Strange, I redeemed my Rime code without being asked to do a captcha.

I wholeheartedly abhor this captcha. whoever developed this should perish infinitely in a most painful way till the End of the Universe.
it's just awful timesink with luck-based success determination.
a year ago this was implemented in national web database, which I needed to access several times a day because of my job. glad they replaced it by now, but hate it everywhere else it pops up. and unfortunately this bloody crap pops up quite often.

Something must have changed with the way it works, at least on here and the redeem page. Until recently it was enough to temp allow google.com and gstatic.com in NoScript and RequestPolicy Continued to get the bloody captcha, but now I have additionally to disable uBlock Origin on the redeem page.

Anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?

I have been asking GOG to provide alternative to unlocking account after CAPTCHA-lock for years. It's either "we'll forward this to our web development team" or "we do not offer an alternative," which apparently in itself is a lie of omission since Chinese users have something else to work with. Even dismissing that one, GOG already has a two-step authorization in place, just does not want to allow an option for user to pick THAT for unlocking account instead of Google data-mining. Kind of making me suspicious of the reason there.

Just got a "hehe, you plebe, get in line and bend over for Google" response asking to have the "free" Rime added to my library. Ironically enough, last year (or maybe the year before), it was something GOG did without any particular hesitation.

FFS, the code is already tied to my account. I'm already upset at the use of third-party scripts from a business relying on data-mining for existence. The request is not something that is, from a technical point, difficult to do, nor is it something dangerous from legal point, either. Why the refusal, other than onset of corporate culture of "fuck you, customer, I AM THE LAW!"

In between changes to Privacy Policy, "social media" trackers all over the place (at least we can still block them without the website going dead), the Facebook thing, and constant pressure to have users bend over for Google, I really, really do not like the implications.

If it's all circumstantial, GOG should rethink its approach to users' privacy. I said it before, I'll say it again - GOG did not achieve its success by following what other businesses were doing, but rather the contrary (non-DRM stance). Privacy is another area that they could use to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market, and ensure loyalty of quite a lot of people along the way. On the other hand, going the Steam route (GDPR-required disclosure confirmed what I only heard unofficially from people in the industry, that Steam is working closely with Google and feeding crapton of metrics to the latter) is just going to piss off those of us still considering privacy a non-trade-able good (or at least something valuable, not to be handed out just because).

There's an icon on the page that we believe is doing some sort of check. If you don;t pass it, you get the popup with the pictures.

Forgive me for not giving specifics or details but the most simple of checks is to see if Javascript fires up. Probably something like that.

I've never been able to redeem anything without running into CAPTCHA.

GOG and its scripts are white-listed, so it has to be something third-party.

What annoys me the most is inability to link a code already associated with my own bloody account with said account without bending over for Google.

You already verified my identity allowing me to log into my account, GOG. Why isn't there simply a button for adding a game already linked to my account straight to my library?

I can understand the need for a security check (not necessarily one from Google, though) for a "gift" code received by somebody else than the account generating it, but this?

Lazy, at best.

As a programmer, some times the easiest solution is to use a third party solution.

Especially when it comes to security, it's far too easy to fuck up when trying to invent a better wheel.

Now, I'm not saying I agree with the link-to-script-on-thirdparty-host bandwagon, and absolutely would prefer that everything necessary be hosted by the first-party, but creating a half-decent CAPTCHA isn't all too easy.

Scrambled-text CAPTCHAs are easy to create, but are also by now easier to pass for a computer than a human, thus completely invalidating the point of them. Which is why we're now often told to identify objects in an image - the thing about that, though, is that you need a fairly large library of images and relevant metadata for the system to be effective, something I doubt GOG have, or have the resources to create.

Granted, Google's system is not only for validating that you're a human, but also used as training data for their image recognition algorithms (some images you get are "we know what this is, do you?" while others are "we're not sure what this is, can you tell us?", and you don't get to know which is which), so in time said system will be useless too, at which point new methods will have to have been invented.