Yeah, same. It is hard; we start to need a collective boycott.

We can all do our part, by using their products as little as possible, contribute to open alternatives (OpenStreetMap, Fediverse, Linux, Nextcloud...) and by stimulating our (non-techie!) friends and family.

But it is a lot of work :(

But remember: once again, don't simply get angry at Google the institution. Get angry at Page and Brin personally. They have the power to prevent this, a power they were careful to preserve when they gave Google its IPO. They are fully responsible for Google's choices here. But, partly because they aren't constantly jumping up and down drawing attention to themselves on social media, they've tended to escape the same personal scrutiny given to eg. Elon Musk. That needs to end.

On that topic, I would highly recommend you to switch to Kagi!

Search is still their workhorse for ad revenue. Less search, less users, in addition to users now just asking chatgpt and co, will hurt them well

The usual argumentation is "I need to make a living" and "if I didn't build it someone else would have done an even worse job, like this at least I could be an activist on the inside and guide the efforts to make it better".

You don't think that some people simply disagree with the idea that this is bad? Or like maybe the CAPTCHA company who put out the post has an agenda here? So you want to go after engineers personally?

I wonder what you've done that might warrant harassment?

Look at how complicated CAPTCHAs are getting to try to be unsolvable with AI - it's a losing game. This and the WEI proposal are trying to solve a very, very real problem. If you continue to deny the problem, or every proposal solution without working towards an acceptable one, people will route around the blockage.

I think the better alternative to making engineers "feel uncomfortable opening their door, walking down the street" is for us to collectively ask if the solution isn't to touch more grass and rely less on the technology we've all come to blindly accept as required.

I mean, I hate this QR code shit as much as anyone, but c'mon, we can and should be better - both in how we treat others, and how much we rely on this shit.

one person's villain is another person's hero.

I imagine if they would be named and shamed, they would get huge contracts in companies like oracle.

Water use and mass displacement of labor get all the attention but there are so many other more subtle reasons like this that AI is going to be bad for society.

I disagree that this kind of scheme is inevitable. We can "evit" it through thoughtful discussion, foresight, alternative mitigations, and even regulation. Certainly, Google can choose to avoid it. On the other hand, the AI bubble will inevitably burst, since compute is not free. I look forward to post-bubble AI.

They shouldn't just be ashamed. They should be shunned at the very least.

There's a good chance they're on HN FWIW. If you are and you're reading this: Fuck you. Reconsider which side you want to be on!

So many in hn already downvoted you. That says the SV nature and opinions in tech sector.

Captchas were never effective. It’s an arms race to the bottom.

Yes, fewer services and infinite fraud is substantially better to me than the web being controlled by Google even more than it already is.

This doesn’t even solve the problem thanks to device farms. There’s not really a solution for this short of aiming a camera at someone’s retina 24/7 plus a fully locked down hardware path. And even that would surely be compromised given enough incentives.

People are just going to have to find a new way to monetize. Maybe more things will become paywalled, or sponsored long-term like old TV shows. Again, there’s no good way to solve this, and the “solutions” on offer just contribute to the surveillance state without solving the problem.

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.

> 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.

Wrong link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362

> Do you seriously think that if Google sees the same hardware identifier 1000s of times a day they are not going to consider that usage to be fraud?

Phones are very cheap, especially refurbished phones. Just have the phones mimic real life sleep/wake cycles and take occasional breaks. Use 25% more devices to account for the loss in uptime.

Besides, some people (often unemployed or disabled, and possibly with sleep disorders or mania) actually don’t do anything other than scroll on their phone all day and night. So you can’t rely on this as a good signal without creating even more blowback. And you really don’t want too much blowback from troubled people who have infinite free time.

I'm seeing this stance a lot "this is obviously AI generated"

Why? What's LLM generated? How can you tell?

To me what's obvious is that our trust system is already breaking down. Commenters accusing each other of being AIs is also another example of this.

iPhones have attestation too: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/establ...

It'll just be more clunky because you have to install their app.

The claim is that an iPad/iPhone will also work. Not that that makes it acceptable; if anything, it's worse, because if it were Google Play only it'd be more obvious how unacceptable it is, whereas catering to the duopoly makes it less obvious how much it excludes people and builds a reliance on proprietary systems.