Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

I can't use it because I'm not classified as "human" by a computer. There is no captcha that I could get wrong, just a checkbox that probably uses a black box model to classify me automatically

Was curious after the post claimed that the quality is better than Google and DeepL, but the current top comment showed translations from Afrikaans that it got wrong but I could understand as a Dutch person who doesn't even speak that language (so it's not like seven levels of negation and colloquialisms that they broke it on)

What do I do with this "Error Code: 600010"? I've submitted a "report" but obviously they're not going to know if those reports are from a bot author frustrated with the form or me, a paying customer of Kagi's search engine. The feedback page linked in the blog post has the same issue: requires you to log in before being able to leave feedback, but "We couldn't verify if you're a robot or not." The web is becoming more fragmented and unusable every day...

>What do I do with this "Error Code: 600010"?

Cloudfare, the gatekeeper of the internet, strikes again.

The usual suspects are VPN or proxy, javascript, cookies, etc.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/turnstile/troubleshooting/...

Unfortunately, even with the error code, I doubt the above page will help much.

Cloudflare is more or less a necessity if you offer any sort of computationally expensive service for free. They're problematic for sure, but I think they're a lesser evil in the grand scheme of things.

Very much a symptom of a much larger problem however, one with not a lot of good solutions.

I had tons of issues with these Cloudflare checkboxes. I finally figured out it was because I use this extension [1] that disables HTML5 autoplay. I assume Cloudflare is doing some kind of thing where they verify that the client can playback media, as they assume that headless browsers or crawlers won't have that capability

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...

which is hilarious because I bypass all cloudflare turnstiles with 20 lines of python and 2captcha API.

It only defeats users.

These mainly exist to push responsibility to somebody else. Proper functionality is secondary.

Interactive captchas are one foot in the grave. With multi-modal tool-using AI models proliferating, challenge tasks that only a human can complete are vanishing. Current challenges exclude users with minor physical or mental impairments even now.

Anti-bot filters will require a different signal to determine if a physical human actually made the request.

> I can't use it because I'm not classified as "human" by a computer.

It uses Cloudflare Turnstile captcha.

The service shows no captcha to logged in Kagi users, so you can just create a (trial) Kagi account.

Thanks, but I am logged in and it still shows that. Clicking log in at the top of the page leads me to the login page which takes about 10 seconds to (while I'm typing) realise that I'm already logged in and then redirects me to the homepage (kagi search)

I don't have any site-specific settings and clearly HN works fine (as well as other sites) so it's not that cookies are disabled or such

Edit: come to think of it, I'm surprised that you find translator data to be more sensitive (worth sticking behind a gatekeeper) than user logins. Must have been a lot of work to develop this intellectual property. There is no Cloudflare check on the login page. Not that I'd want to give you ideas, though! :-)

> come to think of it, I'm surprised that you find translator data to be more sensitive (worth sticking behind a gatekeeper) than user logins. Must have been a lot of work to develop this intellectual property. There is no Cloudflare check on the login page.

This is just a simple anti-bot measure so we do not get hammered by them to death (kagi does not have an infinite treasure chest). It is not needed for search, because you can not use search for free anyway.

I see, that makes sense!

> Afrikaans that it got wrong but I could understand as a Dutch person who doesn't even speak that language

The one language is basically a derivative of the other. Understanding and judging accuracy of translation are quite different though.

eg for me it’s the reverse - can understand large parts of Dutch due to Afrikaans. Couldn’t tell you if a Dutch sentence is correctly translated or grammatically correct though

Zalgorythmz on crack. Brainz out of whack.

(cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_cocaine )

Interesting. Never had such an issue with Google. How do they do it?

By not having a puzzle-less/unsolvable captcha, or what do you mean?

Yes, exactly they don’t have it. Of course there must be a reason for that. Any other tech for example?

Google does have a captcha on Google Search. Using it through Tor is an exercise in frustration.

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