Cloudflare Dumps reCAPTCHA
Matthew Prince and Sergi Isasi (via Hacker News:
We recently migrated the CAPTCHA provider we use from Google’s reCAPTCHA to a service provided by the independent hCaptcha. We’re excited about this change because it helps address a privacy concern inherent to relying on a Google service that we’ve had for some time and also gives us more flexibility to customize the CAPTCHAs we show.
[…]
Earlier this year, Google informed us that they were going to begin charging for reCAPTCHA. […] In our case, that would have added millions of dollars in annual costs just to continue to use reCAPTCHA for our free users. That was finally enough of an impetus for us to look for a better alternative.
In general, it is a good thing to see fewer elements of the web’s infrastructure being controlled by the same handful of companies. I am painfully aware of how limited that line of argument is when the company that runs hCAPTCHA is touting in its press release that Cloudflare controls 12% of the web’s traffic. But, still, at least all that traffic is not being protected by the web’s biggest advertising network, too.
See also: Uncaptcha: Defeating Google’s audio reCaptcha with 85% accuracy (via Hacker News).
Previously:
I switched to hCaptcha on my site and its been fine. Stopped bots just as nicely.