3 votes

captcha.nsa.gov

Topic removed by site admin

5 comments

  1. [4]
    cfabbro
    (edited )
    Link
    What exactly is the point of this submission? I see that it was recently posted to HN, but at least there it had an explicitly stated purpose for being posted in the form of a question in the...

    What exactly is the point of this submission?

    I see that it was recently posted to HN, but at least there it had an explicitly stated purpose for being posted in the form of a question in the title; The OP was wondering what was going on. (Edit: LOL, HN mods just removed the original title and changed it to that of the site URL... God, that "original title" HN rule is so dumb and so blindly enforced it's ridiculous IMO)

    In any case, the top comment there seems to provide a reasonable explanation, IMO.

    I'm guessing that the NSA website uses recaptcha, which is served by Google. Perhaps in order to comply with strict origin policy, they want everything on nsa.gov to be served from their domain. They seem to have a reverse proxy that proxies requests to google.com.

    That's one plausible explanation, but in any case, even if my explanation is wrong, I doubt the explanation is interesting.

    3 votes
    1. [4]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. [3]
        cfabbro
        Link Parent
        Mistake in the geolocation data of the reverse proxy server IP?

        Mistake in the geolocation data of the reverse proxy server IP?

        1 vote
        1. [3]
          Comment deleted by author
          Link Parent
          1. cfabbro
            (edited )
            Link Parent
            Hmmm... revisiting the site, it just swapped to Japan localization for me now. Perhaps the NSA is rotating the proxy server around for some reason? Weirdness.

            Hmmm... revisiting the site, it just swapped to Japan localization for me now. Perhaps the NSA is rotating the proxy server around for some reason? Weirdness.

            1 vote
          2. cfabbro
            (edited )
            Link Parent
            Ah... further down in the HN post some users mentioned it appears to be being reverse proxied through the Akamai CDN, so that's why the IP and localization keeps changing.

            Ah... further down in the HN post some users mentioned it appears to be being reverse proxied through the Akamai CDN, so that's why the IP and localization keeps changing.

            1 vote
  2. [2]
    Comment deleted by author
    Link
    1. milkbones_4_bigelow
      Link Parent
      Is it a joke? I didn't quite get it either :/

      Is it a joke? I didn't quite get it either :/

      1 vote