Comment by Aachen

Comment by Aachen 6 days ago

16 replies

I can't use it because I'm not classified as "human" by a computer. There is no captcha that I could get wrong, just a checkbox that probably uses a black box model to classify me automatically

Was curious after the post claimed that the quality is better than Google and DeepL, but the current top comment showed translations from Afrikaans that it got wrong but I could understand as a Dutch person who doesn't even speak that language (so it's not like seven levels of negation and colloquialisms that they broke it on)

What do I do with this "Error Code: 600010"? I've submitted a "report" but obviously they're not going to know if those reports are from a bot author frustrated with the form or me, a paying customer of Kagi's search engine. The feedback page linked in the blog post has the same issue: requires you to log in before being able to leave feedback, but "We couldn't verify if you're a robot or not." The web is becoming more fragmented and unusable every day...

ziddoap 6 days ago

>What do I do with this "Error Code: 600010"?

Cloudfare, the gatekeeper of the internet, strikes again.

The usual suspects are VPN or proxy, javascript, cookies, etc.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/turnstile/troubleshooting/...

Unfortunately, even with the error code, I doubt the above page will help much.

  • marginalia_nu 6 days ago

    Cloudflare is more or less a necessity if you offer any sort of computationally expensive service for free. They're problematic for sure, but I think they're a lesser evil in the grand scheme of things.

    Very much a symptom of a much larger problem however, one with not a lot of good solutions.

  • [removed] 6 days ago
    [deleted]
kunwon1 6 days ago

I had tons of issues with these Cloudflare checkboxes. I finally figured out it was because I use this extension [1] that disables HTML5 autoplay. I assume Cloudflare is doing some kind of thing where they verify that the client can playback media, as they assume that headless browsers or crawlers won't have that capability

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...

  • wut42 6 days ago

    which is hilarious because I bypass all cloudflare turnstiles with 20 lines of python and 2captcha API.

    It only defeats users.

    • ruszki 6 days ago

      These mainly exist to push responsibility to somebody else. Proper functionality is secondary.

HeatrayEnjoyer 6 days ago

Interactive captchas are one foot in the grave. With multi-modal tool-using AI models proliferating, challenge tasks that only a human can complete are vanishing. Current challenges exclude users with minor physical or mental impairments even now.

Anti-bot filters will require a different signal to determine if a physical human actually made the request.

Havoc 4 days ago

> Afrikaans that it got wrong but I could understand as a Dutch person who doesn't even speak that language

The one language is basically a derivative of the other. Understanding and judging accuracy of translation are quite different though.

eg for me it’s the reverse - can understand large parts of Dutch due to Afrikaans. Couldn’t tell you if a Dutch sentence is correctly translated or grammatically correct though

freediver 6 days ago

> I can't use it because I'm not classified as "human" by a computer.

It uses Cloudflare Turnstile captcha.

The service shows no captcha to logged in Kagi users, so you can just create a (trial) Kagi account.

  • Aachen 6 days ago

    Thanks, but I am logged in and it still shows that. Clicking log in at the top of the page leads me to the login page which takes about 10 seconds to (while I'm typing) realise that I'm already logged in and then redirects me to the homepage (kagi search)

    I don't have any site-specific settings and clearly HN works fine (as well as other sites) so it's not that cookies are disabled or such

    Edit: come to think of it, I'm surprised that you find translator data to be more sensitive (worth sticking behind a gatekeeper) than user logins. Must have been a lot of work to develop this intellectual property. There is no Cloudflare check on the login page. Not that I'd want to give you ideas, though! :-)

    • freediver 6 days ago

      > come to think of it, I'm surprised that you find translator data to be more sensitive (worth sticking behind a gatekeeper) than user logins. Must have been a lot of work to develop this intellectual property. There is no Cloudflare check on the login page.

      This is just a simple anti-bot measure so we do not get hammered by them to death (kagi does not have an infinite treasure chest). It is not needed for search, because you can not use search for free anyway.

baxtr 6 days ago

Interesting. Never had such an issue with Google. How do they do it?

  • Aachen 6 days ago

    By not having a puzzle-less/unsolvable captcha, or what do you mean?

    • baxtr 6 days ago

      Yes, exactly they don’t have it. Of course there must be a reason for that. Any other tech for example?