Open web (was: Re: Oh Gawd - Now MX Linux "Security Verification" - NO !!!)

On 2026-08-16, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

> rbowman <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I hate to tell you but I think your world is going to shrink. I didn't hit 
>> the verification with Brave on two different machines. I think that's
>> because I'd been there before and they'd dropped a cookie. OMG cookies!
>
> There are a lot of things they check. One that had me puzzled for a
> long time was hardware graphics acceleration for WebGL 2 (etc.).
> The Javascript can somehow detect that you're using a software
> OpenGL render (eg. swrast in Mesa) instead of a GPU, and assumes
> it must be running on a server, instead of a personal computer
> with an old GPU or broken drivers. One major Australian website
> blocks me entirely on that basis - doesn't even give me a captcha
> to solve. No GPU = can't be human, apparantly. No more visits from
> this human anyway - what rot that I'd need to have GPU rendering
> working on computers where I'd never need that except to get in to
> those websites showing just text and static images.

I think I've seen that in the wild too. I've had troubles with webgl
before, possibly broken drivers or broken hardware, not sure which, and
not wanting to get entangled in figuring that out, I disabled webgl.

Then there's also the sites which just refuse to handle absence of
webgl for whatever they're doing...

-- 
Nuno Silva