
Ask HN: Can you make me not feel like a robot? - seeing
I&#x27;ve been using Tor to read HN.<p>Each time I open Tor HN asks me to prove I&#x27;m legit by solving a CAPTCHA. No biggie, that&#x27;s a small price to pay to read your favorite website.<p>Once you start clicking on stuff to read on HN though, you get more CAPTCHAs. Not from HN but probably from Cloudflare, like CAPTCHAs from medium.com. You even get them from jobsites under &#x2F;jobs.<p>The irony of it all is the CAPTCHA asks you to check a box that reads &quot;I&#x27;m not a robot.&quot;<p>What&#x27;s the way forward? Does permanently having privacy equal permanently acting like a robot?
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ultramancool
Yes, or emulator normal behavior of many people. You could obtain relatively
similar privacy by buying VPSes or VPN services with ZeroCoin/Bitcoin/whatever
else you have that might be sufficiently private and then using those. The IP
would be unique and not from Tor exits, the transactions would be irreversible
so the providers don't mind that you're from onionland for fraud reasons. Once
you've got the VPN or VPS, access it only over Tor. The risk now is that while
your VPS purchase is relatively anonymous, you're now psuedonymous with your
new VPS IP and your actions can be associated, just not all the way back to
you. Depends on what your use case is whether this is acceptable or not. But
it'll get you past captchas.

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bahjoite
I follow two rules when faced with CAPTCHA while browsing through Tor:-

1) Don't solve CAPTCHA

2) Ignore the site and move on if it isn't reachable after asking Tor Browser
to select a new circuit a few times.

To follow these rules is to protest (in a small way), but it might be better
to email the site operators with one's concerns in the case of a favourite
site.

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joshschreuder
But if there were no CAPTCHAs, presumably the site you want to visit would not
exist (DDOS) or would be in such a state that you would not want to visit
anyway (spam).

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bahjoite
Is the only difference between DDOS or spammer requests and those from people
who value privacy and anonymity that the latter are able to solve a CAPTCHA?
Or could could Cloudflare et al do a much better job?

