today, the internet is out, and my android phone is crippled by the vendor so that although it will run a hotspot it won’t route packets received via the hotspot, and it’s hard to configure ssh and git to use a proxy so i’m running tor on my phone’s hotspot, and this gives me dense captchas now, around 2005, once, i signed up for an amazon turk job to do something like identifying captchas or something, i don’t really remember. of course i tried to write code to do the job for me, and i did this, and my code made me around $100. this was a lot of money for me at the time! i’d never had much of a job then and there was no cryptocurrency boom yet. then i went to cash out and something went wrong and for months it wouldn’t cash out and i never saw the money. there was a moral overtone. i’d cheated on amazon turk, and couldn’t get paid. it left a funny feeling around hacking captchas. but i wasn’t some indentured spammer, i was just a college kid … one could describe it a lot of ways. but anyway the landscape is very different now. so, nowadays, tor is so thoroughly used that the captchas that google shows when accessed via it are not really doable by a human being. this has been the case for some years now. they’re so dense you could pretty much only complete them with a robot. google shows an “inverse captcha” to tor users: prompts that only a computer could complete. meanwhile we’re at a point with public tech where it seems anybody could write code to solve these captchas. they’re just image identification. !