
Show HN: FriendlyCaptcha – a privacy friendly proof-of-work based CAPTCHA - protoduction
https://friendlycaptcha.com
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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.

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)

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satotious
Really interesting. It's good to see an opensource competitor to Google's
reCaptcha.

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mato93
This is super cool

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alokjnv10
Nice

