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.
The technical challenge is actually the smaller one. The real one is to get people to care. Don't be tricked by the HN/techie bubble. Most people don't understand the problem, or don't see it as a problem because nothing smacked them in the face yet. Any attempts to explain it makes you sound like a lunatic to some, or just a bit of a worrier to others.
Whether it's targeted ads, or training AI on their data, or verifying their age and implicitly identity, or "fraud defense", most people happily take it in exchange for a convenient freebie which is why things keep escalating.
It's understandable, people are assaulted with all kinds of abuses from every direction. There are more immediate threats that they can grasp more easily so this stuff has to wait its turn.
> Most people don't understand the problem, or don't see it as a problem because nothing smacked them in the face yet.
Or don't approach the world with a fundamental mindset of having agency to (help) fix things they see as broken. Just because people see something as bad doesn't mean they inherently see a bright flashing line from that to "so I should do something about it rather than accept it".
I wouldn't hold your breath. The government is reliant on them for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. It is a synergistic relationship, not adversarial.
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.
Whether it's AMP or manifest 3 or android source shenanigan or attempts to replace cookies with their FLOC nonsense or this...Google is rapidly turning into a malicious force when it comes to the open internet
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.
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.
Maybe a dumb question, but how is this suppose to work for iphone users? They wont have google play, and it seems like android/google play is required here? There is no way they would cut out such a huge chunk of the market.
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.
I think this is the third HN link I've clicked on in a row that leads to an LLM-generated article. I'm not opposed to AI, but I'm tired of seeing it quietly substituted for human thought and expression.
Given all the negative comments here - what is anyone's alternate solution for AI-driven fraudulent activity?
CAPTCHAs are increasingly ineffective. Services are either going to go offline or implement some kind of system like this. PII like credit cards or SSNs aren't enough because those are regularly stolen.
So where do things go? Fewer services and infinite fraud?
It will be fewer accessible services for everyone who refuses to use this, that's for sure. In general though, service providers are not going to accept "fewer services and infinite fraud" and thus they will look into implementing this.
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.
We do need to abandon the reality where we use the same few companies on a daily basis and get back to what's now hidden the under-the-surface: forums, blogs, personal websites. We need to re-discover the "free" internet we used to have before Facebook and smartphone dystopia happened.
The only real solution is to aggressively name and shame the engineers who build this tech. They should feel uncomfortable opening their door, walking down the street.
(A bunch of engineers who build this tech will probably be complaining about how unfair my proposal is, boo hoo)
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".
Another method is to stall and sabotage the development via endless bike shedding, language changes, rewrites, refactors. All normal things in every project. Drag those feet.
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.
> You don't think that some people simply disagree with the idea that this is bad?
Where are they? Where? Can you point me to one person in this thread who "disagrees with the idea that this is bad"? Apparently even you don't go that far.
The crux of the problem is that their solution involves making themselves the gatekeepers of who is and isn't allowed. And that's a power that no one unaccountable organization should wield.
Given how important internet is to modern society, letting any one entity decide who should and should not have access is nearing a human rights issue.
This case is trivially circumvented with device farms, much like described in the post.
What real problem are they trying to solve? AI bots reading content? That’s not something Google want to prevent, it’s part of their business model, this would allow them to easily circumvent it for themselves though.
But it's so easily beatable! This might be the result of good intentions (being incredibly generous), but as the article states, any bot can afford a $30 phone and the concomitant hardware as the cost of doing business and bypass this.
Also as the article states (referencing an HN comment):
> How should we realistically teach Susan from HR the difference between a real Google Captcha QR code and a malicious phishing QR code - you (realistically) can’t.
Susan from HR is the least of it. This is a huge vector to increase fraud, not decrease it.
How would an ethical, competent engineer argue against this?
The CAPTCHA company who put this out might have an agenda, but also since they're in the industry they might also have knowledge to impart.
We're reaching an inflection point with the oligarchies where the old ideas of "writing a blistering editorial" or "calling your congress-critter" need to be seriously questioned as useful and other non-violent methods of recapturing digital freedom need to be entertained.
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.
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.
> We can "evit" it through thoughtful discussion, foresight, alternative mitigations, and even regulation
Such as? I don't see how regulation would apply here without concrete technical solutions that enforce it. So what alternative mitigations do you have in mind?
What kind of regulation would that be? The only regulation which can actually stop the problem Google is trying to fix here is government-issued IDs tied to all your internet activity. I’ll take the Google fix instead, thanks.
For example:
> Bot operators point a camera at a screen, a trivial automation with off-the-shelf hardware. For operations that need Play Integrity attestation specifically, a compliant Android device costs approximately $30 at current market prices
A bot farm cannot bypass for long with a $30 phone. 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?
I appreciate that Google's made a real proposal to avoid the web becoming bottomless AI slop. This article hasn't come with a better alternative - I'd love to see one!
> 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.
[delayed]
Exactly my thoughts. I am unfathomably angry and I want to contribute to any effort to dismantle Google as a company.
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 :(
It's less work than 10 years ago. So many much more mature alternatives.
The technical challenge is actually the smaller one. The real one is to get people to care. Don't be tricked by the HN/techie bubble. Most people don't understand the problem, or don't see it as a problem because nothing smacked them in the face yet. Any attempts to explain it makes you sound like a lunatic to some, or just a bit of a worrier to others.
Whether it's targeted ads, or training AI on their data, or verifying their age and implicitly identity, or "fraud defense", most people happily take it in exchange for a convenient freebie which is why things keep escalating.
It's understandable, people are assaulted with all kinds of abuses from every direction. There are more immediate threats that they can grasp more easily so this stuff has to wait its turn.
> Most people don't understand the problem, or don't see it as a problem because nothing smacked them in the face yet.
Or don't approach the world with a fundamental mindset of having agency to (help) fix things they see as broken. Just because people see something as bad doesn't mean they inherently see a bright flashing line from that to "so I should do something about it rather than accept it".
It should not be a "vote with your wallet" situation. It should be governments shattering that organization into appropriately sized companies.
I wouldn't hold your breath. The government is reliant on them for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. It is a synergistic relationship, not adversarial.
> Yeah, same. It is hard; we start to need a collective boycott.
Feelgood slactivism. They don't care about your boycott. They finance their own alternatives because they know what makes you shut up.
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
Wouldn’t installing an adblocker basically hurt them as much / more as I still cost them compute but don't get them that sweet ad money?
Whether it's AMP or manifest 3 or android source shenanigan or attempts to replace cookies with their FLOC nonsense or this...Google is rapidly turning into a malicious force when it comes to the open internet
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.
Maybe a dumb question, but how is this suppose to work for iphone users? They wont have google play, and it seems like android/google play is required here? There is no way they would cut out such a huge chunk of the market.
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.
I think this is the third HN link I've clicked on in a row that leads to an LLM-generated article. I'm not opposed to AI, but I'm tired of seeing it quietly substituted for human thought and expression.
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.
Given all the negative comments here - what is anyone's alternate solution for AI-driven fraudulent activity?
CAPTCHAs are increasingly ineffective. Services are either going to go offline or implement some kind of system like this. PII like credit cards or SSNs aren't enough because those are regularly stolen.
So where do things go? Fewer services and infinite fraud?
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.
It will be fewer accessible services for everyone who refuses to use this, that's for sure. In general though, service providers are not going to accept "fewer services and infinite fraud" and thus they will look into implementing this.
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.
We do need to abandon the reality where we use the same few companies on a daily basis and get back to what's now hidden the under-the-surface: forums, blogs, personal websites. We need to re-discover the "free" internet we used to have before Facebook and smartphone dystopia happened.
Related:
Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061938
Wrong link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362
I fucking hate this future. It's bleak. The engineers participating in this should be ashamed.
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.
The only real solution is to aggressively name and shame the engineers who build this tech. They should feel uncomfortable opening their door, walking down the street.
(A bunch of engineers who build this tech will probably be complaining about how unfair my proposal is, boo hoo)
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".
Another method is to stall and sabotage the development via endless bike shedding, language changes, rewrites, refactors. All normal things in every project. Drag those feet.
And the people will be just simply fired for underperforming. Or anything else, it's easy when you have at will employment.
Which are of course delusional excuses when they come from anyone working at Google.
Then they'll come with "but I have a family and mortgage". No shit, so does literally everyone.
I don't have a family or a mortgage.
I think I'd have to be working at Google to afford a family and/or mortgage!
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.
> You don't think that some people simply disagree with the idea that this is bad?
Where are they? Where? Can you point me to one person in this thread who "disagrees with the idea that this is bad"? Apparently even you don't go that far.
The crux of the problem is that their solution involves making themselves the gatekeepers of who is and isn't allowed. And that's a power that no one unaccountable organization should wield.
Given how important internet is to modern society, letting any one entity decide who should and should not have access is nearing a human rights issue.
This case is trivially circumvented with device farms, much like described in the post. What real problem are they trying to solve? AI bots reading content? That’s not something Google want to prevent, it’s part of their business model, this would allow them to easily circumvent it for themselves though.
> You don't think that some people simply disagree with the idea that this is bad?
Some people think women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, not all opinions are created equal.
But it's so easily beatable! This might be the result of good intentions (being incredibly generous), but as the article states, any bot can afford a $30 phone and the concomitant hardware as the cost of doing business and bypass this.
Also as the article states (referencing an HN comment):
> How should we realistically teach Susan from HR the difference between a real Google Captcha QR code and a malicious phishing QR code - you (realistically) can’t.
Susan from HR is the least of it. This is a huge vector to increase fraud, not decrease it.
How would an ethical, competent engineer argue against this?
The CAPTCHA company who put this out might have an agenda, but also since they're in the industry they might also have knowledge to impart.
We're reaching an inflection point with the oligarchies where the old ideas of "writing a blistering editorial" or "calling your congress-critter" need to be seriously questioned as useful and other non-violent methods of recapturing digital freedom need to be entertained.
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.
But but but but ... now that huge tech has declared copyright invalid because of AI they must prevent you from copying Mickey Mouse! Urgently.
Of course courts will undo their current copyright stance as soon as someone "uncopyrights" Disney movies, which is of course coming, but for now ...
Will SOMEBODY think of the billions?
AI use is far more prevalent now than then sadly. This kind of scheme is inevitable since compute is not free.
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.
“Evit” is “avoid” in English, they have the same root.
> We can "evit" it through thoughtful discussion, foresight, alternative mitigations, and even regulation
Such as? I don't see how regulation would apply here without concrete technical solutions that enforce it. So what alternative mitigations do you have in mind?
What kind of regulation would that be? The only regulation which can actually stop the problem Google is trying to fix here is government-issued IDs tied to all your internet activity. I’ll take the Google fix instead, thanks.
In a world where everything is shit, could I at least take away some solace in this helping to reduce Cloudflares hegemony?
This article is full of false assumptions.
For example: > Bot operators point a camera at a screen, a trivial automation with off-the-shelf hardware. For operations that need Play Integrity attestation specifically, a compliant Android device costs approximately $30 at current market prices
A bot farm cannot bypass for long with a $30 phone. 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?
I appreciate that Google's made a real proposal to avoid the web becoming bottomless AI slop. This article hasn't come with a better alternative - I'd love to see one!
> 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.