Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users
reclaimthenet.orgComments
Remote attestation doesn't use blind signatures (as that would be 'farmable') so tying the device to the 'attestee' is technically possible with collusion of Google servers: EK (static burned-in private key) -> AIK (ephemeral identity key in secure enclave signed by a Google server) -> attestation (signed by AIK). As you can see if the Google server logs EK -> AIK conversions an attestation can be trivially traced to your device's EK. This is also why we don't really see and probably never will see online services which offer fake remote attestations, as it will be pretty obvious that the next step of running such a service is getting Google as a customer and having all your devices blacklisted. Private farms probably won't last long either as I'm sure Google logs everything and will correlate.
Unless something special is done with this new reCAPTCHA not only are you locking internet services behind TPM chips but you are also surrendering anonymity to Google. Unless you acquire untraceable burners for every service, the new reCAPTCHA will be technically capable to tying all your accounts across all these services together. Much like age verification. It may appear that the service would need to cooperate to link the reCAPTCHA session to your registration but the registration time alone will likely be sufficient (the anonymity set will be all but destroyed).
Age verification as a technical concept can be done in a privacy-preserving manner! Whether or not we want age verification is another debate, but let's stop making wrong technical claims about that: it doesn't help.
At some point someone will need to issue a key, which at some point will need to be verified against known good signatures.
These signatures will also need to be kept in case of lawsuirs/enforcement, so if somebody gets access they will know you visited that site
There's not necessarily wrong. Despite the vapid and damaging nature of most popular online media, isolating a child from it might have even worse social consequences when their real-life peer groups discover that they're not on social media or that their parents have neutered their phone. Some kids would turn out fine after that. Others would be socially destroyed for life (maybe with the right therapy they could become well-adjusted, but high quality therapy is rare).
No, they are a solution for parents who want to use them, and that's all they should be. Their existence demonstrates that it's possible to handle this without regulation, other than the desire of some people to inflict their preferences onto other people's kids.
Do they work currently? Not really
Are they too complex for the avg joe to work out. Unfortunately yes. (Something about the smartest bears and the dumbest humans)
For example, imagine you put the same private key into the 'secure element' of every single iphone. You use code signing so that key is only unlocked when the phone is running unmodified iOS with all security updates. You use encryption and remote attestation for the front-facing camera and face id depth sensor. You use NFC to read government-authenticated age and appearance data from biometric passport chips (or digital ID cards) and you store it on-device.
Then, when you want to access pornhub, they send an age challenge to your device, your device makes sure your face matches the stored passport, and if so it signs the challenge with the private key.
Pornhub gets an Apple-signed attestation of age - but because every phone signs with challenges with the same private key, Pornhub can't link it to a particular phone or identity document.
So in a very narrow sense, privacy is preserved.
You can't use someone else's ID, as it checks your face every time. You can't fool it with a photo of the person because of the depth sensor. You can't MITM/replay the camera/depth data because the link is encrypted. You can't substitute software that skips the check with a rooted phone because of the code signing. Security holes can be closed by just pushing a mandatory OS update.
Sure, it doesn't work on PCs. Doesn't work on Linux, or on unlocked/rooted phones. It hands users' government ID documents over to Google and Apple. It requires people to carry foreign-made, battery powered, network connected GPS trackers (with cameras, microphones and speech recognition) with them. And there are non-negotiable terms of service everyone must agree to. But if you define "privacy-preserving" to ignore all that stuff and only consider whether Pornhub learns your identity, it's privacy-preserving.
Also even if it doesn't get leaked directly, the security of TPM chips is not absolute. Secrets from them can theoretically be extracted given an attacker with sufficient means and motivation. Normally nothing that's on a typical TPM chip would warrant a project of that magnitude, but a widely used private key can change that equation.
Plus a TPM chip doesn't really have means to tell the phone isn't being lied to. You could swap out the actual phone camera hardware and sensors for a custom board that feeds the entire phone camera data of your choosing and it would be none-the-wiser.
Jesus Christ.
14 year old me ran into porn on the internet all the time. It didn't turn me into a serial killer.
Meanwhile we let kids have exposure to algorithms that pervert their sense of self worth, get them addicted to dopamine and gambling, and make them feel inferior to their peers.
We have the wrong priorities as a society.
And this bullshit is going to turn us into a completely tracked, monitored, controlled bunch of cattle.
We're building 1984 and we're happy about it.
The problem is that while you might be able to trust the crypto, the government won't trust you to do the crypto entirely by yourself. And this introduces avenues for deanonymisation. Moreover, collusion between the government and the entity making the age check can also theoretically deanonimize.
It's a complicated problem.
We continue to seek a technological solution to a parenting problem.
Then it's technically possible (and really not that difficult) for states to provide a service that issues zero-knowledge proofs of facts like "age > X".
> Unlinkability is achieved by design through Zero-Knowledge Proof cryptography see the "Privacy by design" section below.
so while this comment is apt, i would ask them what they think of the previous chicxulub impact of the 2012 era collusion - which to this day has not been reported on
(just realized emacs bindings work in comments, nice, no ctrl-x tho)
Is this speculation, or has it been confirmed somewhere?
Not that I really can tell what this was devastating to. Maybe United States v. Apple (2012), where Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins publishers, Macmillan publishers, Penguin Group, Inc., and Simon & Schuster, Inc. conspired with Apple to raise ebook prices?
I don't think it's that, because the Wikipedia article makes it seem like it was a force for good, but at the time, it wasn't certain at all that it would be that way.[1]
Beyond that, I'm not exactly sure what might be meant.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Association
[1] https://reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xs4qw/google_facebo...
It's possible this scenario is acceptable to them because it means they can still tie your access to something that's easier to ban without requiring a full account login.
That's possible... and they might change their mind if so, we will see.
I feel like it's a similar issue to when scrapers pretend to be an allowed-origin webpage in order to abuse "public" API keys for web services.
They could also require the mobile device to interact with the requesting webpage in some manner, similar to mutual PIN/codes for Bluetooth/TV pairing these days. That way bulk sharing of the codes would still require active participation from the device that requested it in the first place, likely with a short time limit.
Also, if the implementation is competently done the phone will show the website for which you scanned the QR code. A user would be able to see whether or not that matches the site where they observed the QR code and proceed accordingly. In time Google will probably integrate it into the Chrome browser where a proxied QR code cannot even be shown.
As for now, when I need to travel to Germany, I just book tickets through the national carrier of my home country, which for cross-border tickets often turns out to actually be cheaper than booking through DB. Thankfully I don't live in Germany proper and my need for travel there is not that high (once or twice a year at most) but I wonder what would I do if I had to move to Germany and use trains there more often.
Access is temporarily restricted
We detected unusual activity from your device or network.
Reasons may include:
-Rapid taps or clicks
-JavaScript disabled or not working
-Automated (bot) activity on your network (IP X.X.X.X)
-Use of developer or inspection tools> -Use of developer or inspection tools
Gotta love it.
At which point you should contact your attorney general, and work to ensure such efforts face legal challenges at every turn.
Not solved at all: 99.999% of users don't give a damn and use a Google-signed Android.
My opinion is that because they don't give a damn does NOT mean regulations should not protect them. What Google is doing here is anticompetitive and they should be fined (antitrust and all that).
You could try handwriting and posting a letter to their CEO. I think that sometimes works. Probably not very often but there are more than zero CEOs who read those letters.
I was thinking in the same terms: you put up a QR capcha, you don't get my traffic and money. Just the amount of extra work needed, let alone the Google tracking turns me off. As if traffic lights, crosswalks and bridges weren't enough of a hassle.
https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/2026-rei-board-of-direc...
https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/rei-announces-2026-boar...
https://www.reddit.com/r/REI/comments/1qw14k6/rei_hosts_thei...
Most human visitors will never ever notice the change. reCAPTCHA is completely invisible for most human visitors because they are allowed to pass just by fingerprint.
It's not like an average user is going to have to scan a QR code every time they visit a site via web browser. If it were like this then it would be a non-issue because no sane website would adopt this system. But it isn't.
On the opposite, if they see reports of many visitors not completing the captcha, they're likely to think "Wow so many bots!!! This defense nowadays is indispensable..!".
Sometimes you need to pass a captcha even to contact them (if you want to tell them that you can't pass their captcha).
So every government website. Every website where people simply have no choice (DMV) or where failure to login results in them not claiming the money/benefits they are due (all tax websites). And every website handling post-sale complaints (Airlines, insurance).
However much I hate it, right now among the sites using reCAPTCHA there are many that I strongly want to use.
Let's find a better solution please
Is there an argument here that Google is creating a monopoly?
Could this be challenged on similar grounds that forced Microsoft to recommend other browsers to users on Windows?
Our antitrust laws have been toothless for decades, and both parties love billionaires controlling the rest of us with an iron fist.
GrapheneOS is looking more and more worth the headache that my limited free time generally does not like. I don't need Google to know my smut fanfiction is written by my IRL.
However he's been on it now for months and every time he shows me something on it I get a little more jealous. Everything seems to be working fine, including e.g. bank apps, and he has interesting features like some kind of app zoning thing limiting permissions on a zone to zone basis.
The only problem is it's only available on massive phones without headphone jacks and SD card slots, so I'm sticking with Xperia for now.
> Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? [0]
> dang
> No recent changes, but we do sometimes turn captchas on for logins when HN is under some kind of (possible) attack or other. That's been happening for a few hours. Hopefully it goes away soon.
No. Bigger problem created, since there are innumerable government, health care, and educational web sites that use reCAPTCHA.
I'm not going to give up reading the test results from my doctor because of some simplistic ideologue decides that it's "problem solved."
CF turnstile is one, but of course that means Cloudflare owns even more of the web.
HCaptcha is inaccessible and actively discriminatory against individuals with disabilities and refuses to change, to the point that I suspect the only way that they will do anything is to file a class-action against them and sue them into the ground.
And I... Can't think of anything else. Other than to just get rid of Captchas entirely.
Enough to make it so bots are expensive to run.
People do care about such things.
I hope the same is true in other EU countries.
Suddenly I have been made aware that, having lost my paddle on Shit Creek, I will eventually be taken downstream to Shit Lake (where it appears I will inevitably drop anchor).
You could just call them.
But in all seriousness, many services are making it difficult through to impossible to communicate outside of their web or app platforms. Call centres are expensive and messy, and it's now apparently acceptable as a society to treat customers/clients/whatever as adversaries so they can get away with making it hard to communicate with them.
Edit: aaaand... That's another little sliver of my faith gone : https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/04/how-fake-people...
Note that they do not mention any specific companies on that landing page. That is pretty intentional.
But realistically going after bots is expensive and rarely successful, so most companies don’t do it. Even if you find the guy, the chances they can be legally reached are pretty low.
Because they don't care. It doesn't matter that it's AI slop, it generates views. And Google and Meta can bill advertisers for those views.
Zuckerberg is paying people to put AI slop Shrimp Jesus on facebook. (Not directly to platforms like this, but with the incentive structure)
Really, they're not just cashing in on the views of AI slop being put in front of boomers. They're cashing both ways; While the low end spam industry is merely guessing and iterating on whatever generates views, the more refined spammer does not leave the performance of their latest slop post up to chance, and just uses good old viewbotting. Viewbotting that these days, is mostly done on real devices. Which show ads, to the bots or underpaid developing world workers. Google and Meta'll still charge you for those impressions though.
The losers? People who sincerely try to use these platforms, and whatever idiot businesses are still paying for ads by the impression or click, rather than conversions that immediately generate revenue.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....
Also $1,500 a month for 10 "influencers" is wild. This doesn't seem that sophisticated unless they're doing something special to increase trust scores of accounts. They say they have "in house warming algorithm" which honestly doesn't inspire confidence for me.
Whats funny is its almost a certainty (if they are doing things correctly) that they have literal farms of phones (probably in SEA). The only real way to keep trust high is to have a real mobile connection and unique devices. Proxies are okay, but you really need to use the apps on real hardware.
The cost is the attestation keys of a real phone. Once it gets burned, the phone is useless to them.
https://www.penligent.ai/hackinglabs/inside-the-ai-phone-far...
Probably a decent amount of compute cost for video generation, but I'm sure they have access to free compute and inference for being in bed with a16z.
Yes, somehow "parse this QR code" would not have made my top 500,000 list of 'tasks that a human can do more effectively than a computer'.
I think it's most likely to be attested by Google remotely; they might be using an app (with enormous access to the phone as the Play Services have) to be able to link a ton of data together, possibly including the local activity on the phone, officially to make better humanity assessments based on it all.
For people using a Google account it probably won't make a huge difference, in terms of data collected.
If that's how it would work, spoofing would probably be theoretically possible, but it would be easy for Google to detect attestations used by multiple people.
Let's not forget that this is an update to a very approximate system, absolute security is not (yet) required.
But there's a good chance that it will be extremely hard to sidestep, despite that.
Doesn't Play Integrity use hardware attestation, but specifically checking the Google keys?
If you use the Play Services on GrapheneOS, you still don't pass Play Integrity because your system is signed by GrapheneOS and not by Google.
But anything your phone can possibly do in software can be spoofed, so how would that help?
And https://gdpr.eu/recital-49-network-and-information-security-... :
> Recital 49 - Network and Information Security as Overriding Legitimate Interest
> The processing of personal data to the extent strictly necessary and proportionate for the purposes of ensuring network and information security, i.e. the ability of a network or an information system to resist, at a given level of confidence, accidental events or unlawful or malicious actions that compromise the availability, authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of stored or transmitted personal data, and the security of the related services offered by, or accessible via, those networks and systems,...
It's funny how people after all this time think 99 Articles, 173 Recitals and a huge tech lobby equals a water-tight, pro-citizen, impenetrable privacy law with almost no exemptions.
Can de-Googled Android phones present themselves as iPhones?
This is wrong. Many (most?) users of alternative Android OSes do use a variant of the Play Services (be it sandboxed Play Services like on GrapheneOS, or an open source, reverse engineered implementation like microG that phones home just the same).
Google seems to be leveraging Play Integrity here, which requires that the phone OS is signed by Google. This is clearly anticompetitive, I hope the DMA will do something about that.
Only ones that are difficult for fraudsters to use to generate bogus traffic. Whether or not those builds come from Google, they are inherently gonna be pretty constrained OSs. It's not gonna let you spoof your location or simulate user input.
I do think it's a problem if only Google can provide these attestations but even if that organisation problem is solved there is still a fundamental technologic problem here now that humans can't be detected by their ability to solve puzzles any more.
It's a bit irritating but I'm glad I started down this journey because it looks more and more like I'm going to be avoiding the internet
If enough people complain, those services will start caring. If all they see is "one user complains every 3 years", they will just ignore it. That's how it works.
The bank I was talking about were the worst net loser of customers in the UK last year (around -8000) They are making excuses but maybe they would care about why.
If you don't have a static IP you need will want to think about a MX relay service too ~ although mail is surprisingly tolerant of offline MX hosts if you can wait a little bit for your mail.
I had an issue with yahoo a couple of years ago that's all. The "it read like there's a whole science" is sadly a trope mostly repeated by people who have never tried because it gets upvotes on Reedit.
There are some steps you have to take, but not many, and systems like Mox mailserver or stalwart guide you through it, and mail-tester will check if you got it right.
Email, other than tweaking spam filters, is one of my lowest maintenance systems. I can't remember the last time I touched Exim or Mox config
The science of not getting flagged is easy when you're not sending large volumes of untrusted mail; it only gets complicated if you start hosting mail for "customers" or let your system forward mail unfiltered into gmail/yahoo.
Here's my hit list of universal things to configure:
* Start with an IP with good or neutral reputation, non-residential, its nearly impossible to fix an IP that has been burned by a spammer. (Network)
* Valid reverse dns for your IP matching your mailhost forward dns (DNS)
* Valid SPF record; -all (DNS)
* Valid DKIM; with sufficiently sized key (DNS+Config)
* Valid DMARC; start with p=none to test and move to p=reject once you're configured (DNS)
* ARC if you or your users will ever possibly forward mail (Config)
* Don't get your messages flagged as spam anywhere ever, filter outbound mail even if its just you. All it takes is one piece of malware and a saved password and you'll have to get a new IP. (Config)
* Don't configure services behind your mail server with example domains that you don't control ~ I get so much mis-configured test mail from people who think its cute to use my domain as an example in their practice lab. It all gets reported as spam or bounces and then their smart host bounce rate goes up. (Config)
* Test for open relay; only relay for authenticated users. (Config)
* Use strong authentication, preferably with certificates or MFA. (Config)
* Secure everything; IMAP/SMTP/POP are old AF make sure you're requiring STARTTLS and setup MTA-STS to prevent downgrade attacks and enforce encryption in transit. Use a real certificate from Lets Encrypt don't self-sign. (DNS+http+Config)
* fail2ban your auth, you're going to get so much driveby password spraying and credential stuffing; I fail2ban block entire subnets at a time with iptables actions. I also have a bunch of "poison pill" rules for weird stuff I see in my logs eg block anyone who tries to auth with the NTLM hash for 'password'. (Config)
* Don't bother with BIMI at home, you can't get a blue check mark without deep pockets and a trademark (vmc) and most platforms only show logos that have a matching vmc. (DNS+https+config)
* DMARC reporting and TLS-RPT reporting are a pain to manage but are helpful troubleshooting deliverability be prepared to read some XML reports or setup a stack to parse them as they arrive (DNS + Config + https)
* setup the SMTP Submission port (587), so many networks block port 25 outbound and its the right way for clients to connect. (Config)
* configure BACKUPS, don't skip this step, encrypted restic backups to s3 or backblaze b2 is cheap and easy. (config)
* track your configs in git, don't commit secrets. (config)
* configure a free blacklist monitor on mxtoolbox for your domain(s) (config)
If you do those things you'll be in a pretty good spot, you could probably paste that list/this post into your agent and vibe up solid mailserver.
For me keeping the spam and phishing out is a bigger hassle than deliverability issues. rspamd does a pretty good job of keeping it manageable.
I do all of those things and with all of that setup the only place I ever run into issues with with users on AT&T's residential broadband mail servers. AT&T appears to block you if you're not known to them and they have a short memory. If you don't have regular correspondence with AT&T users they will block you after a bit. I'm a fairly low volume sender so I end up blocked every other time I try to send to AT&T by no fault of my own. I've talked most of those friends off of AT&Ts free email and on to ProtonMail at this point.
Banks are implementing terrible "security" checks. Users of alternative OSes should be a lot more vocal: change bank, but also complain a lot to the offending one, and make sure to leave them a bad review on the Play Store.
Actually people not using an alternative OS but caring about that should also leave bad reviews to those banks on the Play Store.
At the end of the day, the problem comes from humans in those banks who don't understand and don't give a shit. The only way to make them care about it is to complain enough that it becomes their problem.
If you need to share files externally, Nextcloud works very much like Google Drive and allows the creation of sharable links.
the web is ruined if you push for this, this is millions of websites that will suddenly force KYC? What...the...f
By KYC, obviously it's because there is very few non-criminal ways to have a SIM without KYC and get a Google account for Playstore without a number, so every website visits will be attached to a real ID.
I don't use a stock Android, right now I literally can't access many websites, this is genuinely crazy.
Wow, This is really bad :-(
I think this is just gonna make viewing internet without a phone significantly harder especially with archive.is and the likes.
Not sure, how relevant this is to the discussion but if it helps, I have made a project[0] which allows to archive archive.is pages on archive.org/wayback machine (this uses singlefile)
Perhaps something like this can be used by community at scale too. Also, I hope that archive.is does something to fix this issue of requiring QR code and hopefully it doesn't become a permanent issue.
[0]: https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...
The result of this would be to upload it all to a bot-friendly alternative to archive.org.
Its whole point is undetectable archiving because it just saves what your browser already sees.
Now to be honest, while it's optimal to archive pages from you browser view I am not sure I want a random web extension to be in everything I see from a security point of view.
I would rather have a local proxy doing it. Maybe something like the InternetArchive warcproc [0]. Haven't tried yet.
- pretended that it wasn't all about invading peoples' privacy.
- done a good ol' fashioned "but Apple does it"
- pretended to be standards-oriented
- advertised it as something completely transparent to the end-user
Seems like that would've caused a lot less backlash while still achieving the goal of having some form of device attestation -- but I'm guessing that's not the real goal.
Yeah, I say it as "because the US bully the EU to prevent them from doing it".
> April 2025: Apple fined €500 million for failing to comply with "anti-steering" obligations. Meta fined €200 million under the Digital Market Act for requiring users to consent to sharing their data with the company or pay for an ad-free service.
> December 2025: X fined €120 million under the Digital Services Act for breaching transparency obligations.
(Sure, not this year, but that's pretty recent by most standards. And not sure if they're still being contested and unpaid)
And recently, Google is working with the EU to avoid a fine: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-06/google-ma...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...
It looks like a cloudflare page but it's not hosted by them. eg. https://bgp.he.net/dns/archive.is#_ipinfo It's hosted by AS49505 JSC Selectel
I think they now use their own Cloudflare turnstile if I remember correctly, but back then they switched to hcaptcha.
This is using another product to reinforce the search and ads monopoly.
You can’t scrape content to build a better google or Gemini, you can’t make an OS to compete with Google or Apple, and you can’t make a Google Analytics competitor.
It’s plain anti competitive.
Now everyone pretends like it's monopoly abuse because the Leopards Eating Faces company finally rang the dinner bell.
Amazon tablets don't have Google services either, which hints that the upcoming Amazon phones also might not work with this.
This makes it more difficult. But I don’t think it matters given how difficult it was prior to this.
The problem is that most popular apps for Android outside Chinese app stores rely on Google services (specifically, Firebase) for push notifications.
I have absolutely no idea what happened there. My best theory so far is that they clicked on some really, really wrong buttons when solving a captcha themselves while logged in to their Google account in the same browser. Bizarre.
The projects were named after a Google Doc they'd recently worked on (or a .docx attachment they'd received?) though, so my other guess is that they somehow created a Google Docs macro or similar by accident?
With apple there's no choices, so I'll continue to take my chances with Android
Also, personally I care less and less. As long as my banks and government apps work, I'll just not use somebody's service if they put up barriers like this.
If most people care less and less, the result would be that banks and government apps will also work less and less.
Look, companies have to prioritise. And the obvious way to prioritise is to say "users are requesting X A LOT and nobody requests Y, so we will do X". Companies never, EVER say "it would be more ethical to do Y, let's do Y".
As people, we can do two things:
* Push our governments to regulate that shit. That means, complain a lot to the government.
* Be vocal to companies and complain when they don't support your system. If enough people do that, it will be prioritised.
The hardware attestation (which is used by strict Play Integrity) checks the signature on your OS. It is totally possible to allow signatures other than Google, but Play Integrity doesn't do that.
Companies could totally decide to use hardware attestation and accept systems signed not only by Google, but also other systems (like GrapheneOS). But they don't care because not enough users complain to them.
Users of alternative Androids typically silently move to another service or stop using it entirely. Which is understandable but doesn't help the cause.
I'd rather have Google check an Apple phone attestation than have Google check a Google phone attestation, and vice versa, though, because you can assume each company is trying to keep as much information private to themselves instead of giving it to the other. Google is probably just getting "yes it's an Apple phone" and some kind of temporary token, instead of my IMEI, IMSI, phone number, all signed in accounts, biometrics and so on.
Could you justify that? Because to me it seems like Apple isn't doing anything even like this.
Also, Apple sells themselves as a privacy company, but often pick (possibly intentionally) insecure defaults. E.g. you might use end-to-end encrypted chats, but by default iCloud backups are not end-to-end encrypted, so law enforcement can just request your backups/chats from Apple. If you are vigilant and enable Advanced Data Protection for E2E iCloud backups, it probably still doesn't matter because the people that you communicate with probably do not have ADP enabled.
Besides that, they are enshittifying in the same way as Google. Ads in Maps, Ads in applications that you get with the OS (Apple Creator Studio ads in Keynote, etc.), Ads in your system settings for Apple Fitness+ (really).
At least Pixel phones and soon some Motorola models have the option of installing GrapheneOS.
The way it's going, by the time the Motorola + GrapheneOS phone is out, it will be a lot more painful to use GrapheneOS than today. Not because of GrapheneOS of course, but because everybody accepts that bullshit Google is doing.
If you're waiting for Motorola + GrapheneOS, you could start complaining to banks and other apps that don't support GrapheneOS :-). If enough people did that, maybe those companies would consider it.
In the meantime, I'm currently using a low end Motorola moto g 5G 2023 which lets me turn off Play Services. Chrome and the Google Calendar don't run (really do need to find a replacement calendar), and I couldn't be happier. Motorola's interest in GrapheneOS makes me wonder if they did this on purpose.
Calendar server: https://radicale.org/v3.html Sync: https://manual.davx5.com/
So, you run Radicale server, you can import Google Calendar.
Set up Davx5 on mobile to sync with the local server
Access from anywhere with Tailscale.
My dad runs the family domain/emails/etc. The hard part will be convincing him to degoogle the whole family.
I'm also becoming open to using software that lies to google about what it is :) Google will treat us like sh*t, why shouldn't we reciprocate.
the trajectory has been clear since AMP-convenience for site owners, attestation pressure on users
He (Torvalds) had no power to do anything and sold out. Even if he did, big tech would just go and use BSD.
For over a decade both Torvalds, and Stallman sold everyone out. They don't make their money directly from "free software" or "open source" in the first place.
Stallman was right in that he knew digital surveillance was going to happen, but he was incorrect in believing that FLOSS was ever sustainable economically and especially with AI replacing the developer and that big tech and startups are weaponising that against them.
Even when Stallman is against AI, he doesn't care. He knows he doesn't make money from "free software"; but only by speaking about it. Torvalds is the same but likes AI.
Can any other developer do exactly that in 2026?
But his vision/prophecy is about 50 years old and while still valid it probably needs an update.
We are now dealing with a fully networked world where AI/bots have become dominant. I am not sure he did / could go as far in his vision.
There's hardly anything you can do to stop someone determined enough to spend money to spam your specific website. These kinds of captchas do raise the bar somewhat, but every single one of them is ultimately bypassed by paying people to solve them for you.
[1]: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/contact-dma-team_en
You will also see this page if your smartphone is degoogled and you try to open the reCAPTCHA attestation URL in a web browser instead of in Google Play Services.
Why does it have to be new? Plenty of open source OSes exist... starting with Android! GrapheneOS is based on AOSP, you would call it Android. If I show you a phone running GrapheneOS, you probably won't even realise that it's running an alternative OS: it will be Android to you.
The problem is not that we don't have alternative. The problem is that Google is moving towards forcing everyone to run their OS (or the OSes they accept, since it includes iOS) to connect to random stuff on the Internet. They are literally building technology that will prevent alternative OSes from running properly.
No need to create new OSes if anyway they won't work, right?
That's the reason companies are desperate to be first/biggest - once you're it, you're it until you finally fall on your face and dwindle to a nobody.
The thing here is that Google is building technology to prevent alternatives from connecting at all. We fundamentally cannot solve it by building more alternatives, we have to prevent Google (and TooBigTech in general) from doing it.
at my most pessimistic i can see a world where consumers pay MORE for attestation to continue to opt-in to society, or perhaps a ai-bot-free digital world.
Your privacy is dead, and you cannot do anything against it, except not using phones and internet... at all. I mean I still fight against it, but not by protecting my privacy by using tools, or using different tools, because I realized it's not possible. There is no "as less data as possible". They know regardless.
I used VPN, browser containers for everything, myriad of fingerprinting protection, nothing related to Google/Facebook/etc. And then I went up to Youtube once for something, and they knew exactly what were my thoughts at the time. That was the moment when I realized that I suffered for nothing.
I still support for privacy movements, and I strongly believe that the only place where we can do anything at this point is politics. You can't protect your privacy anymore at this current environment, that ship sailed decades ago.
My problem is that basically every larger for privacy push is against newly proposed laws (like age verification), and there is basically no large uproar regarding the current already fucked up laws.
My ISP regularly changes everyone's IP, and I apparently share an ISP with people who suck, so I get flagged just trying to do all sorts of normal things. Some examples:
- I've never bought anything from Etsy but I'm somehow banned from even viewing their site at all.
- Discord immediately bans me any time I try to create an account.
- Can't buy flights from Delta, always gives a non-descript error.
- Can't buy concert tickets, it thinks I'm a fraudulent buyer.
- Most CF sites produce a "Sorry, you have been blocked" page, or just loop.
- Trying to buy products on a shopping cart will have my order silently flagged/canceled for "VPN usage" (I don't use one).
- Some sites/programs block me for being on the DroneBL or similar lists I did nothing to get onto, and have verified many times that it's not really coming from me.
I just take my business elsewhere... eventually I'll probably just stop using technology at all.
I had this problem recently with the Indeed website. (Cloudflare Captcha)
Thanks to someone on Reddit, it was discovered that anyone using a Chromium based browser (Brave, Vivaldi, etc.) on Linux was being punished.
Awfully frustrating having to set up a Virtual Machine just to be able to access one website via Firefox since even my hardened Firefox was being punished.
"Source code? We don't need no stinkin' source code!"
I know people like to think of suspicious android box setups but even a lot of "free" apps, extensions and other such services scarily seem to do that duty these days. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but its sad how many people will use some free of cost vpn and not even think why that might be.
I guess my ISP allocates static IPs from a separate pool, and probably my IP block neighbors are better behaved (probably SMBs and other fellow nerds), aside from platforms learning that my IP is safe.
Captcha difficulties are way down now.
I wonder if they are seeing a decrease in traffic and somehow find that acceptable.
Mars? /i
I fire up cloudflare warp and walk right through it
use wireguard with wgcf in environments without cloudflare client
yeah it's stupid we have to do this in 2026 but I guess cloudflare is the new AOL garden
Would you care to elaborate a little on how you did it?
It doesn't happen that often to me, but sometimes adblock setup I'm using results in such issues.
This new reCAPTCHA setup is probably a good indicator that big tech wants to shift to verified access only. Personally, I’m just going to quit spending money via the internet and go back to piracy + retail stores with a physical location.
and on behalf of the Government,
and said “data, so piss off”:
https://abcnews.com/Technology/google-hit-antitrust-lawsuit-...
https://macdailynews.com/2026/02/04/u-s-files-appeal-in-goog...
Turns out that Presidents, once elected, largely do what Continuity of Government, and business interests, ask for.
> Lawfare is the use of legal systems and institutions to affect foreign or domestic affairs, as a more peaceful and rational alternative, or as a less benign adjunct, to warfare.
Strap in, the ownage will be hard.
I'm not going to use any sort of hardware attestation, especially one controlled by Google. You shouldn't either, even if you have an unrooted Google-certified Android phone.
Unfortunately I see the regulatory environment more likely to go the other way of requiring attestation. I sure hope I'm wrong.
I’m Canadian and watching our government sell our souls to American tech companies is beyond scary.
PS: Sure, there always were a handful of exceptions. If you are one of them, you know what I'm talking about. I don't refer to you. But to the other 99.x%.
> If you are one of them, you know what I'm talking about. I don't refer to you. But to the other 99.x%.
Reminds me of Facebook engagement bait
If it didn’t affect those of us that tried to resist, I wouldn’t care, but we got dragged along unwillingly and now it may be impossible to hit the brakes before corporations control everything by usurping control of our identity systems.
Good that some people are able to translate my thoughts into actual English... :D
If you say so. I don't know. I was never an active part of that big problem (so btw I also had nothing to "solve"). You were?
Everyone in power wants it, across the entire globe.
That's very different from requiring hardware attestation, though.
And to think, people said consumer choice was dead...
The amount of stuff councils and state governments gatekeep about road specs alone... Argh.
Google doesn't give a shit, but smaller companies are the ones using reCAPTCHA and that kind of shit. Consumers need to complain to those smaller companies. And citizen need to complain to their government, if those case. In the EU there is the DMA: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/contact-dma-team_en.
What's sad is that the few citizen who care are often complaining against regulations. And it is the lack of regulations that got us here. We need antitrust, period.
Nobody trusts web browsers nowadays.
I would have no idea how, nor desire to purchase a Google account on the black market, and I do in fact still trust that my web browser can do TLS correctly.
"easier just to buy a Google account ...." for those who would choose to do that in quantity. That is, the scammers and fraudsters for whom this is a financial decision. Which suggests that Google's latest moves shift the needle only slightly against actual abuse at a huge cost to the rest of us.
"Nobody trusts web browsers ..." applies to the publishing side. Content (that is, advertiser) sites and commerce most especially. The prove-yourself hoops that those opting out of that approach (de-Googled Android, privacy-hardened browser, alternative OS) must deal with are mind-bogglingly insane, speaking from personal experience. The Web no longer brings joy.
Incidentally, Google plays strongly in the second space, such that its incentives are aligned with pushing people into the "Google Play Services" ecosystem, and to both its own browser and ad-tech personal surveillance tools.
In conclusion, Google must be destroyed.
>? URL: .env.project :: IP: 213.209.159.175
>? 30326336336 :: viewer key
>? URL: lab/.env :: IP: 213.209.159.175
>? 39363064647 :: viewer key
>? URL: Dr0v :: IP: 185.12.59.118
>? 76543264647 :: viewer key
>? URL: data/.env :: IP: 213.209.159.175
>? 63623731628 :: viewer key
>? URL: docker/app/.env :: IP: 213.209.159.175
>? 62653061304 :: viewer key
>? URL: fedex/.env :: IP: 213.209.159.175
>? 61663064656:: viewer key
[09/May/2026:11:31:32] notice: exiting: exceeded max connections per thread
The internet is a failure. Congratulations us.
See the explanation associated with Manifest V3.
I don't know what services a TPM chip does provide. Wild guess, some private keys, hidden to the computer user, are used to sign stuff and/or encrypt ?
Let the commerce-driven, corporatized hellhole that the modern web has become eat itself.
I hear ‘web of trust’ pretty often and I like the idea but that’s not anonymous or accessible either
Something that makes it expensive to initiate a connection and cheap (relatively) to accept or reject would probably help. I think that’s a hard problem though.
I do 95% of my web browsing via Tor Browser and it is very tolerable, most circuits are fast enough for 1080p video (Youtube, Twitch livestreams, etc) without any buffering.
Here is a speedtest I ran just moments ago, I would hardly consider this "painfully slow": https://www.speedtest.net/result/19172283165.png
Of course this is a single tor circuit with an exit node, so speeds are slower when going directly to .onion sites, but the only real slowness comes from the latency and not throughput.
I’m not talking about the network itself but the servers on the other end.
I guess my point is that while Google is definitely malicious, I don’t think every site using recaptcha is and if we expect them not to use that tool there should probably be an alternative.
I think SV was asking what onion services, which can't really use recaptcha, do to prevent the DDoS storm.
And I would imagine the answer is obscurity, since the dark web isn't nearly as well-mapped as the public web. That and some Anubis or other PoW would probably go far.
If I’m hosting at some IP, I still need Anubis or something to serve up the challenge, so doesn’t that become the attack point?
I would say it will be interesting to see what they do but I think rent-seeking, oppression, human rights violations would be more apt.
They were of course trustworthy proviers while they were untouchable but now I know how things are gonna go.
Obviously you immediately realise just how often you !g in DDG, use Google Flights, YouTube etc. Ok easy enough to fix
Then of course I can't use Play Store (Aurora didn't work either) so my phone would have eventually become quite obsolete
You can't compile many Go projects because the dependencies are pulled from Google
And if you had ALL of Google's ASNs that would include GCP and that's a whole other level of being cut off
Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362
Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged
Spread the news, tell everyone you know, before it's too late. I wish we won't have to resort to even more drastic methods in this fight.
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
Here's the obligatory: Google, FUCK YOU!
Whether it's from companies that create the tech, or companies that use it.
In the orgy of money, we've had a kind of industry-wide sociopathic convention of individual engineers considering it perfectly OK to further surveillance capitalism.
Can we reverse that?
If someone says we can't, because "everyone does it", are they saying that we're a field of baddies?
I think we are already starting to have that with a couple more infamous other companies in the news the last year: if someone goes to work there, I suspect a lot of people are going to think what is wrong with you, since you must know that company does very harmful things,
Maybe it's time to start wondering that about anyone who'd work for a lot of additional companies?
(I actually had a recruiter recently who was pitching a startup, and the headline featured the "ex-" pedigrees of the founders, including an especially infamous company. I figured any company touting that pedigree as a selling point is probably a bad fit for me. I thanked the recruiter, but said that infamous company as selling point probably isn't a fit. The recruiter seemed to not only understand, but to agree with my vague sentiment about that pedigree company.)
Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather a kernel—a core component that manages hardware resources. Android uses the Linux kernel, but replaces the traditional GNU userland with its own runtime, libraries, and system framework.
Many users run Linux-based systems every day without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the Linux kernel combined with Android’s userspace is often simply called “Android,” and many of its users are not aware that it is built on Linux at its core.
There really is Linux in Android, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs you run. The kernel is an essential part of the system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system.
Android is normally used in combination with the Linux kernel: the whole system is basically Android/Linux, a Linux-based operating system with a distinct userspace, not a GNU/Linux system like traditional desktop distributions.
And let's not pretend that we mean the kernel when we say Linux distribution
How so?