Debian User Forums

I got another e-mail from the startpage support:

Note:some text cut--name of support person--

Thank you for being in touch with us again.

We are continuing to see why many legitimate users are seeing the captcha and will implement another fix on Monday.

If you don't mind, can you try again late tomorrow and see if you are still asked for the captcha?

Thanks again and we apologize for this inconvenience.

So apparently it is not just me, I will say, the support contact was responsive and polite anyway, ... since I started using one of the other search engines mentioned earlier, I have not had any problems with that one,...I suppose I should give startpage another try and see if there was any change. Don't really have any searches to do at the moment though.
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Re: on StopForumSpam, if I start doing multiple searches on IP /e-mails, some times I will get a captcha, we had to implement one because of DDOS attacks, but the capctha does work, and after solving it, I continue,.. that is what was so irritating with the one startpage is/was using, even though I was careful and sure the type in the text shown, including correct case, and it still made error.
How ever I will admit, the same when SFS started using one, we had some problems as well, especially depending on what browser one was using. It is kind of discouraging though, internet has become so full of criminals, and abusers, that these kind of things are necessary, but that is a whole other topic.

Garry, I've never had Startpage ask me to do a captcha. However, another forum I use requires a Google captcha (the one with all the fuzzy pictures) for every posting. It's a real pain. A while ago the capcha became almost impossible to defeat. I tried every stunt I could think of. Every success was only good for a day or two. Out of sheer frustration I stripped the ~/.[userconfig] out of one of my browsers, Waterfox, and reconfigured it from scratch. I even installed fresh extensions of uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere. It worked! I don't know what I had messed up but it was certainly something I had adjusted for privacy. Moreover, I had done the same for all my browsers by exporting settings.

BTW, Tor Browser makes a good test platform. I keep mine up to date and never tinker with anything. Amazingly, in-spite of Tor's tight configuration and complicated routing, it can often do things, such as captchas, that all browsers should be able to. While it is not a sure thing, if it works with Tor then the problem is in your regular browser.

For years, I had never had that happen either, so I was surprised to say the least, ...probably related, there was some recent discussion at SFS about some bot nets being very problematic, and these bot nets are operating out of Mexico, so I do suspect that has a lot to do with it. .. it will all blow over after a while, I am sure.

Garry, I was having coffee this morning and it occurred to me that I never have had Startpage raise a captcha. Perhaps it's the browser setting. I set Startpage as home, but with an obfuscated URL that I copy to Firefox settings, not letting Firefox do any autoconfiguring for Homepage. Use the generate a URL on the Startpage settings page and then copy and paste it into Firefox for homepage. Also add Startpage to your list of search engines. I've used Startpage that way since the release of Jesse and all the way through Stretch and never had a captcha, and I work with it every day. Not an occasional user.

TC