DeGoogle Yourself

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A community for those that would like to get away from Google.

Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!

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Mojeek Captcha [Comment] (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) by tired_fedora@lemmy.ml to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml

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I just hit an "are you a bot" captcha screen on mojeek. At first I was shocked that mojeek, beloved search engine of the privacy crowd, would go down that path: Blocking people who use VPN and a minimal-fingerprint browser just because. However, reading the footnote and digging around a little, Mojeek seems to use Altcha, which can be self-hosted without any external calls or data sharing. https://altcha.org/docs/v2/sentinel/features/threat-intelligence/

While I can't say I identify as a threat quite now (to Mojeek, anyway), I can see how adding a little friction for the bots and scrapers out there can be a good thing for the web overall. As long as this doesn't happen on every second search and as long as the data stay where they belong, I'm chill with it. Peace out.

Edit: I now started to regularly receive a full access blocked page instead of a captcha. If anyone at Mojeek reads this: Folks, you can't claim to be "a search engine that does what's right, that values and respects your privacy" and block access because I'm using VPN and a minimal fingerprint browser. It doesn't work like that.

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[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago

I think proof-of-work CAPTCHA could solve a lot of this problem.

Sure, it's still going to let some bots through, but those bots are going to have to work to get through.

When you're a single person, one or two seconds worth of work to solve the CAPTCHA isn't a problem. When you're a bot with hundreds of thousands of machines, that's hundreds of thousands of seconds.