https://areallygoodrantblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/23/how-to-renew-your-drivers-licence-online-in-new-south-wales/


How to renew your drivers licence online in New South Wales

The Roads And Traffic Authority (RTA) of New South Wales, Australia, has a 
fantastic feature to renew your drivers licence online.

https://my.service.nsw.gov.au/MyServiceNSW/index#/rms/trans/renewLicence/login

The Problem

It doesn’t actually work. As soon as you hit renew via the above link and click 
register for an account you will be prompted to fill in a recaptcha that isn’t 
actually there.

Any attempt to register will ask you to please verify that you’re not a robot 
despite that being impossible. This error has been happening for the past week 
for me. No fix in sight. Now that it’s the weekend I’ve got time to find a way 
to make this work.

Am I a Robot?

Assuming i’m not actually a robot… there must be something broken on the site. 
Using Chrome lets inspect and find out.

Bingo! The website has a local copy of a script, recaptcha.js that then tries 
to fetch a URL hosted directly via Google. Someone at Google has moved that URL 
at some point in history, presumably a simple version upgrade and the RTA 
website has been broken ever since. Lesson to be learnt here. Be very careful 
using third party Javascript libraries on your site.

Ok lets work around this

I really can’t go into an RTA office. I’m overseas right now and I need to 
renew my licence.

Google has a demo of recaptcha. https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo

This has the above files (albeit a newer version) load successfully except 
they’re from a different URL. We could at this point create a webserver and 
host the files and hack our hosts file up, install a fake certificate auth, etc.

But it’s easier to use a browser plugin. I ended up going with Switcheroo for 
Chrome. No affiliation to that plugin, i promise! It’s just the first plugin 
for the task at hand that came up.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switcheroo-redirector/cnmciclhnghalnpfhhleggldniplelbg?hl=en

We simply replace the recaptcha.js URL that the RTA website uses with the URL 
that the Google uses.

Specifically i’m replacing via the above plugin

https://my.service.nsw.gov.au/MyServiceNSW/resource/1497728015000/snswAssets/recaptcha.js

with

https://www.gstatic.com/recaptcha/api2/r20170717162708/recaptcha__en.js


Easy and convenient!

The option is now there and we can register an RTA online account and proceed 
with renewing our drivers licence online!

I can confirm it all works for me now and my licence is renewed.

This should also fix any issues you have doing online car registrations. 
Hopefully the RTA will fix it but i wouldn’t hold your breath.

--

Cheers,
Stephen

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