On Wed, 9 Jul 2014 12:22:06 +0100 kingqueen kingqueen@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.
[2] https://startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html