The crux of the problem is that their solution involves making themselves the gatekeepers of who is and isn't allowed. And that's a power that no one unaccountable organization should wield.

Given how important internet is to modern society, letting any one entity decide who should and should not have access is nearing a human rights issue.

> You don't think that some people simply disagree with the idea that this is bad?

Where are they? Where? Can you point me to one person in this thread who "disagrees with the idea that this is bad"? Apparently even you don't go that far.

But it's so easily beatable! This might be the result of good intentions (being incredibly generous), but as the article states, any bot can afford a $30 phone and the concomitant hardware as the cost of doing business and bypass this.

Also as the article states (referencing an HN comment):

> How should we realistically teach Susan from HR the difference between a real Google Captcha QR code and a malicious phishing QR code - you (realistically) can’t.

Susan from HR is the least of it. This is a huge vector to increase fraud, not decrease it.

How would an ethical, competent engineer argue against this?

The CAPTCHA company who put this out might have an agenda, but also since they're in the industry they might also have knowledge to impart.

We're reaching an inflection point with the oligarchies where the old ideas of "writing a blistering editorial" or "calling your congress-critter" need to be seriously questioned as useful and other non-violent methods of recapturing digital freedom need to be entertained.

I see this comment was flagged, I have vouched for it.

It's making a valid point.

I wondered people are reading "I wonder what you've done that might warrant harassment?" as some kind of personal threat or incitement to harassment, but I read it as precisely the opposite.

It's an entirely valid point that many of us have worked at jobs on products that did something that somebody disagreed with, and we shouldn't be asking anybody to harass us personally for it, because that is wrong.

GP is asking to "aggressively name and shame" engineers. It's entirely valid to say that you wouldn't much like that if it happened to you.

> Or like maybe the CAPTCHA company who put out the post has an agenda here?

That captcha company is not trying to push spyware onto my device and punish me for daring to remove it. Google is.

> Look at how complicated CAPTCHAs are getting to try to be unsolvable with AI - it's a losing game.

So don't play. Even cloudflare had a better idea - don't block, just demand payment.

This case is trivially circumvented with device farms, much like described in the post. What real problem are they trying to solve? AI bots reading content? That’s not something Google want to prevent, it’s part of their business model, this would allow them to easily circumvent it for themselves though.

> You don't think that some people simply disagree with the idea that this is bad?

Some people think women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, not all opinions are created equal.