I try out a lot of distros. Not a hopper but a tryer-outer.

Over on DW I saw an announcement that was quite surprising - a new Kanotix dl. So I downloaded it and stuck it on my ventoy USB. Booted fine. Fired up FF and searched to find an unrelated forum I read. Didn't sign into FF so didn't have my bookmarks. I don't like to sign into any of my accounts with a live tryout unless it is an emergency.

Google results gave a warning message. It said that it detected unusual traffic from my computer and wanted me to go through a captcha ordeal, which I despise with the fiery white intensity of an unlocked overclocked AMD Athlon.

Anyone else seen this message from google? I did google the google message and it can just be caused by a large number of people using a single IP. Or, it could be compromised by malware. I am in a nursing home with wifi the speed of dialup and firewalled with what I don't know and for why I don't know. I have been in several facilities and never had so many sites blocked for seemingly no reason so far mostly game sites - they obviously don't want us entertained by anything except farmyard flashcards or lollipop bingo.

I have four linux installs on this machine and have been in this facility for two weeks and have not seen this before. All my installs reach google without that message. Is it worth checking my machine or the iso for malware? And if so, how?

> Google results gave a warning message. It said that it detected unusual traffic from my computer and wanted me to go through a captcha ordeal, which I despise with the fiery white intensity of an unlocked overclocked AMD Athlon.

yes, I massively hate this too.

You might use a VPN, or your university network, where people run shady things. Or you might be in a third world country and google thinks your ISP is fishy. Or it might just be "random".
Sadly google doesn't provide more information about this.

It happens to many people and its normal. My recommendation would be to ditch google and use something like https://duckduckgo.com or, if you want to be new age, something like https://www.perplexity.ai/, which shows you AI generated answers as well as matching links. I use the latter since a few weeks and think its extremely helpful.

You can use google without scripts on, cookies cleared, no cross site. Use the advanced search page for your first search. That is probably part of it. Google could not read everything about you.

I think that they are doing that to stop bots. If you don't appear as a "normal" web browser, they refuse you.

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

Cloudflare does that too.

I've been getting this more frequently on my phone (Android), and on my computer (Debian). I haven't had Google do this to me, but I've had Amazon and a couple other sites do this to me, usually when browsing incognito.

Thanks all for your input. I couldn't believe after all the "guest" connections I have had in so many places for a year I never saw it before (and you don't want to know about welfare motel wifi, scary very scary) but never saw that.

Oh, and yes captcha is an ugly authentication anti-bot tool. I lost my account in one forum because on my phone especially who can tell if the blur in a corner of a square is part of a bicycle, car, bus, boat, bridge or get this...it was mountains or hills that did me in. It wasn't worth writing the admin to unlock it if I had to go through that every time I wanted to post. I got my username, my password now let me in.