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756 points dagurp | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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haburka ◴[] No.36882152[source]
Very controversial take but I think this benefits the vast majority of users by allowing them to bypass captchas. I’m assuming that people would use this API to avoid showing real users captchas, not completely prevent them from browsing the web.

Unfortunately people who have rooted phones, who use nonstandard browsers are not more than 1% of users. It’s important that they exist, but the web is a massive platform. We can not let a tyranny of 1% of users steer the ship. The vast majority of users would benefit from this, if it really works.

However i could see that this tool would be abused by certain websites and prevent users from logging in if on a non standard browser, especially banks. Unfortunate but overall beneficial to the masses.

Edit: Apparently 5% of the time it intentionally omits the result so it can’t be used to block clients. Very reasonable solution.

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1. insanitybit ◴[] No.36882700[source]
There are obvious benefits here. The ability to remove captchas is one, the ability to ensure that clients are running the latest updates before accessing sensitive content, etc.

But the power is too significant. If it were some small subset of positive assertions I'd be ok with this, but the ability to perform arbitrary attestation is beyond what is required and is far too abusable.