I'm not actually sure it's particularly effective at stopping bots, considering how easy it is to spin up a docker container that can bypass it. Ironically FlareSolverr wasn't able to solve CAPTCHA so now with them gone it works even better.
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Yeah, I'm pretty skeptical of the premise... it's looking for browser "abnormalities"? I mean... there wasn't a strong motivation to correct those abnormalities for bots when it didn't matter. Now that it does, I just suspect they'll correct those abnormalities.
Just because the abnormalities were present in the past doesn't imply that it's intrinsically more difficult to emulate browser behaviour than it is to defeat captchas. There just hasn't been a reason to do so up until now.
Ok so bypass it
Nothing can stop 100% of bots. The goal with captchas like Turnstile is to use a significant portion of your resources to the point it's expensive and slow to perform an attack.
Turnstile runs many background checks on your browser, so headless browsers automatically become futile.
JavaScript PoW challenges are performed that take up multiple seconds of execution time, memory and CPU. This alone is a deterrent because sequential attacks become extremely long to execute.
Concurrent attacks are still unfeasible because Turnstile ups the difficulty if it detects something is up, and receiving requests from thousands of botnet IPs is bound to trip an alarm.
I'm curious how easy it would be to bypass with significant volume though?
Like a few requests might get through but it would get fairly easy to detect dozens of requests from the same bot i think?
It's also doing some "light" proof of work - this would be a PITA if you were trying a bot net attack or something.
I mean it's always going to be an uphill battle, but I'd rather it stop some bots and be easier for me than them making me do a million captchas, that dont even work half the time, that still don't stop many bots.
I absolutely hate it, in tachiyomi, it just keeps reloading the page instead of giving me a captcha to solve...
Same, I cant get to or log in to multiple sites with Firefox because of this.
It does seem to be able to work if I use a private window, though. So Im not exactly sure what's causing the issue. Maybe something to do with cookies? But ive messed around with that and havent been able to get anywhere.
Getting sick of these strange new hCaptchas. Click the thing that's only appearing once? Click I this exact order 😱🥺😅😂🤞. Click the stadiums from SimCity?!? Hopefully websites switch to turnstile fast.
I fail hCaptcha a surprising number of times, and I'm sure it's actually doing that on purpose so we help it label more images for AI training.
It's like "select all flowers" and then you have 7 AI generated horses, and one AI generated flower. I pick the flower and "try again!" with a new set of images.
Yeah. Its better than reCaptcha - do I click those 3 pixels of the traffic signal it not!?! - but it's still an obstacle that dimenishes the experience.
Don't like it.
I use VPNs, Tor and nonpopular browsers and I need to have a way to proof I am not a robot other than staying in the crowd.