They only want dumb humans doing the shopping not some hyper-focused bot that wont add any extra items into the shopping cart.

Unregulated greed doesn't care if every user gets robbed and their identity stolen.

But a QR is a URL. If visiting a certain URL pwns your device, complain to whoever made the device or browser.

Not that I like this thing at all. But using a QR isn’t exactly why it sucks.

2020s will be remembered as the decade when companies stopped behaving in a trustworthy way, and normalized scanning random QR codes, downloading random apps, uploading photos of your face or documents, all as strange convoluted "verification" procedures. Scammers will love this

Whats to stop malicious actors (bad extensions, compromised cdn, etc.) from painting over the qr code or injecting their own? This is so incredibly terrible.

You would not last long in China ;)

(you pay by scanning QR code in .. well, everywhere)

Scanning QR in your bank app for payment is near universal in Europe. In fact, it is considered very annoying if a site does not provide the option.

Where are those ‘mark of the beast’ cranks when you need them?

It's coming.

The Poshmark morons demanded government id to buy a $35 shirt. On an established account, an address that matched my credit card, etc.

The only answer is delete your account.

I thought it's just happening to me. I tried to watch my computer's network activity to see if anyone has hijacked my IP. I closed Gmail and YouTube tabs because I find that they are the ones which pings to the outside world a lot more than other tabs I have opened. I even restarted my modem two times. Didn't work.

So I decided to...use Firefox a lot more with DDG (I use FF for mostly privacy-sensitive stuff like checking my financial accounts, but now I use it for a lot more browsing stuff).

Seems like it is the Chrome browser over-reacting.

"As part of our mission to enable a safe agentic web" drew an immediate swear from me.

What's happened here is yet another massive negative externality from AI. Because AI is such a fraud enabler, Google are now using that as an opportunity to end the open internet and competition in operating systems.

I'd much rather go the other way and make the AI wear identification. Crack down on both corporate and unlicensed AIs.

Edit: and of course it's also advertising killing the web, because the fraud in question is ad fraud. Need to force it into human eyeballs, not bots.

No. Just more rejection and labelled as a terrorist.

It's hard to say which one is more maddening annoying

Why not hcaptcha or anubis? I had to block Cloudflare JS due to abuse, so I can't use any sites that require it.

From one egg basket to another; both are flawed in design.

Does reCAPTCHA ever claim to detect or block labor farms? From its old name it just seems to block bots only. (Bots are nowadays called agents.)

I imagine again a worldwide search for the cheapest labor. Mechanical Turk on steroids.

Just show us your face and transactions history, it's about the kids.

They're expecting everyone to whitelist Google agents because Google has the market share for people to complain if Google agents don't work.

Point On! Probably done by two different teams, who don't know about each other. I hate this (re)captcha so bad. They assume everyone is bad.

It’s the same thing with Sam Altman and Worldcoin: create the problem, then sell people the solution (which also just so happens to shred more privacy). Play both sides and profit; it’s great work if you can get it.

And you must be signed in.

I frequently get flagged as suspicious activity and have to pass a captcha when trying to use the Google verbatim search function on a signed out Firefox browser on android.

> No mention of device integrity verification yet

If Google Play services is listed as a requirement, that implies that a "certified Android" device capable of Play Integrity attestation is required, since that's the only officially supported way to obtain Google Play services. On consumer-facing support articles like this, they don't tend to get into the nitty gritty details like what APIs are being used. If MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY is required, that would probably not be explicitly listed here.

E.g. the consumer documentation for Google Pay just says you need a "certified" Android device and a screen lock set up: https://support.google.com/wallet/answer/12200245

(Yes, if you go deep into the FAQ at the end it eventually states that if you rooted your phone, you can't use tap to pay, but that requirement is implied by the certification requirement [1].)

In Google's eyes, and in the eyes of the law due to trademarks filed by Google, Android == Google Android.

This feature would make little sense if it's not using device attestation because otherwise it would be easy to spoof. I expect that it will initially not use it, and they will start A/B testing device attestation in the coming years.

[1] Expand "What to do if you see device is not certified" -> "Reset device to fix issue" https://support.google.com/android/answer/7165974

I will be unable to solve the phone verification because I use LineageOS for microG, but any fraudster can just buy a bunch of $30 android phones. Many people have trouble using a smartphone, so they use dumbphones, but they will be locked out. Many people just don't have any mobile phone because they don't think that it is useful.

This is going to make my grapheneos journey a bit more exciting. How wild to force users through an official google identification for web browsing.

Does the iPhone recaptcha app force you to login with a Google account? Seems we didn't need ID verification for the web to lose all anonymity.

I’m already sick and tired of seeing cloudflares “making sure you aren’t a bot” checkbox everywhere. Sometimes it locks me out entirely and decides I don’t get to view pages.

I see recaptcha less frequently but it’s much more annoying, with all the clicking of crosswalks, or busses, or whatever. I am not looking forward to a web where google can not only lock me out of my email, but also large sections of the previously public internet. Occasionally google decides I don’t get to do searches, and that’s not too much of an inconvenience, there are other search engines.

I believe you'll also need bluetooth enabled on both devices. At least you do for those "scan this QR code displayed on your computer to authenticate using the passkey on your phone" feature, which this seems analogous to. Bluetooth is used to ensure that the two devices are actually physically co-located.

... or you'll need to stop using reCAPTCHA if you want to get any traffic on your Web site.

I know, people will slavishly knuckle under, but let me dream for a few minutes.

The app that scans the code talks to the TPM in your phone to prove that your phone is running an unmodified Google OS.

You don’t need to. As long as the dumb majority goes along with it, your options are to capitulate or get locked out of society.

Bluetooth is generally used to prove that the two devices are co-located, which makes it more complex to do your proposed kind of deployment at-scale. Bespoke solutions could perhaps work around for some smaller number of devices, this QR code layer by itself isn't intended to stop 100% of workarounds.

Yeah, I had the same question myself. I think that's what you would want to do to make it airtight (plus some amount of rate limiting or flagging for devices that are part of dedicated device farms).

But even if not, there's still value in raising the barrier to entry. For example, you can buy 1000 reCaptcha solves for $1-2 from various captcha-solver services. And yet that $0.001-per-request fee does discourage mass-scale bot attacks.

With the apparent competence that built Gemini, I have zero faith in Google building or doing anything that works anymore.

Which means, it's urgent that more and more people realize there are alternative to the everything-on-the-phone situation they live in. And that owning one is not mandatory and should not be (by the way, politicians should also wake up).

Tactics like this will make me get a dumb phone and stop using those websites. If that means no more credit cards, online shopping, etc so be it. You have to draw the line somewhere.

> but the writing is on the wall.

Only if politicians are still corrupt and law enforcement doesn't work.

Which means the writing is on the wall.

I think you're spot on. This will block and inconvenience legitimate users while fraudsters have no problem buying more phones.

Not a useful direction for real end users.

The GitHub one I recently tripped on was the worst of all time. Part one of 9 or something, which of these three next sounds are bees? Or some small man rotating around spaces on a map. I have an eInk screen and it was nearly impossible to see. Extremely painful and ridiculous.

Then you have already have not been very present in the analytical data that these business decisions are based on.

No surprises here, though of course disappointment when it comes to fruition.

Go fuck yourself?

I mean, that seems to be the general societal attitude.

And you'll need to buy new ones because many things are app only, or are migrating that way (including being able to travel to certain countries)

Im in the community reverse engineering web CAPTCHAs, it's because they are too easy to reverse engineer with Claude now.

I've seen multiple people break botguard (the obfuscation used by recapcha) within the last year when before it was considered a huge technical envour.

Devices like phones don't have this issue since Google owns the client attestation end to end and can fingerprint you without the risk of receiving spoofed values.

Does anybody trust it? MacOS seems to be the only desktop platform I see be trusted.

I think the pathetic thing about this is that it’s so much less intuitive than stuff like cloudflare and Anubis.

Google, a multi-billion dollar company, is going to make the customers of their corporate clients pull out a phone and do some bullshit just to visit a website.

Meanwhile, when Cloudflare/Anubis verifies you there’s zero required interaction and you barely even see the anime character because it all loads so fast. At most Cloudflare makes you check a box.

You can't, really. If a user can access the site, so can a bot.

You may be able to make it more expensive than your information is worth, but of course that affects users too.

Perfectly: They're not; that's not really possible.

Adequately: Proof of work. https://anubis.techaro.lol/

Before the age of AI, most bots aren’t sophisticated at all. They might be a script running curl in a loop, or at best some standard browser automation tool like selenium or playwright. People couldn’t stop bots reliably but they could easily stop 99% of bots. That is of course no longer true which is why reCAPTCHA had to evolve.

++1

Many sit-in restaurants enforce QR codes ordering. Started during covid, but keeps happening, especially outside US in my experience.

It's a URL that you can't read. It's literally exactly what we tell people to not do to be secure. LOOK AT THE FUCKING URL BEFORE YOU VISIT THE SITE.

What does the FCC have to do with this?

That means you're a peasant, and don't matter. Don't worry, they'll work with telecoms and carriers to ensure devices matching your budget are subsidized and made available at every possible opportunity.

I shuddered when I realized that Google would require (smart)phones for recaptcha.

I say this because I used to have a dumb-phone for an year and more and I only stopped using it when it broke (its battery fried but its replacable but I don't find battery its size). No smart-phone period,(I am a teen so I can afford to do that)

Recently, I wanted to make a google account, guess-what, I literally couldn't make a google account without having an (smart)phone. Google's new feature on making a google account also requires you to qr code your way into, similar to this re-captcha.

I tried to somehow find ways to have a phone number OTP but even when I finally managed to do that after so much PITA, I didn't get the OTP (at all).

I am pretty sure that my phone number works as I got another OTP from google when I had finally given in and used an android device to make an account and even then, there is so much friction.

Even though I have verified my phone number on google, I had to verify the phone number on youtube again to upload a video >15 minutes iirc and yknow I tried to add my number and it didn't send my OTP. So I tried again, and it said that I had tried too much, yes their rate limit of too much is 1

I was sharing all of this with some of my online friends with screenshots. I probably wished to write a blogpost about it that you can't use google without having an (smart)phone.

and now, you are telling me, that Google is gonna force me/us the same but for viewing the open internet, the content and websites that they don't even control. There was one thing about google doing this BS in their own websites because I thought that although really sh.tty, but they don't care about me enough to want me as a user so fine (it wasn't but still)

But this just takes it to an extremely completely next level. I can't stress how bad this all is.

Even after all of the previous things, I still was like, well this problem of google account can still be fixed/isn't thaaat large more than its annoying/frustrating and Google as a company is still mostly fine as compared to other tech giants except from their locking down android thing but this all changed with this move.

With age verification, locking down android, requiring android, recent Utah/UK laws which somehow threaten websites. Internet is turning into Dystopia. We are gonna slowly move towards a allowlist internet where only select few websites are used. For a large swath of the population this is already the case so the voices protesting are quite few but we must do what we can to protest them all from killing the internet. Sorry this got long but I can't stress how bad of a move this is as someone who used to use dumbphone, Google is basically saying that I can't use the internet if I have a dumb-phone.

Where is this specified? I don't see that in TFA.

Scan QR code -- you don't have our "captcha app" installed, automatically redirect to Play store -- download malware because Google Play's horrible screening -- profit

I must not be the first one to think of this, right?

Right???

Overall it’s a reason to sigh deeply and thank our fellow “visionary leaders” for making everything that little bit worse. At least we’re getting an AI paradise out of the deal right?

Right?

The first step is to write down why you are stopping bots and which bots you are stopping. If an LLM is buying things from your web store, that's good. You are making money on that, and you shouldn't stop it.

I get it all the time on my Mac with Safari using iCloud private relay

Doesn't have to even be that advanced, people get conditioned to stuff like reCAPTCHA and friends & Cloudflare's interstitial landing page (when "I'm under attack" mode is on) and they won't bat an eye. That's how we get people piping `curl | bash` into their terminal to "solve" fake challenges.

As a side note though, I recently have tried to turn CSP on a website I run and the amount of garbage I see in the reports is astonishing. There's some noise from things like OpenDNS intercepting YouTube or Social embeds for people using the work-friendly or family-friendly options, but the sheer amount of things attempting to phone home to random URLs and random extension scripts injecting ads into the site would astonish you. My mental model of "toolbar hell" from the Windows XP days being gone has completely shattered.

Companies were doing this all along. The 2020s will be remembered as the decade when we realized, too late, that the world began ending in the 2010s.

So openclaw or whatever future software will run or control unmodified google os devices.

I know that's the final destination, but I didn't see that listed in the requirements page linked above. Any proof of this affecting the current implementation?

Your only option is to sway the "dumb majority" in the other direction.

An increasing percentage of the dumb majority are opting for dumb phones and plenty of people still use laptops, it doesn't have to be anywhere remotely close to a majority for many analytics-obsessed site owners to see the drop in sales and opt for another solution.

In any case, sites using an extremely restrictive mode of recaptcha during ddos attacks will just be one segment of a very fragmented digital future, not society as such

Also in adjacent countries like Vietnam etc., where even ragtag street food vendors have a QR code sticker on their stall/cart.

It's so common that people pay without even talking or confirming; I've seen customers just take their phone out, point at the QR, and walk away, and the shopkeeper says nothing. I'm assuming the shopkeeper gets a notification on their phone and trusts regular customers,

but how easy would it be to secretly place your own bank account's QR code on top of a shop's QR? People who wait for a confirmation notification will catch it immediately, but by then the customer has already paid the attacker and the transaction can't be just reversed. Repeat it in several places, and a thief to snatch quite a few payments before the parasite stickers are all taken down.

A few millennia too late for that: the “mark of the beast” is just money — “so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark”. How does one buy or sell without money? Otherwise we would call it bartering.

Some currencies are even literally called Marks lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_(currency)

Adding friends, shopping, logging in on PC, binding accounts for after-the-fact SSO, etc..

This is all done with QR codes here.

Looks similar but is a different thing entirely. That is for allowing a someone to take money from your account.

Because the concept of credit/debit cards is batshit insane that only serves to finance organized crime.

> And you must be signed in.

I don't see any mention of that? Google Play services work fine without an account (although if you're the kind of person who doesn't sign in to a Google account on their Android phone, you're probably running a custom ROM or something)

>that implies that a "certified Android" device capable of Play Integrity attestation is required

No, it doesn't. It implies that the app for handling the deeplink lives within GMS as opposed to needing to manually install a separate app like you do on iOS. GMS does not have a hard dependency on device integrity APIs being supported.

> I expect that it will initially not use it

it's boiling the frog method. Moving too fast means backlash, but a slow, step by step transition where each step seems reasonable, but ultimately end up with a locked down device, is how they aim to achieve it. And people would be too lazy to complain until the last few steps, by which time it would be too late.

Google is mostly interested in abuse that happens beyond the scale of how many $30 phones you can buy.

Which would be meaningful if phones weren't remotely controllable.

So the net effect is every AI agent will also have and connect to a physical phone.

They don't like contactless technology or what? I don't think that scanning a QR code is significantly more involved but it's enough to be annoying

I live in France and no such payement system ever took off.

We just pay with a standard credit card.

I’m European, never encountered the system you describe.

What is it and why does it exist? Apple Pay has been widely available since 2016. Why would anyone want to use some clunky QR-code thing instead?

Why the hell would they care who is buying it? They're getting paid either way.

The only reason they'd care is because they want to sell your personal information.

Thankfully I don't live in China. Unfortunately the totalitarian government is a larger concern than the QR codes.

No, we don't, or shouldn't ask people to check the URL itself, because of homonym attacks are a thing. Goal is to make sure that your credentials can't be compromised by surfing the wrong website (e.g. by using Passkeys instead of passwords).

Right! Let me check the URL before clicking the "confirm your account" link!

https://rt434.mjt.lu/lnk/GN2PVLyAIiUHuMqkGcjHkjkcRBtF/zJfB7p...

Oh wait, never mind. I guess I won't be signing up for electricity, then?

Also, the vast majority of people don't know that google.com and loginto-google.com aren't the same website, or that google.com.securesigning.net isn't real Google.

If your device gets busted by opening a URL, without any further confirmation or user interaction, your browser/camera app/third party app is broken.

Whoever told you that is the same person that advocated complex password rules with montly resets and no repeats.

reminder that any company which has a legal obligation towards you (GDPR requests, refunds, filling a complaint etc) can be contacted directly and forced to do it manually if you cannot use their web interface due to being blocked by Cloudflare & other captchas

CTAP2 requires Bluetooth but I'm not seeing any mention of that protocol here? It wouldn't really solve the "are you a human" thing, because you can just implement your own CTAP2 protocol handler if you wanted to write a bot.

I think the phone will just do basic remote attestation and then do a POST request to Google. Still not exactly difficult to bypass for anyone with a dollar to throw at the click/ad fraud farms, though.

Does it hurt Google if that happens? No, not really, unless it happens a lot and one of the victims happens to be a US senator or something. The value of the control this gives them, if adopted widely, is immeasurable, not to mention the ad-targeting value of identifying more people across devices.

I think they are jumping ahead but it does seem like a logical conclusion. Would tie in nicely with the online ID verification stuff popping up everywhere.

Hey at least in September they're going to stop you from installing F-Droid. For your safety, citizen!

It's not really about leaders, but people who are supposed to ensure they are not corrupt.

It seems like security services in many countries started outright to scam the tax payers. Get the wage and pretend brown envelopes don't change hands and policies are not shaped by corporations for their benefit, not the public.

Yeah, idiots would fall for it.

Both (Google/Apple) need a much higher level of certification for anything to be allowed to be prompted to install. Either you're already big (and can easily afford to pay for some human time to verify), or you're a manufacturer selling something that has an associated app (again, which implies you're reasonably big and can afford to pay for verification.)

You're neither? Get lost. Somebody types in the name of the app, fine, but the user must find it.

They don’t enforce in my experience. Just don’t bring a phone and they will bring you a paper menu.

Anti-trust. They're selling part of the problem (inference via Gemini) and now they're selling a solution. They also dominate web standards by developing the dominant browser. And they control one of two dominant phone platforms that will collaborate to enable this solution.

If this were some smaller company that just did cloud then it'd never even make it to PoC. This can only happen because it's Google Cloud, and they can leverage everything they own all at once. Those not buying into their ecosystem can take a hike.

I'd rather have to do ID verification at a government site that gives out blindable RSA signatures to browse the web with using open source software, than this overseas tech company needing to lock down the whole device and tech stack and not have to 'show ID' at all. One of these two holds elections...

Music/movie corporations and game developers must look forward to an age where people can't access the cache files or hook up a debugger to their apps anymore

My desktop doesn't have Bluetooth. Does this mean I'd be doomed even if I had a compatible mobile device?

But what's the alternative? Sites need a way to prevent bots overwhelming them, and there's no perfect way to distinguish real users from bots.

99.999% of people don't give a shit and don't even know what this means. They'll follow the instructions. These are the same 99.999% of people who press win+R ctrl+V enter when the captcha prompts them to. Because do this to see the dancing bunnies.

I have blocked it for years with ublock origin, if a site doesn't work, ctrl-w. Nowadays i cannot even use google search because of this, any search will trigger a captcha, hilarious (atleast on chromium-based browsers, firefox lets me get a page or two).

In passkeys the bluetooth is used for the actual authentication protocol...

The thing is even a contact form without something like reCaptcha is doomed on today's web: spam all day.

I expected mostly snark from my earnest question, And got it.

Ok, concrete scenario. What about homeless people using the computer at the library? Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?

Please don’t respond with sarcasm.

The example they give in TFA is having the user scan a QR code, presumably from a mobile device.

To counter the idiot downvotes, I proffer this as a prime example of Gemini:

  Resolving Final Compilation Conflict: I will remove the redundant `Entry` type declaration to resolve the compilation conflict and finalize the in-memory `StdNetDB` refactor.

    Edit  std.go → Accepted (+0, -1)

      31   type Entry struct {
      32       RouterInfo *router_info.RouterInfo
      33   }
      34 -
      34   func NewStdNetDB(db string) *StdNetDB {
      35       ctx, cancel := context.WithCancel(context.Background())
      36       return &StdNetDB{

That and the cli keeps exiting 0, without hinting why... Quality like the "AI Overview" that hijacks an entire page and isn't even relevant to the search terms - uBlock still doing god's work.

It made me realise I was perhaps a bit hard on Claude (but then it did something equally as dumb)

Good metaphor. On the one hand, Google increasingly cooperates and makes deals with militaries and governments. On the other hand, it increasingly locks down its customers and eliminates their privacy and freedoms.

Google has just about got the pot boiling. They win, we lose.

They said "capable of Play Integrity attestation". It's a weasel statement. If you have GMS, you're capable of performing PIA attestation, you just might fail. So it's strictly true, but doesn't tell us anything about whether it requires PIA.

I'm expecting a pretty hard identity verification requirement to connect to the internet, which should solve for the burner phone thing.

They're mostly interested in having a complete record of all users' internet activity tied uniquely to their identity.

Google is interested in, like other tech companies, identifying users by tying them to their phones. Other ai defense companies are trying to get photos and IDs. This is just another take on the same subversive activity.

... which is why you'll get locked out if you happen to visit an unusual number of sites in a day.

One can expect it will be tied to a government ID, at which point they ban you from the internet if you disobey them.

Having been there recently, it's about as annoying as taking out your phone to pay for something. Some systems also support NFC now, though the most common is still QR. Also helps that their QR scanning tech/transaction processing is really fast, many transactions were as fast or even faster than me scanning with a card from my experience.

(Also if you want to talk annoying payments don't get me started on how insane it is that the US still requires me to hand over a physical card at most restaurants to take over to their register... sorry I just can't help but get annoyed by this lol)

It's all WeChat Pay (or AliPay).

Lots of phones don't have NFC. All phones have cameras.

For better or worse there's no such thing as "Europe" despite the wish of many on HN.

Such a system exists in, for example, Switzerland. Actually there are two such systems that aren't compatible. There are QR code invoices for domestic payments, where the code includes the target bank account details, amount to pay, transaction details etc. That's scanned by your bank app, direct p2p payment. And there is Twint, which is a domestic consumer payments app. The QR codes often contain short one time use codes that are looked up server side.

Why do people use them: because it's easy and the fees are low. Banks give you QR code invoices even for small businesses for free. Twint is a bit like Venmo, you can send to numbers in your address book for free, and for businesses they can do website integrations easily and even print out static QR codes to stick on market stalls etc.

Twint isn't as fast, convenient or reliable as NFC card payments so the card/tech companies still have an advantage. But it's been getting better. Maybe at some point the NFC elements in the card tech will become flexible enough to allow arbitrary mobile apps to be as good as tap-to-pay.

QR codes are used in direct account-to-account transactions. They encode all the data like the IBAN-based account number, bank code, requested sum etc. that you may find on invoices in a way that’s much more convenient than typing over by hand.

Apple Pay meanwhile uses your credit/debit card to perform the transaction, the other party needs a terminal or payment gateway and is required to pay fees to Visa or MasterCard.

... You... think... it would be a good thing.

Don't you...

No browser supports Bluetooth.

Until now, I have never run "a custom ROM or something", but just the Android that came from the phone vendors and its updates.

Nevertheless, I do not have a Google account and I do not intend to have such an account.

Of course, this means that I cannot install any app from the official Google store, even if it is a free app. The requirement to login into your Google account should have existed only for payments, not for downloading a free app, but nonetheless Google does not work this way.

I already had problems with a bank that has terminated its Web-based online service, replacing it with an app that they refuse to provide for downloading, so that I could install it without having to open a Google account. Therefore I have also terminated my accounts with that bank.

I hope that this behavior will not spread to all remaining banks that still have Web-based online access.

The attestation will include a unique ID of the phone, so that if you get banned you have to keep buying new phones and keep paying money to Google. Google won't stop this because it makes them money.

And the official Google OS just won't feature remote-control software.

I think partly because Google and Apple controlled the contactless bits of the phones for many years, the non-OS-makers like WeChat and AliPay made use of the open technology of QR codes. I think theoretically you could build equivalent things as they have with NFC today on those platforms but on the other hand being able to set up a “POS” with nothing more than a printer does have an appeal to it, even if writable nfc stickers cost 5 cents you still have to go buy some.

QR payments in china was already prevasive before contactless payments became prevasive in the west. And as others say: not all phones supported nfc at the time. Remember iBeacons on iP5? Wechat and Alipay was already everywhere by then

Standard card payment that you need to autorize on your phone in your bank's app...

That is an incredibly long bow to draw from someone that obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is willing to make massive jumps to conclusions. Do you know how ecommerce works? I agree that it is a bit absurd, but not nearly as absurd as your claim of “the only reason”.

Which one?

The lifetime value of a LLM may be less than a real person. Especially if you consider things like word of mouth marketing.

one of these also rounds up people and sends them of to overseas concentration camps without due process. I think maybe white people still don't get what the rest of the world is living or experiencing.

Or if you want to play a bit, have a browser with some extension that breaks websites and show them "it doesn't work on my phone". Pranks apart, in my experience, I always got a paper menu when I asked for it.

Yes. The technical name for this FIDO2 QR code flow is caBLE (Cloud Assisted Bluetooth Low Energy).

I also disable Bluetooth on my phone every few months (and never enable it)... or at least after every CCC or such.

What are "bots"?

If I use Claude to gather and summarize information for me, is that a "bot"? Because I recently hit that wall and it wasn't great. Turns out in our quest to fight "bots" we also force humans to do the manual labor of copy/pasting information.

Why would bots "overwhelm" a site is another discussion — I find it really hard to create a website that would be "overwhelmed" by traffic these days, computers are stupidly fast.

Ditch Google Search as well then, use something like SearXNG or another meta-search engine. You'll get more representative results, no tracking and no captchas. Sometimes some of the engines may return captchas but they're kept from the search results, i.e. those engines don't get used for the query. You can run your own instance of SearXNG or one of the alternatives or use one of the available public instances, your choice. The fewer direct interactions with the likes of Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc. the better.

Sometimes, sort of. Most passkey usage doesn’t involve bluetooth. When it does, there’s no real data being sent over bluetooth, just a meaningless hash that can be confirmed using a secret inside the QR code.

So really, it’s like I said, Bluetooth is used to make sure that the device consuming the QR code is actually near the device that’s displaying the QR code.

If it's just a contact form on some random site that isn't particularly valuable to spammers, a bespoke solution like hidden input fields, obfuscation, or some kind of token calculated client-side by JS will probably work just as well.

Google would throw homeless people in a furnace to generate electricity for their datacentres if they could. No, this is not sarcasm, I fully expect they would if they could.

I guess history made us different. Personally I have reasons to be equally distrustful to anyone who wants to know too much about me, but much more afraid of my gov't than overseas entities.

I'd rather have no ID verification at all. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile.

The FCC doesn't enforce antitrust law. That's the FTC. (The FTC is also the commission that Lina Khan chaired for a while.)

One of them pretends to hold elections.

Sorry, I trust Google more than my government for my data. I mean I trust photos, youtube, music, gmail, wallet, keep, etc. what is that I have left anyway? It's sad that we started from open web, but we ended up in the hands of few. Apple/Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Amazon decide basically how I live my life. I don't want to (and sometimes I try to hard), but I don't want to give up the convenience also, but not only mine, also for my family is in the same pot.

We might need to redo this whole Internet thing because this is insanity.

One alternative is to make simple, efficient, and where appropriate even static sites that can scale to meet the demand.

The HIBP hashes distribution is a great example.

In a free market, the content provider is free to put whatever guardrails they feel appropriate. Loginwall, Paywall, CaptchaWall.

If you don't like that provider, you are free to pick another.

The alternative would be tar traps that only a bot would “see” and interact with and thus be caught by. Default to annoying machines not people.

You're right, we need big tech to protect us from the problems big tech created.

In the olden 20th century, we had a term for that...

> press win+R ctrl+V

LOL is this real?

I guess yes, because yesterday ReCaptcha asked me to screenshot a QR-code with the mobilephone :-D

Yeah, this is going to turn into another malware vector, isn't it?

They will do exactly as it says while also ceaselessly complaining, completely unable to connect their choice to use a website with the pain of using that website.

There's some sort of serious issue with learned helplessness or something

> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?

Sure they would. Cloudflare has already arbitrarily blocked entire swathes of the internet. Captcha as well. Your average user ends up going to the path of least resistance, and end up with a compliant ISP or carrier that's doing all sorts of censorship and gatekeeping and siloing and funneling.

And if they did get noticed, they'd whip up some sort of program through their cronies like the Obama phone, and get subsidized service to some token groups, heavily favoring political funneling and defaults supporting whatever party won the grift for that particular round of conspicuous do-gooding.

It's bad, man. For technically savvy people, they can get around things, switch up DNS, muck with vpns, etc. Normal folks are kept firmly within the walled gardens.

Then there's the information silos, platforms, and psychological shit they use. People don't have a chance in hell of getting a free and open link to the internet, what they see is tied to their identity, tied to their service provider, tied to their geographic location, and it's all done seamlessly in the background so they never even notice what they're missing, by design.

It wasn't snark. It's the awful, honest truth, and I have things to suggest involving wire brushes for anyone at Google or any other company involved in this shit.

We need a digital bill of rights, outlawing commercial trafficking in user data, mandatory ephemerality, and penalties involving prison time for CEOs and fines that are rapidly and unavoidably fatal even for companies like Alphabet or Amazon if they screw up even a little bit. Otherwise, this whole pretense at a free and open internet is just a convenient talking point and marketing schlock.

> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they? Please don’t respond with sarcasm.

Honestly, if you ask such terminally naive questions don't be surprised to get sarcasm in reply. Google does cut off access to chunks of people if it deems it profitable to do so!

You could try aurora store with anonymous accounts, though that has the problem that other people may be able to see the apps you install.

Or keep stealing IMEI IDs. Now regular people will start getting banned from the internet because of bot activity. You would open your phone one day and see "You have been disconnected from society" and there will be nothing you can do.

In Russia they tried to use bluetooth after being sanctioned from using NFC.

There's also remote control hardware (a printer-like device can operate a touchscreen). But the first point stands, yes. Be it a phone or another hardware attestation device, they and Apple will be giving "I am human, let me participate in society" checkmarks out, directly or indirectly for money

Only because you typo'd twice: it's "pervasive".

I think there is also something about how easy it is for a business to adopt a QR code by just needing to print one out instead of having to go out and buy a whole payment terminal.

That's 2FA though, not a QR code payment.

lol how edgy of you

People on this site don't really think deeply about what they type. They just say whatever is the most cynical in order to farm up votes

Chrome does...

These passkey QR codes don't need to use Web Bluetooth API, because they utilize the WebAuthn API. The website itself isn't given access to the bluetooth, the task is handed off to the browser, which as a native application, can access bluetooth and abstracts the bluetooth away.

I do. It has downsides of course, but what's the alternative at this point?

Same, I've never seen any app or website where an ID registration would make sense. No thanks.

Oops, Yes. I got 2/3 of the letters correct, though. I think that might be a better rate of success than their court cases during those years.

Google will comply if your government needs information on you. Are you sure your trust isn't misguided?

Given the chance, Google would kill you by accident.

"We're very sorry, your access to G-Pacemaker was accidentally revoked when your accounts were closed for suspicious behavior after watching a YouTube video without subtitles in a language we hadn't realized you were learning. Unfortunately, there no is appeals process as your heartbeat was terminated immediately."

“Demand” has very little to do with any of the problems bots cause on the internet today.

That doesn't really help if the same Huawei bot keeps re-requesting a bunch of 600 KiB JPEG from 120 rotating IP addresses with random crap at the end of the URL, like what happened to one of my servers. Efficiency doesn't really matter if you're getting hammered by bots.

I ended up aggressively IP blocking all of China, Singapore, and a few other East-Asian countries once I noticed that blocking server IP addresses just made the botnet switch to residential IPs. I didn't switch over to Cloudflare, but now a couple billion people can't read my website, which is arguably worse (but cheaper).

Also, a handful of people seeing an annoying checkbox is hardly a reason to re-architect an entire website. I am as opposed to Cloudflare taking over the internet as any sane person, but the usability story isn't really an argument for that kind of time investment.

The alternative to Cloudflare isn't some magical system that works for everyone but bots, it's hard-blocking IP ranges on the network level for anyone who doesn't fit the "normal" user profile.

Maybe it’s time to get in to Ham radio or some other hobby

1. Free markets do not exist

2. If free markets did exist they would not conform to the theory that people are using when they think of what free markets are, since people do behave rationally, power dynamics are real, and no consumer can have all of the information needed to make rational decisions even if that information were available

3. The market is providing solutions to its own failures without fixing the underlying failures because it is more profitable this way. Is buying something from a company that mitigates a problem created by the same company actually a free market, or is it just extraction?

I'm not 'free' to pick another government site. There is only one.

It’s a common thing for malware. But people are going to be more likely to fall for it when mainstream sites ask you to complete weird tasks with your phone to verify your identity.

People are constantly made to jump through strange hoops to do things on the internet. Unless you're really keyed in to what's going on, it's easy to fall for stuff like that.

Whats your argument

It is. There are fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs on pwned Wordpress sites that instruct users to run Powershell scripts.

GitHub allegedly blocks most of Brazil because most of Brazil is on CGNAT. Do you think GitHub cares? No, of course not lol.

They just didn’t want a Temu Cory Doctorow answer.

Well, it depends on the application and context. I don't think a homeless person at the library is going to be booking a $1000-a-night room in downtown Los Angeles.

However, services that homeless people will be using should factor in their target audience (such as the homeless not having a phone at all, or maybe not one that's up to date even).

However, like it or not, having a modern up to date device is becoming essential for even rudimentary basic access to society. Whether that's right or wrong it's where we are.

But that's not a specification

US govt used to have a program to sponsor mobile phones for homeless. Is that still around or did DOGE kill it?

(edit) It seems to still exist: https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...

>Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?

Followed by

>Please don’t respond with sarcasm.

Is my kind of humor. Just because they follow ESG scoring doesn't mean they actually care, if anything it means they very much don't.

They already trying there best to marginalize non chrome, non residential ip, non lodged in user not to mention there decade long silicon valley political purity targeting.

In this specific case, why fear the government?

My government has already seen my government-issued ID. If my government hasn't worked out my phone number, they can always ask the phone company. My address is required for the ID, voting, and filing taxes. I don't see how the government learns anything from this?

Conversely, I would like to believe most companies do not have my government-issued ID, nor a lot of the information on it.

Does it only count as an election if one’s favorite side wins?

Which public corporation do you think doesn't hold elections?

You know that protection racket where the mobster came to my corner store and says if I don't pay him he will come later and rough me up? This is a worse deal than that.

Your idea works for generic crawlers.

That doesn't work for targeted bots. A major benfit of device attestation is to stop the hordes of custom bot creators who try all sorts of ways to make a buck off of your platform such as sms toll fraud, credit card testing, ad fraud, account takeovers, stolen card laundering, gift card laundering, botting for pay for platform / ecosystem benefits, paid harassment, the list just keeps going.

Some aps such as okta, banking, and others already check platform verfication. Websites can't currently until device attestation.

Personally, I hate the concept, but I also hate spending a large amount of time fighting mal-actors on my platform in a completely unbalanced fight. There are tons of them, and they have all the profit incentive. There's a few of us, we only take losses. They can lie all they want, we can't really trust any facts except kinda the credit card and the device attestation.

Like everything, it's a shitty compromise, but, as a platform runner, if I can leverage google's signal and cut 95% of my malicious botting users, guess what I'm going to do.

Maybe ai companies should have invested any of those billions of dollars into safe and equitable ways of rolling out their new surveillance machines. Oh right that was never the point and this only serves to further that. Got it.

Discord has a feature where you can log into your account on your PC by scanning a code on your phone.

So does Binance.

It's almost like some people aren't IT hobbyists.

mCaptcha, ALTCHA, Cap, Friendly Captcha, Private Captcha, Procaptcha, Anubis... there are literally dozens of open source alternatives that aren't feeding the Do Be Evil company... not to mention all of the commercial alternatives - if for whatever reason, you do feel like paying for a service that costs nothing to offer

It doesn't matter how "naive" you think a question is. Nobody here deserves sarcastic remarks in response to a good-faith question.

Literally the first guideline under "In Comments" is:

> Be kind. *Don't be snarky.*

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?

Why wouldn't they? Google is notorious for making marginalized people's lives harder if it can make them money. Some examples:

- Hosting Palantir's ImmigrationOS, used by ICE to track immigrants

- Actively removing tools marginalized people use to protect themselves against ICE, such as ICE-tracking apps on the play store

- Intentionally aided Israel in committing genocide as part of Project Nimbus

- LGBTQ creator censorship on YouTube

Cutting off a small group of people they've repeatedly shown not to care about in the first place is a small price to pay to further cement their position as gatekeeper of the internet.

That's news to me https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...

Websites cannot use Bluetooth anywhere. The QR codes shown in the blog post are not passkey QR codes, which is likely what's confusing you.

That's passkey QR codes generated by the browser, it has nothing to do with random QR codes offered by websites.

I suspect that the HN crowd is somehow insulated from the river of crap and fraud that is the internet experience for a majority of the population.

Depends on your specific problem. Usually redesign your system not to need to care if the other end is a bot or not.

Interestingly, only on desktop/Android and not iOS it seems.

In this specific case your government can ban you from the web by refusing to verify. E.g. to punish dissidents abroad Belarusian dictatorship simply nullifies their IDs, and lists them as terrorists in public data. Apparently that's enough to ruin somebody's life worldwide. But at least they can use their browsers, which would be not that easy in a world where gov't-backed verification is norm on the net.

Google. The Class B stock setup means Class A shareholders are shouting into a void.

From an American perspective, i don't trust the government with the implementation details, nor do I trust our political climate, misaligned incentives, and general disinterest in good governance to implement something so sensitive.

If I lived in say, Sweden, I feel much more comfortable trusting their government to implement. In America, I feel I must always vote in a way that prevents giving any power to the government that I wouldn't want my political opponents to have over me.

> My government has already seen my government-issued ID.

If you have a government ID and all you use it for is voting and paying taxes, then they know that you vote and you pay taxes.

If you have to use it for accessing the internet then they know everything you do on the internet. What you read, who you talk to, what you post, when you sleep, where you are at any given time -- it's very much not the same thing as just having a picture of you and your name.

What if neither side represents your interests? What "election" is there in that case?

Better turn on that 'free' Cloudflare 'bot' protection. Would be a shame if our, ahem, I mean, those botnets ddos'ed your site.

this is the modern version of that.

> A major benfit of device attestation is to stop the hordes of custom bot creators

Attestation is extremely ineffective at preventing this because it requires attackers be unable to compromise their own devices, even when they have permanent physical access to the hardware and can choose which model to buy and get devices known to be vulnerable.

For example, CVE-2026-31431 is from only a week ago. It's a major local privilege escalation vulnerability. If you can run unprivileged code you get root. How many people have Android phones that can pass attestation but will never see the patch because the OEM has already abandoned updating them? Tens of millions, hundreds of millions?

Attackers can trivially get root on a device that passes attestation. Many devices even have vulnerabilities that allow the private keys to be extracted.

The main thing attestation actually does is beset honest users who just want to use their non-Android/iOS device without getting a million captchas, because they chose the device they wanted to use as a real human person instead of doing as the attackers do and choosing a device for the purpose of defeating the attestation.

And it's easy to confuse this with real effectiveness because whenever you roll out any security change, the attacks may subside for a short period of time as the attackers adapt to it. But that's why it makes sense to avoid things that screw innocent people or entrench monopolies -- while the temporary effectiveness wears off, the screwing becomes permanent. Meanwhile spending the same resources on any other method of shuffling things around to make them adapt will give you the same temporary effectiveness without hurting your legitimate users.

I think they'd be OK w/o the surveillance machine part of it, but they have never seemed to care about anything besides advancement of the tech or its side projects.

I can imagine a world where they were fighting for displaced workers, for Altman/Elon-suggested UBI/universal "high" income plans, and where they'd compensated those in the training set, and cut deals with publishers & content creators instead of scraping anything they could get their hands on. Would they be unpopular?

I'm not a heart surgery hobbyist, therefore I don't chop people's chests open, no matter who suggests it.

Oh please. It wasn't even that snarky. It's also still a valid and correct (as far as anyone can tell) answer to the question.

Chrome on iOS uses WebKit, so that makes sense.

(*I think in the EU, iOS Chrome can use Blink, but I am not sure if it actually does.)

So does Signal.

Those are good things though? They’re about logging in, on purpose.

Not about attesting to Google that you have a proper smartphone as a proxy for your humanity, like this thing.

But none of those options are requirements to access the service.

Gen off it. Fraud detection is nontrivial and requires ongoing effort. It’s reasonable for people to be compensated for that.

Illegal immigrants =/= marginalized people

How though? Can you also avoid DDoS simply by designing your system to not care if the requester is a bot or not.

Let's say I'm running https://grep.app/ for example. AI bots start heavily using it, costing me a ton of money. How would you magically design this so it doesn't matter if the end bots are using it?

the grass is always greener on the other side

There's more than two sides here. None of the 14 parties with >1 seat in parliament fully represents my best understanding of how to improve the country and world on any time scale (long or short), but quite a few of them come reasonably close and I would vote for them without much hesitation

(Heck, I wish there were fewer parties, like if five single-topic good parties (bij1 against racism, pirate party for internet freedoms, volt for international collaboration, party animals for environmental welfare, etc., plus greenworkersparty as the current overarching big boy) would band together, it'd be a much easier choice!)

That not every country is so lucky (not all of them have free elections, or elections at all) is a shame indeed, but at least for countries like mine I'd be much happier to have a government arrange a system than a tech corporation and foreign laws. Presuming that the 2-party system you speak of is the USA's, at least both corps are governed by your own laws, that's something!

In said US of America, when the government wants to know something about you, they will get everything they want from the companies - it's even written clearly in the US laws. So I'm not sure why (or where) you draw that line...

No they do not. A properly designed government app that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age to a consuming site is manifestly different than Google adtech hoovering up as much of your activity as possible.

Simply live somewhere that doesn’t have a broken electoral system.

Can you candidate yourself in that election?

CAPTCHAs are not fraud detection and not an ongoing effort

To prove you're not a bot, scan this QR code with Discord.

They're requirements to access my website though! To prove you're not a bot, scan this QR code - with Discord.

But Signal is secure(TM)!

No person is illegal

Rate limit individual clients.

1. if they have to subpoena each site each time they need user data, it reduces mass surveillance risk. I'm okay with cops getting a warrant to access someone's gmail. I'm not okay requiring everyone to use email.gov.

2. I use a VPN and pseudonyms. they could unmask me if they cared to, but it'd be annoying. it'd be a lot more annoying if they wanted to unmask every VPN user all the time.

They could do it like that, but they won't do it like that, because tracking the population is a feature not a bug

I'm sure many are tempted to dismiss this comment, but I think it's actually great. It's incredibly easy to complain about the options out there, really easy to vilify any or all of the parties as controlled by satan/evil corporations/communists/fascists.

What's harder?

Convincing enough people to matter (in some kind of election-based system) to get behind your platform - either with you as a candidate, or working to promote a candidate or party or movement that you do believe in.

People talk like their changemaking ideas are very widely held - the way people talk it's like they believe 75%+ of the country must actually agree with them - but then they don't run for office on such a popular platform that it should be a sure election win, yes even with countervailing forces such as electoral college, Senate, etc.

> A properly designed government app

Oof, that's not a great premise to take as a requirement right out of the gate. More counterexamples than examples for that one.

> that uses cryptography to generate a deniable token that can't be cross-correlated but proves your humanity/age

If it's actually deniable/anonymous then how would it work for rate limiting? If you can't correlate their activity then you don't know if the million requests are a million people or one bot with a million connections. If you can correlate their activity then it's not anonymous.

Moreover, it's a false dichotomy that we should be doing either of these things. The better alternative to corporate surveillance isn't government IDs, it's no surveillance.

Like the Moon or Mars? The power is not something for the people for free.

I have not seen any government adopt such a standard.

some EU countries claim to provide anonymous age verification services, but those only hide your identity from the relying party. the site you visited is logged to the government's database along with your identity, before you're redirected to the target site with an "anonymous" token.

Let's play this out: how do you determine individual clients? By ip? By seasionid?

"person is immigrating illegally" not "illegal person is immigrating"

Some Western European democracies have a well-functioning democracy. The people voting are still humans, a substantial portion votes for racist parties that economically only benefit big corporations and not them, but the damage is limited because there is no winner-takes-all. Everyone has to accept compromises.

> the site you visited is logged to the government's database along with your identity

Is that true, or are you spreading FUD? Because the system in question is not even live yet, it's only had experimental releases.

A site can still choose to have a login system if it wants to. Sites can still rate limit based on IP address or cookies or whatever they use today.

The idea would be to use ZK proofs to demonstrate that "yes, this anonymous request is from a client acting on behalf of an adult human EU citizen" - that's something that is not easy to do today.

> A site can still choose to have a login system if it wants to. Sites can still rate limit based on IP address or cookies or whatever they use today.

So then you don't need either attestation or government IDs, right?

> The idea would be to use ZK proofs to demonstrate that "yes, this anonymous request is from a client acting on behalf of an adult human EU citizen" - that's something that is not easy to do today.

But how is that even useful? Is it good to exclude real people from Korea or South America? Do we really expect criminal organizations or for that matter even children to be unable to find a single adult EU citizen willing to anonymously loan them an ID?

It's about as plausible as criminals being unable to run their code on a device that can pass attestation. They're both authoritarians with a conflict of interest trying to foist a hellscape on everyone under a pretext their proposal can't even really address.

You're moving the goalposts. I was responding to your claim that any verification system involves the government getting a complete record of all online activity.

If you're willing to admit this is entirely possible from a technical standpoint, there's a separate question about how useful/valuable it is.

Making it harder for children to access extreme pornographic or violent content seems useful to me. Many advertisers want to be able to say they've shown ads to a human not a bot. Humans in WEIRD* countries have more valuable eyeballs than humans in the developing world.

If you don't solve for those use-cases in a privacy preserving way, adtech will do it in an intrusive way - which is what Google are doing in the OP.

*"Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic"

> It's about as plausible as criminals being unable to run their code on a device that can pass attestation. They're both authoritarians with a conflict of interest trying to foist a hellscape on everyone under a pretext their proposal can't even really address.

How is the system proposed by GP authoritarian? It's not actually giving away any real PII. We could just argue that it would make Internet less usable for "illegal" immigrants who don't have a Gov ID - whcih can be seen as a problem already in itself, but still doesn't make that solution "authoritarian".