Separate BridgeDB's CAPTCHA into another service
This was first requested when my GSoC student a couple summers ago was hacking on a Twitter bridge distributor, so that twitter requests for bridges could use the CAPTCHAs to decrease automated requests.
Last week, Mike Perry requested this, as part adding a mechanism to get new bridges directly from Tor Launcher.
Finally, Arturo also requested this today so that OONI probes running in censored countries can have an interface for getting bridges:
23:37 hellais | anyways it would be nice to have an API where I send a HTTP request and I get back some JSON with the captcha encoded in base64 and I can send back the solution to get bridges
23:38 isis | yep, that's exactly what we're going to do :)
23:39 isis | except we hadn't exactly decided on JSON, but yeah
23:39 isis | the captcha image is already base64, btw
23:42 isis | hellais: would these be bridges for bridge_reachability tests, or bridges just to get an ooniprobe capable of connecting to some (hopefully)-known-good-and-not-filtered version of the
internet, for like submitting reports and stuff
23:43 isis | hellais: err, that was meant as a question
23:46 hellais | the second
23:46 hellais | I would like to have this: https://gist.github.com/hellais/995793f88fc42727fb92
23:46 hellais | run when ooniprobe is first installed to check if the user needs some bridges
23:47 hellais | I think I'll put it in the setup.py or something
23:47 hellais | since ooniprobe relies on tor for reporting without a working tor, we can't collect the reports
23:48 hellais | parsing HTML with standard python libraries is just a bit messy and I was wondering if there was a better way
00:10 hellais | anyways I think I will end up making something that starts a web server and makes the user solve the CAPTCHA on the local webserver. Having to open a JPG file and input it into a shell
is so uncomfortable
00:13 hellais | but the JSON API would be nice nonetheless