How does that work?

The QR code thing I understand, but what about the “select all the fire hydrants” captchas?

Really

Google. It's their recaptcha service doing that. The QR code validation also gets rejected if you're using a privacy oriented mobile OS like Graphene.

archive.is in this case

It looks like a Cloudflare interstitial. I also don't think sites get to choose which challenge types show up in reCAPTCHA, so this is on Google.

I have degoogled but YT is the only thing I’m stuck with. The monopoly is too much to overcome.

I tried using Konqueror once, but Cloudflare websites (like WineHQ) would verification loop me. Niche browsers are discriminated against

Oh, thanks for letting me know. I missed that one, as it isn't all that clear that's what it does.

Such a gem of a movie

Lmao so the captchas don't even do anything anyway. Except harass us.

This is a good use of AI.

Google's already on their phone. Consumers gladly pay for the priviledge of malware.

A few years ago I was given a technical deep dive into Akamai’s bot detection systems. One area they were quite focused on were bots impersonating mobile devices, and in particular mobile apps. It’s commonplace for attackers to try to mimic the behavior of mobile apps because it often provides more direct access to the data they’re looking for than trying to scrape websites.

To counter this threat Akamai developed a library for their customers to incorporate into their apps. This library collects a bunch of haptic data from the mobile device, such as the tilt sensors, accelerometers, finger taps/swipes on the screen, and other available data. It then encrypts it and sends it along to Akamai along with the data the app sends. Akamai then analyzes that haptic data and uses it as part of their bot detection analysis.

It is VERY difficult for a computer to mimic the truly random way a mobile device moves in space, or the way your fingers tap/swipe on a screen. If you were asked to draw a straight line from the upper left corner to the bottom right corner of your smartphone, not only would it not be perfectly straight but it would be quite fluid in its randomness. Writing a computer program to simulate that would be very tough. You’re far more likely to get lots of short straight lines with jagged angles than something that looks like a human drew it. And computer algorithms can quickly analyze this sort of data and return a confidence score indicating if it appears to have been created artificially or not.

So my guess is that when that QR code is scanned it will launch a Google app that will collect some similar haptic data and send it off to Google along with a unique id for that captcha. Google will then quickly analyze that haptic data to determine if you’re a bot or not.

I think they can use remote attestation on the mobile device to prove that it's a physical device. They do that through Google Play Services or whatever the equivalent is on iOS. So, for instance, scanning the QR code on a custom ROM like lineage or GrapheneOS doesn't work.