[tor-relays] Google captcha

[Roman Mamedov]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2014 12:22:06 +0100
kingqueen <kingqueen at btnf.tw> wrote:

> Hello
> 
> Since running a relay, I have frequently had the notice akin to
> "Google has detected unusual activity from your computer or network"
> and had to do the captcha, when I have connected via the server that
> the relay is running on; both by Chromium over VNC and by Firefox over
> OpenVPN.
> 
> The thing is, I am not, and have never been, an exit node. I was a
> middle node and am now a guard node. So I am somewhat confused as to
> why Google is getting unusual activity from my server?
> 
> I guess it could be a coincidence and somebody else from the server
> farm has tripped it, but it seems a remarkable coincidence, as I have
> run the dedi for nearly a year and didn't have the Google notice until
> after the Tor relay was started in the last three weeks or so. But I
> don't understand how being a Tor relay could have tripped it, as I've
> never been an exit node.

Hello,

In your past E-Mail you mentioned your Tor relay nickname, I looked it up back
then, and it was a dedicated server at OVH.

Thing is, I also rent such a server, and has been running exactly into the
same problem with Google. However I do not run a Tor relay on that server.

If you take a closer look at the CAPTCHA page, at the bottom it should mention
your IP address. Check if it's maybe the IPv6 address of your server
(2001:41d0:...), in my case it always was. If yours shows IPv6 too, then this
issue is definitely not related to Tor, because in the default configuration
Tor does not use IPv6.

I suspect this is either a misconfiguration on Google's part, or indeed a
large number of Google scraper bots running in OVH's network.

For me the solution was to just abandon using the Google Search and switch to
StartPage[1], which aside from a number of privacy-related benefits[2], also
looks like Google from back in 2004 before they ruined it with all the damn
AJAX and "Web 2.0", which in my opinion is completely awesome.

[1] https://startpage.com/

[2] https://startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html

-- 
With respect,
Roman
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