this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Privacy
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The point with captchas is not really that bots can't pass them, more that its too expensive to pass them consistently with a hurtfully large enough volume of bots.
I'd heard of this strategy, like making it perform some kind of costly encryption that's irrelevant to a human user but restrictively expensive for a bot army.
But does decoding a QR code apply? I never really thought about it. I guess it's an image, it's at least a little bif by comparison... but it's also in a restricted, easy to capture exclusivity, spot and maybe could be minimized to a fairly small pixel set? Idk how many key pixels you need to parse a QR code... I guess I could Google
*typo bit --> bot
Since a QR code is just made of squares, it can be very, very tiny
1 square = 1 pixel
I don't know much about this new captcha system, but I feel like the challenge wouldn't really be in the scanning of the qr code itself but more so on making the device you're scanning with seem legitimate. They could check usage patterns, what apps are installed, how many accounts are added and are they actively used, location and sensor data, are the hardware specifications really unusual, are they constantly trying to complete random captchas... Stuff like that to tell apart a real user's device from a bot or sandbox. The QR Code is probably just a random ID for which captcha instance the user is trying to pass.
Also I just realised this but this is probably inconvenient as hell. Like I do NOT want to constantly be picking up my phone to scan QR codes when I'm trying to go around the Internet. What if my phone is on the other side of the house? I don't want to get up and walk all the way over there! If this gets fully rolled out there may actually be a small dip on the amount of desktop users of websites because they just leave when they are hit wth this captcha instead of bothering to scan a code.