Encrypted email provider Proton has built its own CAPTCHA service | TechCrunch
Proton, the Swiss company that develops privacy-focused online services such as email, has developed its very own CAPTCHA service to help discern between
Wow that’s awesome hopefully they open source it and make it easy for anyone to use
Wouldn't it be significantly easier to bypass if it were open source?
mCaptcha is an open source proof of work tool to tackle bots.
This company can't stop starting new projects and putting their current ones on the back burner. Their services are all spread out between multiple operating systems. Want proton drive app? Better use Windows. Want the new proton mail app? Better use iOS. Want anything? Better not use Linux.
So it's a true Google replacement.
Welp they only need a search engine and ai tool really. And they are percived as a good guy ( for a good reason,probably the best free vpn out there and just overall )
Yeah, its super annoying.
Port forwarding with the VPN on Linux was an adventure because all the docs are outdated and I had to scour github issues for how to do it.
Android mail app becomes super slower over time. No snooze. Wish it could do POP3/IMAP for send/receive from other accounts like my school one. Can't delete aliases I made before proton pass aliases came out.
No contact syncing as a bi-directional provider with Android.
Someone recently added Proton Drive to rclone if you want to sync in Linux. Worked for my small test but I've since moved to Backblaze for my backend storage while waiting for a solution and it works really well for less than a $1 a month.
Their vpn client for Linux was also missing features compared to their windows counterpart.
The android app is so bad I just straight up stopped using them as a service. Very frustrating.
This is something we really need competition on. In fact, proton are doing strong solid work as a whole.
The more companies that build these the harder they will be to defeat with a bot.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“As we investigated available CAPTCHA options, we weren’t satisfied, so we decided to develop our own,” Eamonn Maguire, a former Facebook engineer who now heads up Proton’s machine learning team, wrote in a blog post.
This is usually presented to the user in the form of a visual or cognitive challenge, one that is relatively easy for a human to complete but difficult for a machine.
CAPTCHAs, while generally effective, come with trade-offs in terms of usability, accessibility, cultural biases, and annoyances that businesses would prefer not to impose on their users.
This is why companies such as Apple and Cloudflare have sought ways to tell the difference between humans and bots automatically using alternative mechanisms, such as through device and telemetry data.
And while there are other alternative CAPTCHA services out there, given Proton’s core raison d’être, it clearly does make sense to develop its own — as resource-intensive as that may be.
“In this manner, a botnet that can bypass the initial proof of work but struggles with the visual challenges will be met with increasingly complex computations.
The original article contains 642 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Here's the original article
In the future, we may also consider making it available for third-parties who care about privacy via an API.
Wait, it isn't even available for other services?
Yeah and wheres the source code?
Question: how do you make captchas work for blind people?
Ah! They do an audio puzzle apparently. For Google captchas at least.
Some used to have an audio button where they read the letters in different voices / accents and there’s a ton of weird background noise and static. It was super annoying.
I know that hCaptcha has a system where they send you an email containing a link to a page, which will set a cookie in your browser telling the CAPTCHA to auto-flag you as verified.
Of course, good luck if your browser blocks third-party cookies, you don't browse in incognito mode, or if your screen reader can interact with the CAPTCHA to get the link in the first place...
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