I have noticed lately that several sites I’ve tried to login to, some I already have an account, some I am trying to make a new account give me what seems like endless captchas.
The two notables ones from my memory, Etsy, where I’ve had an account for years and have 2fa enabled ffs. The other Unity, where I’m trying to make an account to join a friends Organization.
After several minutes the captches just seem to keep going and I get more and more frustrated to the point I just give up and don’t login (which is not really an option with my Etsy store).
My setup isn’t anything crazy, Firefox, Fedora 40, no vpn’s or anything. Always from either my laptop or gaming system.
Does anyone else have this issue? What are the options?
EDIT/UPDATE: I disabled ublock origin long enough and only got one captcha. Seems google is trying to punish people using that. EDIT2: Spoke too soon, got my email verification, clicked through and back to endless captcha’s… ffs
Your edit is spot on. Google is trying to annoy people out of using VPNs and other tracking blockers. In most cases, I allow one CAPTCHA, and if that fails, I go somewhere else. If it’s Google search, where I go next is Bing, just to punish Google.
When I must use Google, I do so in a dedicated container on Firefox. That way, Google knows who I am, but the only thing they ever get is what traffic I’m sending to them.
One thing I have yet to do is randomize my VPN exit node for Google; I’ve noticed that they correlate exit nodes to device trackers, and if I visit somewhere outside of my Google container, they can tell it’s me by correlation. I may start using Firefox’s VPN for Google connections, or just fire up Tor for Google connections.
While I don’t dispute any of that, it seems to me that Google’s CAPTCHA services can also cycle endlessly no matter what.
For example, I’ll have uMatrix give full permission to the service early in the day, and the queries will never end. Come back a few hours later and it will work first-time, no problem. Other days it might loop in images more than usual but will eventually work.
As if they have no issues with my particular setup, but sometimes lose track of my progress through the CAPTCHA.