Thoughts on Brave PoW (Proof of Work) captchas?

Quite nice. Better than entering a normal captcha and most definitely better than Google Recaptcha which is completely unsolveable behind a VPN.

It’s great, similar to Proton’s CAPTCHAs. Google’s CAPTCHAS, however, are just…something “interesting…”

I haven’t tested with Brave yet, but I’ve had a lot of problems with Cloudflare’s proof of work captchas on iOS with Lockdown Mode enabled, so I’m curious how it works in that case.

It uses WASM, does lockdown disable JIT and WASM? I encounter the PoW not working on Vanadiun with JIT turned off.

Yes, it disables WASM

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Yeah, and the issue in Cloudflare’s case was that there was no fallback to anything else, so it’d be impossible to bypass. I wonder if Brave has figured that out or not.

Not sure if PoW is available on mobile or not because I usually get a normal puzzle captcha when using Brave search on mobile. The PoW captcha on desktop does depend on WASM though and throws up a non-bypassable error unless you enable WASM (tested on MB on safer security level).

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I had it once on Mull Private Mode after quick, successive searches and it wouldn’t work because some Integrity feature was off.

But I have to be honest, even on VPN, I never get a captcha with Brave.

Safari supports JITless WASM now: 277266 – Implement JITless JS entry thunk to Wasm