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Comment by morpheuskafka | Hacker News Reader

I think what OP is talking about is Cloudflare not Google's decision. Google provides the CATCHPA API but Cloudflare decides to flag nearly all Tor traffic and make it go through the CATCHPA.

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In the case of Cloudflare specifically, they support Privacy Pass[0], an extension that allows solving one captcha to allow you through to multiple sites without de-anonymizing or reducing the security properties that tor provides.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass...

Cloudflare is a good actor, they offer the PrivacyPass extension that basically generates 30 auth tokens from one CAPTCHA challenge and then uses those until it needs new tokens. Sadly the overwhelming majority of sites doesn't use CAPTCHA through CloudFlare but directly through Google, rendering PrivacyPass moot.

Cloudflare is not a good actor in this, they have shown that they do not care about encryption (allowing non-https backends while showing https to the end user) and embedding trackers in verification pages (the CAPTCHAs on random pages).

Cloudflare is the scum of the internet. They've put a crazy amount of effort towards making wide swathes of the internet unusable for people trying to protect their identity and privacy. I wouldn't trust their implementation of Privacy Pass.

Sigh. We changed this so long ago yet people repeat this over and over again. Do you use the Tor Browser? Please show me a site on Cloudflare which uses CAPTCHA on Tor.

I don't know about TOR, but a couple of years ago we had a site on Cloudflare that had the CAPTCHA come up for visitors from mainland China - where the great firewall blocked the requests to Google. Chinese users were effectively locked out. We contacted Cloudflare about this and got dismissive replies.

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