The image above shows the Captcha challenge presented when logging into my ISP's portal. Of course, the whole point of this kind of check is to ensure there's a human making the request rather than an automated bot - but this is to foil a malicious bot of some kind, rather than our wholesome, legitimate and approved automation. One final topic to address is how to use RPA to automate around visual Captcha challenges like these:

To give you a sense of what that looks like, the portal looks like this: This now runs like clockwork every day once the kids have had their prescribed hour of fun. In the last post I walked through how I got Power Automate Desktop to open a browser, navigate to my ISP's portal, find the page with the URL blocking, enter the two gaming URLs I want to block into a textbox and then click 'Apply' - with the final step being an announcement to Alexa. Authentication challenges and solutions - working around Captcha requests.Licensing considerations for Power Automate Desktop.Sending a mobile notification once the flow has run.Turning a Power Automate Desktop flow into a cloud flow which can run on a schedule.In this follow-up post I want to cover a few things:

Power Automate Desktop is now free with Windows 10 and Windows 11 - Microsoft's move to bring RPA technology to the masses and gain market share as RPA moves from exotic and niche to democratised and commonplace. By driving the keyboard and mouse directly, RPA opens the door to wider automation since it simply replicates how a human would interact with the application. Enter Robotic Process Automation - RPA technologies are designed to 'automate what cannot be automated', in other words applications without APIs, applications which run on the desktop and other legacy systems.

Since the scheduler in the portal doesn't support what I need, I had been manually visiting the site many times each week to block and unblock sites, which was a huge pain to both me and the kids. In the last post I talked about how I automated my home wi-fi/ISP settings with Power Automate Desktop so that my kids can only use gaming websites like Roblox at permitted times.

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