I would still like to see captchas being replaced by proof of work systems.
Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
181–190 of 245 posts
Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that "free work"? Automated usage can threaten a site's bottom-line, and even its existence. A site resorts to Google's CAPTCHA's service because they don't have the money to build their own detector. It's not a service that was free for Google to create. edit: Also worth noting that some of this "free work" that users do for Google is used to improve bot-detection overall. The comment to this blog post (the p…
It is "free work" since I'm helping training Google's algorithms and I don't get money back. Note that the service is free for the site owner, but not for the end user, which has to invest his/her own time.
Taxes work the same way. You pay money (or, if you wish, you work for money you don't get to keep) but don't get money in return. Rather, the money goes toward societal improvements. You can debate whether they're societal improvements you personally care about, but it's not a very interesting debate, because societal benefits aren't meant to be uniformly attractive to everyone.
Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
#183Concerning the general problem of captchas:
What about paying a small fee instead of filling ever increasingly complicated forms.
Say 10 cents.
You could set up a service where the website's owner could decide whether the money goes to them or to, say, a foundation of their choice.
Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
#184I remember when they advertised it with "you just need to click a checkbox". In reality, I always have to solve a streetview captcha, possibly several times in a row.
Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I never heard of Pixel Tracking. That sounds super evil. Are there browser plugins to fight back on this one?
They're an even bigger thing in emails. Usually, companies would include a pixel from an external resource and then figure out if you've read the email or not by looking at was that image loaded or not. IIRC, GitHub does that. If you read the email of some notification, it won't show you that notification in your notifications. The solution is to block external image loading in your email client (I know that Thunderb…
Yep, tracking pixels are among the oldest forms of internet surveillance, predating the far more aggressive and intrusive JavaScript companies use today. They're one of the reasons why most mail clients don't load images by default. They only give information on page loads, not obsessive behavior tracking, but they're harder to block.
They're why I block doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com, etc. in my hosts file rather than just blocking their JavaScript.
Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
#186I started making my own as Google Recaptcha was getting annoying. At its most basic, hide a field. On your PHP page that does the checking, simply see if that field has anything in it. If it does, its a bot. If it doesn't, it's not a bot.
I've started doing this on my HTML forms years ago - spam completely disappeared immediately. I haven't had any form spam since.
Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could argue that your payment is access to all of the free services they offer (e.g. Gmail)
Which is also mined for data for targeted advertisement, wouldn't that be the payment for access?
Yes, but now we're really just arguing about the actual costs of those services.
Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
#188I remember when they advertised it with "you just need to click a checkbox". In reality, I always have to solve a streetview captcha, possibly several times in a row.
Let me guess, you use privacy enhancing browser extensions or adblockers? :)
Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is "the jitter test"?
That probably refers to check whether the mouse moves like a human or more bot-like. Recaptcha does more than that though. It checks if you are logged into any other Google services, whether your browser user agent matches your actual browser, and I think one or two more things.
It's more urban legend than fact, recaptcha checks your google cookies and little else. They initially marketed it as looking for "human signs" such as mouse movements but they didn't, and AFAIK they still don't.
Re: Introducing the Invisible reCAPTCHA
#190Google using captchas to get humans to read street addresses captured by street view cars to improve maps results remains one of the most Googly things they've ever done. Genius, lateral, and a little weird.
Not sure if that's good for us. We're doing work for google for free. Google Translate will replace translators, Google car will replace drivers, Google VR + map will replace city guides. We're giving them knowledge and powers to replace us, for free. Professions will disappear, people will lose jobs, Google will get richer and richer, will not pay me or you for fixing their suggestions in Google Translate or fixing…
This assumes the amount of work is fixed. Some people consider it a fallacy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
and some don't, so this point of view is arguable, to say the least.
Regardless, translation is an intellectual work, driving (depending on the point of view), isn't. Same goes for city guides; people doesn't necessarily prefer an electronic device to a human.