedly shown not to care about in the first place is a small price to pay to further cement their position as gatekeeper of the internet.
However, services that homeless people will be using should factor in their target audience (such as the homeless not having a phone at all, or maybe not one that's up to date even).
However, like it or not, having a modern up to date device is becoming essential for even rudimentary basic access to society. Whether that's right or wrong it's where we are.
I say this because I used to have a dumb-phone for an year and more and I only stopped using it when it broke (its battery fried but its replacable but I don't find battery its size). No smart-phone period,(I am a teen so I can afford to do that)
Recently, I wanted to make a google account, guess-what, I literally couldn't make a google account without having an (smart)phone. Google's new feature on making a google account also requires you to qr code your way into, similar to this re-captcha.
I tried to somehow find ways to have a phone number OTP but even when I finally managed to do that after so much PITA, I didn't get the OTP (at all).
I am pretty sure that my phone number works as I got another OTP from google when I had finally given in and used an android device to make an account and even then, there is so much friction.
Even though I have verified my phone number on google, I had to verify the phone number on youtube again to upload a video >15 minutes iirc and yknow I tried to add my number and it didn't send my OTP. So I tried again, and it said that I had tried too much, yes their rate limit of too much is 1
I was sharing all of this with some of my online friends with screenshots. I probably wished to write a blogpost about it that you can't use google without having an (smart)phone.
and now, you are telling me, that Google is gonna force me/us the same but for viewing the open internet, the content and websites that they don't even control. There was one thing about google doing this BS in their own websites because I thought that although really sh.tty, but they don't care about me enough to want me as a user so fine (it wasn't but still)
But this just takes it to an extremely completely next level. I can't stress how bad this all is.
Even after all of the previous things, I still was like, well this problem of google account can still be fixed/isn't thaaat large more than its annoying/frustrating and Google as a company is still mostly fine as compared to other tech giants except from their locking down android thing but this all changed with this move.
With age verification, locking down android, requiring android, recent Utah/UK laws which somehow threaten websites. Internet is turning into Dystopia. We are gonna slowly move towards a allowlist internet where only select few websites are used. For a large swath of the population this is already the case so the voices protesting are quite few but we must do what we can to protest them all from killing the internet. Sorry this got long but I can't stress how bad of a move this is as someone who used to use dumbphone, Google is basically saying that I can't use the internet if I have a dumb-phone.
I mean, that seems to be the general societal attitude.
And you'll need to buy new ones because many things are app only, or are migrating that way (including being able to travel to certain countries)
But tactics like this will make that nearly impossible if every website starts requiring a QR code scan on a authorized smartphone.
So I decided to...use Firefox a lot more with DDG (I use FF for mostly privacy-sensitive stuff like checking my financial accounts, but now I use it for a lot more browsing stuff).
Seems like it is the Chrome browser over-reacting.
The bulletpoint as-is just says:
> AI-resistant challenge: As we identify potentially fraudulent behavior from agents, we enable application providers to deter and mitigate malicious requests by requesting humans to be in the loop using the new QR code-based challenge. This AI-resistant mitigation challenge to prove human presence is designed to make automated fraud economically unviable.
Followed by
> Existing reCAPTCHA customers are automatically Fraud Defense customers, with no migration required, no action needed, and no change to pricing. Your existing site keys and integrations remain exactly as they are today.
It is probably me being a literal reader but "we enable application providers to deter and mitigate malicious requests by requesting humans to be in the loop" feels like it can be read as "Good news: by using reCAPTCHA, we're now interfering with agents that can solve the regular challenges" or "there's now a flag the application developer can set". This is the difference between me swapping off reCAPTCHA ASAP or just editing my configuration. I have to imagine someone somewhere anticipated the kind of reactions a number of us are collectively feeling (I too don't want to use my phone to browse the web more than I already do) and it feels irresponsible to publish a feature announcement without covering basic information like this for site administrators. Maybe they thought the second line about existing reCAPTCHA customers being moved over clears this up, but "Your existing ... integrations remain exactly as they are today" feels like again, literally, you won't have this new attestation requirement being presented to your users... but then why am I Fraud Defense customer!
Traditional CAPTCHA was heading for the graveyard for a while now, because the overlap between the dumbest of users and the smartest of AIs is too severe. But aggressively doubling down on the user-hostile garbage isn't the solution.
How about we start with some accountability for entities that host fraud? The main reason we can have relative anonymity in public is part trust and partially because you can get physically taken out if you cross the line. I understand there are some real limitations with enforcing accountability on the Internet, but perhaps that’s where we should be focusing.
with cloudflare, I cannot use my old browser, I cannot browse many sites without javascript or cookies.
recaptcha? that prevents me from doing business with many sites, let alone browse.
So the net effect is every AI agent will also have and connect to a physical phone.
And the official Google OS just won't feature remote-control software.
(*I think in the EU, iOS Chrome can use Blink, but I am not sure if it actually does.)
In any case, sites using an extremely restrictive mode of recaptcha during ddos attacks will just be one segment of a very fragmented digital future, not society as such
(The extra devices are cheap $30 phones all going into reCAPTCHA solve farms)
How do two service businesses get treated so differently by law?
A lot of companies have issues with ClickFix [1] and other social engineering campaigns and now Google wants to teach users that they should scan QR codes to proceed on a website.
How should we realistically teach Susan from HR the difference between a real Google Captcha QR code and a malicious phishing QR code - you (realistically) can't. I wish we could - but those people don't work in tech, they will never know and I can't really blame them because at the end of the day they are just happy that they don't have to deal with tech after work.
We have spent years of behavioural conditioning to prevent QR-code based phishing attacks (some people call it Quishing but I hate that term) and since the QR code is being scanned from a mobile device (99.99% of the time the private device), we have no EDR visibility on those devices and can't track what's happening if people scan it.
This is more of an invitation for threat actors than it is something that holds them back.
[1] https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/what-is-clickfix/53348/
My personal thoughts is that this is fucked. I'm not whipping out my phone to read some blog or comment on youtube.
But even if not, there's still value in raising the barrier to entry. For example, you can buy 1000 reCaptcha solves for $1-2 from various captcha-solver services. And yet that $0.001-per-request fee does discourage mass-scale bot attacks.
Don't you...
Let's say I'm running https://grep.app/ for example. AI bots start heavily using it, costing me a ton of money. How would you magically design this so it doesn't matter if the end bots are using it?
It seems on iOS you'll even need to download an application, which is quite a bit of friction.
In the current economic times, adding minutes onto the user journey is not going to result in increased sales, I suspect the data will prove the opposite.
Using a mobile device is bad enough as it is: TOTP, email, SMS codes, 3DS etc, while you can say this is part of the "flow", it's too much. I can see many abandoned journeys from this.
You may be able to make it more expensive than your information is worth, but of course that affects users too.
Adequately: Proof of work. https://anubis.techaro.lol/
It made me realise I was perhaps a bit hard on Claude (but then it did something equally as dumb)
If this were some smaller company that just did cloud then it'd never even make it to PoC. This can only happen because it's Google Cloud, and they can leverage everything they own all at once. Those not buying into their ecosystem can take a hike.
What is easier than pointing a camera at a QR code and commanding and an AI bot to follow the next steps?
I'm so pissed off in advance. I hope that Google die and collapse in sudden bankruptcy before we have to support this crappy challenges that are totally user hostile!
Because Google doesn't actually care about preventing fraud, they just want the data you feed them and the fraud feedback you provide. It's all take, no mutual business.
And I don't see it getting better without government regulation. But states are now weaker than corporations. How can we expect them to take charge?
Oh, you sweet, summer child.