https://x.com/IntCyberDigest/status/2053259432054726872

Quote:

‼️🚨 ALARMING: Google now treats privacy as suspicious behavior by default. Users of GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, /e/OS, and other deGoogled Android phones are being locked out of millions of websites unless they install the exact Google Play Services software they deliberately removed. GrapheneOS is recommended by the EFF and used by journalists, lawyers, and activists in high-risk environments. The audience most likely to read Google's data practices and refuse its terms is now flagged as fraudulent for that exact decision. What happened?: ▪️ Google announced "Cloud Fraud Defense" at Cloud Next on April 22-23, 2026, branding it "the next evolution of reCAPTCHA." Existing reCAPTCHA customers were auto-migrated. ▪️ When the system flags traffic as suspicious, the old click-the-bus puzzle is gone. Users get a QR code instead. ▪️ Scanning the QR code requires Google Play Services running on the device. Internet Archive snapshots show this requirement has been live since at least October 2025, silently rolled out for 7 months before anyone noticed. ▪️ No Play Services = no QR scan = locked out. The bigger picture: ▪️ Google already tried this in 2023. It was called Web Environment Integrity (WEI), and it would have let Google decide which devices were "real enough" to access the web. Standards bodies and the public pushed back hard, and Google killed it. Three years later, the same idea is back, just hidden behind a QR code instead of a browser feature. ▪️ reCAPTCHA runs on millions of websites. Every developer who keeps using it is now, by default, telling deGoogled Android users they're not welcome...

Don't like Google play services? Don't have an iOS device running iOS 16 or newer - bound to change?

This is planned obsolescence at its finest, corporatist means to push the sales of new devices and hardware (and sell your data), or flog **** to people who don't need it.

Also I just looked and in countries like Brazil an iOS device meeting that minimum requirement would still cost like £130 used (about the same as a new Android device from my own research, though I might check up on this later), which is like more than a quarter of a month's wages there. This sort of behaviour from corpos is discriminatory to those who aren't well off IMO.

I don't see any immediate concern but would be curious if anyone actually using a jailbreak phone is having trouble with XMB or seeing QR code challenges.

This could be another reason to add support for the Cloudflare captcha.

Changes to reCAPTCHA  

Quote: Originally posted by miqrogroove

I don't see any immediate concern but would be curious if anyone actually using a jailbreak phone is having trouble with XMB or seeing QR code challenges. This could be another reason to add support for the Cloudflare captcha. Changes to reCAPTCHA

CloudFlare isn't fantastic for user privacy, but it's certainly better than anything Google would offer.

hCaptcha is also pretty good, and tends to respect user privacy where it can - the free tier gives you 100,000 requests a month which should be feasible for any small forum really. (Its challenges can be aggressive, but at least it doesn't discriminate against users who just so happen to use anything but whatever the very default OS/browser config usually is.)

Here's the very real problem with reCAPTCHA.

https://bugs.xmbforum2.com/view.php?id=901