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There aren't many good ways to prove you're not a bot and there are even fewer that don't involve things like ID verification.
Their opt-in approach helps shift the blame to individual web stores for a while, so who knows if this will take off. But either way, in the long term, the open, human internet is either going away or getting locked behind proofs of attestation like this.
Apple built remote attestation into Safari years ago together with Cloudflare and Google is now going one step further, as Apple's approach doesn't work well against bots that can drive browsers rather than scripted automation tools.
Luckily, their current approach can be worked around because it's only targeting things like stores now and you can buy things from other stores. Once stores find out that click farms have hundreds of phones just tapping at remotely served content, uptake will probably be limited.
It'll be a few years before this is everywhere, but unless AI suddenly isn't widely available anymore, it's going to be inevitable.
good point... it's interesting how Captcha was initially popularized as a reverse Turing test, but it's just variants of Proof of Work today.
And it seemed clever at the time for Google to leverage this for improvement of their OCR models (it was!), and makes you wonder what utility is derived from the proven "work" today.
CAPTCHAs are nearly useless because of how little you need to pay humans to solve them.
(?)
I guess so
The OCR thing was earlier and used for Google Books, I think. Which is also is fitting for training data, or the motto "organize all knowledge".
At that time, this goal seemed really cool!
Do you think this won’t also be bypassed, by bribing people to scan QR codes and spoofing location etc.?
But regardless, I imagine scammers will circumvent this to buy products, login to bank accounts, etc. of the exact users they’re targeting. The user will be presented with “Scan this QR code for $100” as the scammer is logging into their account with spoofed metadata.
what does that bribe look like, as in, how much can one get? what all does that entail? is that a little box i connect to my network and forget about? does that mean if i unplug it unless another payment is received that will work out? i'm asking for a friend that's looking to avoid selling plasma to make ends meet.
> The following methods can be used to acquire residential IP addresses for a residential proxy network:
> Software development kit (SDK) partnerships: Proxy services convince mobile application developers to include their SDK in applications in exchange for payment for each person who downloads the application. Individuals download the application and accept the terms and conditions, allowing the SDKs to run in the background and route proxy traffic through users' devices.
> Virtual private network (VPNs) with hidden terms of service: Free VPN services may enroll users' devices in a residential proxy network, without obtaining their consent. The details are often hidden in the terms of service, which most users do not read prior to download, or the language is difficult for the user to understand.
> [malware and compromised IoT devices]
> Passive income schemes: Proxy services convince people to download applications on their device that promise to pay them for their internet bandwidth. People often do not realize that criminals use their internet connection to commit cyber attacks
One reddit post says bandwidth sharing passive income schemes paid them $1 to $9 per month.
I believe the cheap Chinese pirate TV boxes that are somewhat popular in the US these days are also in botnets, which is likely how the vendors make them so cheap.
And that's assuming they're nice enough to ask at all.
insert You wouldn't bring a 40 Petabyte Zip Bomb to School, would you? meme
Their announcement is full of buzzwords about "agentic" things. Detecting LLMs is one thing, but imagine the power of being able to pick which LLM browsers are permitted and which aren't!
I think Google is being too early to the party with this. Cloudflare still has CAPTCHAs to throw at the wall. There are ways other than attestation to verify that someone is a real human, but they're getting more and more annoying to real users and harder and harder to implement on a small website.
Despite the massive implications, this is a simple system that just works for the 99% of people who use Chrome or Safari or at least have access to an Android phone or iPhone somewhere. It's quick, doesn't require installing apps or creating accounts, and it just works from both the website perspective and the user perspective.
Of course when you start thinking about people with disabilities things become problematic, but when have tech companies ever really cared about that sort of thing? Inclusiveness was fun and all for a while, but the clowns the American people elected banned that sort of thing for any company considering government contracts, and big tech licked that boot like it was made of honey.
The world becomes a lot easier if you just decide to ignore all edge cases and assume customers who disagree with you didn't matter anyway. And infuriating as it may be, for companies like Google, that business model works.
Doing that for a webpage seems way easier than s videogame
That was true before this, but this indicates nothing will ever be enough. Google will always want to track more of everyone's activity online, and will use every tool at their disposal to do it.
It's not Google, it's someone. A person came up with this idea and is pushing it through. We should stop treating corporations as some abstract entity instead of a group of sick people making these kinds of decisions.
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.
Not the guy you're responding to, but:
1. The high number of (em) dashes is suspect, though it's unclear whether they manually replaced the em dashes or is actually human generated.
2. "One additional failure worth noting: one incident response professional in the HN thread, raised a concern that operates independently of the bot problem" feels out of place for a content marketing piece. HN isn't popular enough to be invoked as a source, and referencing it as "the HN thread" seems even weirder, as if the author prompted "write a piece about how google cloud defense sucks, here are some sources: ..."
3. This passage is also suspect because it follows the chained negation pattern, though it's n=1
>No hardware identifier is transmitted. No attestation is required. No certification layer determines who may participate.
edit:
I also noticed there are 2 other comments that are flagged/dead expressing their reasons.
Human written, not generated.
> HN isn't popular enough to be invoked as a source
Excuse me, what do you mean there? The author happens to read HN too.
* "With Fraud Defense, there was no process to respond to. The product launched. The requirements page went live."
* "That is not a technical limitation waiting to be engineered around. It is the mechanism."
* "The defeat is mechanical. Bot operators point a camera at a screen, a trivial automation with off-the-shelf hardware."
I could be wrong, of course. Maybe humans are starting to write like LLM's, or maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part.
"One additional failure worth noting: one incident response professional in the HN thread, raised a concern that operates independently of the bot problem: …"
The ersatz Ted Talk meets LinkedInfluencer rhythm of sentences, the throat clearing fillers as connective tissue…
Or Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
(Also, you can pry my em dashes[1] from my cold, dead hands.)
[1] https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... says mean 1.64, maximum 13 em dashes per pre-ChatGPT comment.
There's also a few cookie-cutter patterns that should immediately jump out at you if you're at all familiar with AI writing, such as:
> No hardware identifier is transmitted. No attestation is required. No certification layer determines who may participate. User privacy is structurally preserved, not promised.
> Google Cloud Fraud Defense is not a reCAPTCHA update. The QR code is the visible mechanism, but device attestation is the real product.
I mean sometimes they're right, but honestly in this day and age does that even matter?
RMS has offered broadly solutions/alternatives since the beginning, along with reporting early on trends that other people ignore.
Unfortunately, "build it yourself" is relatively easy when it comes to software, and almost impossible when it comes to the hardware running that software. It doesn't matter if you have full ownership of a complete open-source stack if no hardware manufacturer will permit you to run unsigned arbitrary code. The lack of open hardware--chips that you could build in your garage using materials nobody could reasonably prevent you from acquiring--is the lynchpin upon which open source software will wither and die.
My god AMP was such an annoying thing ~4-5 years ago when I was working in a marketing-forward web dev shop.
"Google really likes when you pipe your words into their shitty UI because it saves some time for the user"
We were all like, cool so on one hand we're being given complex designs for sites to differentiate them, and on the other hand we're bowing to a megacorp who actually wants to skip the whole web design part entirely and pipe our content through their pre-defined UI.
So glad it died. Should have known it would die in a matter of a couple of years with that being the track record for Google in general.
It's a shame this part didn't stick. I use reading mode every chance I get be cause the more design a page has, the worse it is. For some reason orgs agreed that it is ok to let medium or substack own their content, but hated Google's high speed CDN.
It's not just Google. It's governments, corporations, all around the world, simultaneously. The noose is being tightened gradually, then all at once. And it's coming for all of us:
https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
The threats above interlock by design or convergence: Identity layer (1-5) creates the prerequisite for the others. Once identity is established at SIM/account/device level, the carve-outs that make surveillance politically viable become possible (powerful users get exemptions; ordinary users get watched).
Device layer (10-12, 16-19) creates the surveillance endpoint. Once content is scanned on the device before encryption, the cryptographic protections at the communications layer become irrelevant.
Communications layer (6-9) is the most-defended. Mass scanning has been defeated repeatedly. This is the layer where the resistance has the best track record.
Reporting layer (13-15) is nascent. Direct OS-to-government reporting hooks haven't been built yet at scale. The UK's December 2025 proposal is the leading edge.
Platform control (20-24) determines whether alternatives can exist. Browser diversity, app distribution diversity, and engine diversity are the structural protections. All three are narrowing.
A society with all five layers complete has the technical infrastructure for total surveillance with elite carve-outs. We are roughly 40% of the way there. Whether that infrastructure becomes a dystopia depends on political choices, not technical ones.
HN as a whole is surprisingly oblivious to the noose tightening, because many here are super against decentralized distributed things, if they involve any sort of token. You can complain all you want, but downvoting and burying the decentralized alternatives just for groupthink makes you somewhat complicit in the erosion of our privacy and liberties. Even if you might disagree with a project, all the work that goes into it might be a good reason to upvote it instead, considering that without this work, we're basically doomed.
When IPv6 was designed it was normal for each IPv4 address to be traceable to someone's desk. Fortunately, as that changed with IPv4 so did it with IPv6, so we got IPv6 privacy extensions.
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.
How is Chrome, of all things, a monopoly? Have words just entirely lost all meaning and now monopoly just means "things which are popular that I dislike"?
>> Google holds absolute authority on how websites are rendered and if websites can be found.
This is still 100% correct. Google owns the dominant browser and the dominant search engine, this means that they get to dictate how websites function and pick winners and losers through their search algorithm. If you're a publisher (i.e. anyone who hosts a website) you're forced to fall in line or go out of business.
[1] https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-05...
Ship with a chromium fork called Edge
I'm on Firefox and use DuckDuckGo.
I use Firefox right now. Occasionally I need to open a site in Chrome instead, but it's rare.
People absolutely did like Google at the time, but the majority of its growth is actually shoveling hijackers into other software installs just like BonzaiBuddy.
the fact that this kind of comment gets downvoted proves my point. so what if you personally don't like WEI? it doesn't mean the problems aren't real...
that aside, i don't know how people say stuff like "malicious force" and then you go and use a bajillion Google-authored, completely free as in beer and often free as in freedom technologies that nobody obligates you to use at all. It's not like Apple, where their software is so shitty (Messages, Apple Photos, etc.) that the only reason people use it is because it is locked down and forced upon you. it's interesting to me that @dang worries about the tenor of conversation changing - he longs for that 2009 world of university-level math people hanging out and writing comments about LISP or whatever - when the real deficit is not intelligence about math but, at the very least, seeing that things are nuanced, to see more sides to a problem besides the most emotionally powerful and the most mathematically neutral ones.
I know it is a small move, but as it happened when chrome started, this opens opportunities for other players
So now I'm back on Chrome.
>For operations that need Play Integrity attestation specifically, a compliant Android device costs approximately $30 at current market prices
This assumes the logic on google's side is something like `if(attestationResult == "success") allow()`, but it's not hard to imagine the device type being factored into some sort of fraud score. For instance, expensive devices might have a lower fraud score than cheaper devices, to deter buying a bunch of cheap devices. They might also analyze the device mix for a given site, so if thousands of Chinese phones suddenly start signing up for Anne's Muffin Shop, those will get a higher fraud score.
>Firefox for Android does not appear in Google’s stated browser support list for Fraud Defense.
The browser only needs to show a QR code, so if you're on firefox mobile they'll either open a deeplink to google play services on the phone itself, or show a qr code.
>One human solving a single challenge pays a negligible cost. A bot farm running concurrent sessions faces exponential compute costs with each additional attempt - and AI agents, which consume GPU cycles to operate, face identical penalties regardless of how sophisticated their reasoning is.
PoW for bot protection basically never caught on because javascript performance is poor, and human time is worth more than a computer's time. An attacker doesn't care if some server has to wait 10s to solve a PoW challenge, but a human would. An 8-core server costs 10 cents per hour on hetzner. Even if you assume everyone has a 8-core desktop-class CPU at their disposal (ie. no mobile devices), a 6 minute challenge would cost an attacker a penny. On the other hand how much do you think the average person values 6 minutes of their time?
This is detailed at https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652
It'll just be more clunky because you have to install their app.
I don't know what technology they're using, but when I scanned the QR code it launched (downloaded?) an iOS app of sorts with one tap, similar to the way Google tried Instant Apps a few years back. Didn't even need to double tap the power button like usual.
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!
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.
And the cost for the bot farm being detected is very high because if a phone's root key loses trust it destroys the value of the ~$30 phone they purchased. And of course, I'm sure Google can use the phone's value as another signal for trustworthiness, treating cheaper phones many generations behind as less trusted.
I don't think bot farms will go away completely, but the price will spike massively, which is all you need to discourage many types of abuse. Some Googling show that reCAPTCHA solves are about $0.003 each right now, so quite cheap. With this new reCAPTCHA, I suspect the price will jump massively.
Yes.
That's exactly what they are doing already, and it's not 30$/device but something like <5$/device. Remember they can buy the worst of the worst of the used market.
Betting on device attestation is really betting that smartphones will become less ubiquitous and more expensive to own. Sounds like it's not going to happen to me.
It’s also worth noting that the author of this article is selling a proof of work solution to the problem.
I am fairly skeptical that proof of work is the right way to go here. A lot of users of the web are using older hardware. Adding a computational toll booth doesn't solve the problem in a world where people have differing amounts of compute to spend.
On the other hand, a botnet might have access to thousands of computers and may not actually care about waiting an extra 10 seconds. Or worse, they will come up with a custom solution on an ASIC that solves your proof of work puzzle thousands of times faster than grandma‘s laptop.
1. lots of laptops have fingerprint readers & TPM2 build-in
2. lots of folks own Yubikeys or FIDO2 keys - if these became the norm then the price would come down significantly.
Both of these methods only require a tap to authenticate to a website. Both provide public-key authentication, and both provide some level of proof of work / require human interaction, without revealing the identity of the end-user.
Why not use or standardise these? because there's no benefit to Google of course.
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?
A combination of "regulate AI" and "The optimal amount of fraud is not zero". https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
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.
As a footnote i found googles recaptcha bitterly ironic, it was painted it in bright colors "this data assists in book scanning" or "this help our self driving cars recognize stop signs" but really designed to train models to do exactly what it's trying to prevent them from doing. and making life hell for the humans along the way. The modern single click version is doing behavioral analyses.
I can think of many sites where, for users that trigger captchas often, introducing a multi-device workflow is even worse for those users than clicking traffic light images. An automatic rollout would be hostile to those operators!
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 :(
For an example, see EU's GDPR, DMA etc.
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.
Feelgood slactivism. They don't care about your boycott. They finance their own alternatives because they know what makes you shut up.
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
This is an attestation scheme. Attestation is about controlling what software you are and aren't allowed to run. If a future version of this allows desktop browsers rather than just phones, it will almost certainly try to do similar forms of attestation, and prevent you from controlling your own software stack.
We really need brand new legislation that makes it much easier to break up companies that are too big, and also to tax mega corporations at a much higher rate than all other companies. Then we can have fair competition and the power of choice. But the existing laws end up with no real consequence for these companies, and even if there’s some slap on the wrist, it takes years in court. New laws must make it very fast and low cost for society to take action.
As a web-wide captcha replacement, not cool
They also need to browse the web, and are more likely to be blocked by these measures than humans
In other words these measures work as intended...?
The bad news: US decided to weaponize big tech’s leverage over the world and does not enforce these laws anymore that fix vanilla capitalism.
You’re confusing markets with capitalism.
Market Socialism (the only reasonable kind) would have these same issues. If Google was owned by the workers instead of capitalists, it would still have incentive to grow. The worker owners would have the exact same incentives as current owners. The only difference would be who the owners are.
Capitalism is not actually “the final boss” that internet leftists make it out to be. Socialism is not the panacea that leftists make it out to be. Surveillance is not a “capitalist only” thing.
We are going to see sooooo many scams out there. No wonder Google is locking down third party Android apps outside of their control, getting a user to install "device verification.apk" will become super trivial after people have clicked through these popups a couple times.
-- sent from Chrome on Android
That entire QR barcode thing is so that you can browse the web on your laptop/desktop, and _still_ rely on smart phone's attestation, no mobile browser needed.
(And no, not you Microslop!)
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!
>As someone who is working in incident response and malware analysis I have to say that is one of the worst ideas I have ever seen. A lot of companies have issues with ClickFix [1] and other social engineering campaigns and now Google wants to teach users that they should scan QR codes to proceed on a website.
>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. I wish we could - but those people don't work in tech, they will never know and I can't really blame them because at the end of the day they are just happy that they don't have to deal with tech after work.
>We have spent years of behavioural conditioning to prevent QR-code based phishing attacks (some people call it Quishing but I hate that term) and since the QR code is being scanned from a mobile device (99.99% of the time the private device), we have no EDR visibility on those devices and can't track what's happening if people scan it.
>This is more of an invitation for threat actors than it is something that holds them back.
[1] https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/what-is-clickfix/53348/
However, a lot of recent bot traffic are sophisticated scrappers called "LLM's." You can tell claude to "research X from this www.example.com" and will automatically scrape it and summarize it, something that a LLM is perfect for. Gemini tends to share links instead, presumably because most of Google's revenue comes from ads served on those websites, so if it completely killed the traffic to those websites it would just make less money. Incidentally, I wonder if Claude/Gemini use an search engine-like "index" of all websites or it refuses to cache anything to always fetch "fresh" data.
If this is employed, I don't think the web is only going to be gatekept to Google devices. I think it will also be gatekept to Google's AI's.
Google would be able to display a captcha that no LLM could defeat, and then just let its own LLM pass through.
The same could be said about its other bots, such as the web crawler. Google's bot could crawl webpages that no other crawler would ever be able to simply because it has free pass to captcha-gated GETs. Although the same could be true already today.
Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362
That's $30 per account, not one time. Because of the following:
> Device attestation does not just gate access - it produces attribution. A device with a stable hardware identity creates a persistent identifier that crosses sessions, browsers, and private browsing modes.
If you put all your bot accounts on one device, they all get banned at once. So fraudsters have to spread their accounts across multiple devices and replace them when they inevitably get banned. That's the reason for all the spying, attestation, and lockdown bullshit behind Google Cloud Fraud Defense. It is far easier to ban fraudsters if you just let the Maoists run the Risk Department.
The author proposes an alternative solution: proof-of-work. And, yes, there are use cases for that, such as Anubis. Google might even want to consider a proof-of-work option in certain scenarios. But there is no scenario in which someone's phone deliberately burns $30 worth of compute - perhaps a quarter of the user's battery - and the user still has a good onboarding experience. Most of your actual users are not going to be able to burn compute as efficiently as fraudsters, either - so maybe you have to burn the whole battery on a phone to cost a fraudster $30. Proof-of-work is, strictly speaking, anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic. "One CPU, One Vote" is less useful than you think when you realize fraudsters have the money to just buy lots of CPUs to always win[0].
Every Risk Department eventually reinvents arbitrary and capricious punishment. When you have no legal authority to prosecute crime, you rely entirely upon your freedom of association and ban people with a hair trigger. It's the only thing that works. Personally, I'd rather live in the world where governments actually took fraud seriously and corporations didn't have to do this, but for right now, GCFD is at least less onerous than WEI in the sense that WEI was going to lock down all browsers. GCFD just means I have to keep a Google-approved phone around to scan a QR code every once in a while.
[0] I'm not mentioning the massive waste problem proof-of-work creates, because obviously attestation will also produce waste. Actually, if anything, the fraudsters will probably wind up dumping all their banned devices on the used market and ruin it.
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
The military industrial complex created the internet, and has funded many of the big players in Silicon Valley. Their goal was never an open and free internet.
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?
These wouldn't eliminate the problem, but they'd change it from "many people do this" to "this is always a malicious attack, react accordingly".
[0]: https://youtu.be/4BYkuPUQoWE