Comment by troyvit
1 day ago
But it's so easily beatable! This might be the result of good intentions (being incredibly generous), but as the article states, any bot can afford a $30 phone and the concomitant hardware as the cost of doing business and bypass this.
Also as the article states (referencing an HN comment):
> How should we realistically teach Susan from HR the difference between a real Google Captcha QR code and a malicious phishing QR code - you (realistically) can’t.
Susan from HR is the least of it. This is a huge vector to increase fraud, not decrease it.
How would an ethical, competent engineer argue against this?
The CAPTCHA company who put this out might have an agenda, but also since they're in the industry they might also have knowledge to impart.
We're reaching an inflection point with the oligarchies where the old ideas of "writing a blistering editorial" or "calling your congress-critter" need to be seriously questioned as useful and other non-violent methods of recapturing digital freedom need to be entertained.
You realize that $30 phone is burned the moment it's used for abuse, right? It's not $30 and then spam as much as you like. It's $30 per action per site, which makes nearly all abuse unviable.
You realize how rife abuse already is using google's infra? Do you really think google's gonna be right there, cracking down on this? This is at least as much about locking people into their infra as it is cracking down on fraud, and anybody who doesn't recognize that is at this point willfully blinding themselves.
Yes. I used to work on Google's abuse team and am 100% aware of how much worse things would be if they actually didn't fight it.