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Comment by compbio | Hacker News Reader

I do not get the problem of hiring a clickfarm for 1$ an hour to click on cat pics.

If we take reputation, IP and cookie. All must be in order to pass. We want to spam a 1000 forms today. Scenario 1: The clickfarm itself fills in the Captcha. Result: Their IP's will soon be blacklisted, reputation of a third-world account will be inherently low. Scenario 2: We let the clickfarm send the answer to our own bot, which selects the right pictures. Result: Google will see a single IP and cookie trying out 1000s of captcha's a day, and ban you. Scenario 3: We let the clickfarm send the answer to our own bot, this bot uses a list of proxies that haven't yet been banned. Result: Google will see a single account cookie trying out 1000s of captcha's a day, from different IP's and ban you.

Can anyone come up with a scenario which involves reputation, IP and cookie that does not end up with Google detecting and banning your efforts? Cookie swapping?

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Here's a scenario: a dissident living in a third world country with pervasive surveillance. He accesses the net using TOR, and disables cookies.

Now his IP is blacklisted, because there are lots of people using the same exit node; his reputation is low for the same reason, and the cookie is rejected. There's a good chance that this one person will be blocked, even though he didn't do anything wrong.

For a simpler case, private browser sessions over a VPN would suffer from the same issue.

I would argue that the problem of spam and hackers is a greater burden on society as a whole than someone in Iran not being able to get past a captcha.

Yeah, seeing a few spam links on a website is much more burdensome than free speech!</sarcasm>

That's not what I was talking about at all. And tell me how a being forced to solve a captcha prevents free speech.

The problem that the GP was talking about wasn't being forced to solve a captcha, but of getting blacklisted before even being given a chance to solve it.

Depends on what variables you're plugging into your moral calculus. Spam typically doesn't actually cause bodily harm, political repression, etc.

Spearfishing and hacking accounts does indeed cost some people their life savings and cause elderly people with semi-comfortable retirements to go into poverty. I think hackers do indeed cause society harm. It`s not just some email in a folder you never check.

I see where you are coming from, specially considering that spam makes up for a significant volume of the entire internet traffic. However, I'd think it wiser for one spammer to go free than for one person to be denied access to legitimate content.

I'm often being denied access to free content because I'm accessing from the "wrong" countries, and that's infuriating. If I start being locked out of free content due to my privacy measures, I'm probably going to start setting buildings on fire.

Do you think content creators should not be able to control access based on their own criteria? Are you somehow "owed" access rights to free content?

I'm not probably_wrong, so I can't speak for him/her.

But while I believe content creators should be able to control access, I think it's ridiculous to ban certain countries from access to certain content -- I don't quite see the point.

And also, being "owed" free content != being able to access free content you otherwise would be able to access were it not for a service like TOR or a VPN (e.g. escaping the Chinese firewall using a VPN service whose IP is banned from a website versus wanting to watch a movie but living in Germany instead of the U.S.)

Scenario 1 - we don't need to create a clickfarm for this, maybe we can clickjack random users online. Literally every porn site will be happy to make some money with it. Scenario 2 - of course we won't just use 1 IP, it will make us look Bad guy. Speaking of Scenario 3 - which account cookie are you talking about? The clickfarm has thousands of own trustworthy cookies but our bot doesn't send any cookies, it only solves challenges (neutral guy).

As soon as you have valid g-recaptcha response you don't need to persist any cookies - use it outright.

+1 also consider s/click farm/malware worm bot/g

Yeah malware bot will generate lots of free g-recaptcha-responses! Good idea

Scenario 4: you use botnets. 1 IP, 1 account = a few attempts, and you scale by renting a bigger botnet.

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