
Show HN: FriendlyCaptcha – a privacy friendly proof-of-work based CAPTCHA - protoduction
https://friendlycaptcha.com/#
======
protoduction
I built FriendlyCaptcha over the past 2 months because I was tired of there
being no good alternatives to Google's reCAPTCHA and the like that your users
won't hate you for. FriendlyCaptcha is based on proof-of-work (think
hashcash): instead the user labeling fire hydrants in images, they commit
their device to doing computations for at least a couple of seconds. The idea
is that the cost of an attack is not so different for a spammer: instead of
running a ML model to label the images (or solve the audio challenge) they
would need to solve the proof-of-work challenge. That's probably good enough
for most if not all websites, and compares favorably against ReCAPTCHA which
has many issues (privacy, accessibility, bundle size & bandwidth, menial
tasks, customizability, closed-source).

The attacker shouldn't be able to use much more optimized code, which is where
WebAssembly comes in: the FriendlyCaptcha solver is WASM based (with JS
fallback) which achieves close to native speeds. The solver [0] and widget [1]
are all open source so you can play with it or customize it for your website.

The question is if this is what people want for their website, or maybe what
the world needs is just a less evil reCAPTCHA?

In case you missed it on the main website, there is a demo here [2].

[0]: [https://github.com/gzuidhof/friendly-
pow](https://github.com/gzuidhof/friendly-pow)

[1]: [https://github.com/gzuidhof/friendly-
challenge](https://github.com/gzuidhof/friendly-challenge)

[2]: [https://friendlycaptcha.com/demo](https://friendlycaptcha.com/demo)

