Captchas are rarely related to your own machine.

For the PC it is mostly VPN stuff or such things.


Most of the time you will see captchas because of your ISP.
Because many ISP got a to small amount of IP4 adresses, so they basically build up a large private network with several users and this network is then connected to the internet and a bunch of costumers got the same IP.

The moment 50 different PCs with different OS and different browsers try to do stuff on 50 different webpages at the same time...

I can tell you that VPN itself doesn't really matter. What matters most is that certain IP ranges that are known to have been either previously used in illegal activities, or already been flagged with "suspicious activities", whatever that means (most likely from what they think is a zombie bot network sending out unusually many and damaging acks and fins packets).

Neither does your computer itself matter. Been using VPN on and off, different locations, including Linux, Windows (XP to 11), Android, 4 different browsers with different extensions, and I never see any gotchas. Cleaning cookies and history doesn't matter either. Unless, I use certain IP addresses or sometimes try to login from a new location.

The amount of zombienets/clients in existence is actually staggering, largely thanks to standard passwords on switches/routers/aps, et cet, and people not changing them or updating them at all. But I digress again...

To be clear, this is on GOG.

Youtube f.ex seems to have it on always.

Right, that's due to IPv4 depletion, and NAT which translates and keeps track of the sessions from the private ip addresses on your network into the public one you get from your ISP.

Absolutely. I personally don't own a smartphone. However, my wife does, and so do all my children. My entire family uses a single Google account for all of their devices. I set it up that way back then. But I don't have one personally.

I worked in IT for 20 years, 10 of which were spent in Europe's largest data centers, and if I've learned anything, it's that many technological developments do more harm than good. Just ask Snowden ;-) That's why I left 10 years ago.

And it all started so excitingly and harmlessly with a Commodore 64, Amiga, and my first 486. That was a wonderful time. *sigh*
CGNAT (Carrier-grade NAT) 100.64.0.0/10 RFC 6598 :)

hahaha :-D *searching with google for example for gog forum posts is a lot easier then using the forum search function

I don't get that many captcha's anymore, those 'i'm human' checkboxes seem to be everywhere. Are those an evolution, machinery that advanced that the way you click the checkbox proves your human or something

glad you made it btw, even if you have a terrible taste in games ;-p

I believe you, obviously ;)
I wanted to double-check because it seems many people do not know that their Android phone goes through a Google account.

That might be part of what helps you in avoiding captchas. If Google-authenticated activity is seen coming from your IP (assuming these devices and the one you use to browse GOG share a same public IP), it makes it less "suspicious" in regard to Google-provided captcha services.

That's okay. In fact, very few people know what their devices are doing in the background or how they fundamentally function.

That's possible. Who knows how Google will evaluate it internally.

Then it must have been the fault of the Opera built-in VPN back when I tried. It was years ago, but when I tried Google search with it on for the 2 minutes I left it on, I got an instant "suspicious activity warning", it refused to search for anything and broke captchas for months in that browser (had to use a different one to be able to complete them).

I just kicked out a storefront because of a captcha failure!
When i tried to link a 3d party game manager to the store... sjeez!!!!
A similar experience to what the OP describes! The store its self worked fine tho, but not in a way i wished for it to work...

I believe it means that hackers are winning. Security has outweighed the inconvenience that comes with it.

Underrated comment.

15 years ago, we didn't have these captchas. The internet was a magical place. But a lot of bad actors made malicious bots and then cybersec people had to step up their game and put in these captchas.

First the it was letters. Then it was shapes. Then it became wavy and strikethrough scanned texts. And then identifying road vehicles and signs. Then it was matching animals. And now it's matching puzzle tiles, playing 'choose similar pics', and identifying upright AI-generated animals, all with 2FA/MFA. And tech companies got rich off all this free labour, especially Google with the vehicle-identifying shit for their self-driving cars.

And sometimes cybersec departments actually offer hacking challenges so these malicious actors can try to break into their systems for a reward. And everybody else is caught in the crossfire and will be for decades until we can actually just jail these botmakers.

It's fucking bullshit.

I remember well those early captchas with funky letters on file hosting sites like rapidshare way before 2010.

Google started expanding its use back in 2009.

I never really liked Captcha for the longest time due to issues that happens more often than not.

And now Google search (using Chrome Browser) has been hitting me with Captchas since a few days ago, as soon as a start the initial search for anything. After that initial search, it seems to be fine for a while.

I also tried setting this

{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14

as a test and it seems to work sometimes, once set to default search. Though if you enter it manually and then type your search words, it seems to always work, so far. This is based on what was Google suggested (of all things LOL). It also seems to stop the AI Overview from posting.

I'm not gonna go through the extra trouble, but thought I'd just put the info here in case anyone was curious.

I wonder what changed though. Was it something on my end or did Google do some sort of update recently?
.

Just this morning, my smart toilet required me to complete a captcha before it would let me lift the lid. I kept failing them, so I wound up having to take a dump in the bathtub instead. :.(

Another reason to not close the lid.