Live data from Hacker News

Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

privatecaptcha.com

111–120 of 394 posts

Re: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

#112
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only real solution is to aggressively name and shame the engineers who build this tech. They should feel uncomfortable opening their door, walking down the street." What do you think this is a call for, if not harassment?

There is a fine line between harassment and pointing of for socially bad actions. Harassment involves usually calling by names, making threats etc. You can definitely shame people with a diplomatic language.

Why would anyone "feel uncomfortable opening their door, walking down the street" if they weren't being harassed?

It sounds to me like you're trying to defend harassment. If that's not true, and you also believe people should not be harassed, it would be helpful if you stated so clearly and unambiguously.

Re: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

#113
post #24

Whether it's AMP or manifest 3 or android source shenanigan or attempts to replace cookies with their FLOC nonsense or this...Google is rapidly turning into a malicious force when it comes to the open internet

> rapidly becoming Always has been. Google was creating cartels like the "Open Handset Alliance" literally decades ago. Via their control of Chrome and Search which are both monopolies, Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.

It cracks me up when people say Chrome is a monopoly, because a massive amount of computing devices do not even ship with Chrome. Windows computers, Macbooks, and iPhones require users go search out and install Chrome on their own out of their own volition, shipping with entirely functional and decent browsers out of the box that they have lots of patterns to push. Even many Android phones ship with browsers other than Chrome as a default still from what I understand.

How is Chrome, of all things, a monopoly? Have words just entirely lost all meaning and now monopoly just means "things which are popular that I dislike"?

Re: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

#114
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they didn't. Firefox unseated Internet Explorer. Chrome then got big by putting its installer right on the Google homepage and harassing users to install it. And they had it bundled with other software, and would install as a user so that locked down computers could still run it. They absolutely did not win by embracing open standards.

Chrome has gone off doing their own standards to some extent, but you're forgetting what it was like when Internet Explorer dominated. You basically couldn't use the web without IE because they broke so many standards and implemented them in closed source. Then there was ActiveX on top, straight up Windows binaries in web. And besides there being a dominant engine, only one browser could use that engine. Trading that…

Chrome didn't solve that though. Quoth Wikipedia:

> Firefox usage share grew to a peak of 32.21% in November 2009, with Firefox 3.5 overtaking Internet Explorer 7, although not all versions of Internet Explorer as a whole;

Firefox was the browser that embraced open standards and was unseating IE. And ActiveX was used for corporate stuff, not general web sites, so the main reason it died was that Microsoft gave up.

Re: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

#115
I think the idea is good if it could actually curb bot traffic that currently plagues the Internet.

However, a lot of recent bot traffic are sophisticated scrappers called "LLM's." You can tell claude to "research X from this www.example.com" and will automatically scrape it and summarize it, something that a LLM is perfect for. Gemini tends to share links instead, presumably because most of Google's revenue comes from ads served on those websites, so if it completely killed the traffic to those websites it would just make less money. Incidentally, I wonder if Claude/Gemini use an search engine-like "index" of all websites or it refuses to cache anything to always fetch "fresh" data.

If this is employed, I don't think the web is only going to be gatekept to Google devices. I think it will also be gatekept to Google's AI's.

Google would be able to display a captcha that no LLM could defeat, and then just let its own LLM pass through.

The same could be said about its other bots, such as the web crawler. Google's bot could crawl webpages that no other crawler would ever be able to simply because it has free pass to captcha-gated GETs. Although the same could be true already today.

Re: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

#116
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, occasionally hammers do find nails to hit.

Strange analogy considering that RMS got to where he is precisely by finding nails to hit much, much more than occasionally, and much, much more than most hammers.

The analogy works if you think of RMS as a nailgun.

Re: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

#117

Given all the negative comments here - what is anyone's alternate solution for AI-driven fraudulent activity? CAPTCHAs are increasingly ineffective. Services are either going to go offline or implement some kind of system like this. PII like credit cards or SSNs aren't enough because those are regularly stolen. So where do things go? Fewer services and infinite fraud?

Why do you continue to extend the benefit of the doubt to your former employer when they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy again and again?

Re: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

#119
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amused at how thoroughly Google adopted Microsoft's playbook. Chrome supplanted Internet Explorer by embracing the open web. But then Google immediately started on extensions, and now they're trying to extinguish the open web with nonsense like Cloud Fraud Defense. All very smoothly done. I mean, people are actually _asking_ for this junk. I'm impressed.

No they didn't. Firefox unseated Internet Explorer. Chrome then got big by putting its installer right on the Google homepage and harassing users to install it. And they had it bundled with other software, and would install as a user so that locked down computers could still run it. They absolutely did not win by embracing open standards.

Chrome and v8 was just stupidly faster than any other browser and JS stack at the time when I first adoped it. It was a lot buggier in many other ways and many sites just didn't work quite right at the time, but the tradeoff on performance in the early days was very much worth it.

Re: Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

#120
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a fine line between harassment and pointing of for socially bad actions. Harassment involves usually calling by names, making threats etc. You can definitely shame people with a diplomatic language.

Why would anyone "feel uncomfortable opening their door, walking down the street" if they weren't being harassed? It sounds to me like you're trying to defend harassment. If that's not true, and you also believe people should not be harassed, it would be helpful if you stated so clearly and unambiguously.

> Why would anyone "feel uncomfortable opening their door, walking down the street" if they weren't being harassed?

Usually people feel ashamed when they do something that is shameful. That is the definition of being uncomfortable.

> It sounds to me like you're trying to defend harassment. If that's not true, and you also believe people should not be harassed, it would be helpful if you stated so clearly.

I am against the harassment. For me, these arguments feels like that you are trying to allow people do to whatever the want for the money as long as they can hide behind the company.

Post reply on HN