This is vicious, fraudulent and should be illegal.
Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
#22That's literally what it takes to get something patented? For better or worse, maybe by patenting it, we won't see that solution used in many products from other companies. Hmm, maybe I should start thinking up annoying things that future software might do for profit, and patent them now to stop companies from doing them for a while.
> maybe by patenting it, we won't see that solution used in many products from other companies My favorite in this genre is IBM's patent on patent trolling: https://www.google.com/patents/US20070244837
Then why they didn't weaponize it against patent trolls?
Re: Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
#23This makes me think of userbinator's comment from yesterday's Google Memory Loss post. To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly varying queries and exhaust its result pages in an effort to find something you know exists, very often it will think you're a robot and present you with a CAPTCHA, or just ban you completely (solving the CAPTCHA just gives you another, and no matter how many you s…
I think most people don’t realize this “endless” CAPTCHA is actually an average of three iterations. You’re supposed to stop when you see no squares with X in them. That is, you should click submit even when there are zero squares matching the CAPTCHA criteria. Once you realize this it’s way less confusing, and in fact it even clearly states the instructions at the top of the CAPTCHA. But it’s super confusing and def…
Not in my experience. It would give me “select cars until none are visible” and it would be replacing the last car by another one for a long time. Then, when there are finally none, it would just offer another captcha, such a as “click on storefronts until there are none”. And so on and on
Re: Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
#24I hate stuff like this. When I fall into the "this guy looks unusual" bucket, I don't want to have to second-guess whether your system is even going to let me in if I put in the effort to jump through its kafkaesque hoops. I had trouble with Coinbase account verification which I'm almost certain was akin to the linked patent: it asked me for a picture of my passport, and then a picture of my face, and then told me th…
Coinbase did that to me and at least three people I know personally. You’re not a special edge case —- they just suck.
I attended a talk by Coinbase. They get A LOT of fraudulent activity (both high end and amateur). They have like 7-8 employees who handle all the manual aspects of user verification. So they have to rely heavily on automated solutions.
I have never used them so I don't know how often they flag false positives but based on that talk I would at least qualify the statement with "it's a hard problem!"
Re: Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
#25This is vicious, fraudulent and should be illegal.
Lol why should it be illegal? It's your service, you can block however you want
Re: Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
#26the best answer is to make a captcha that only a bot could solve.
Re: Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
#27the best answer is to make a captcha that only a bot could solve.
"For a split second, NESTOR-10 had forgotten that the other NESTORs could not detect the difference between infra-red and harmful gamma radiation..."
Re: Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
#28Reminds me of that "intelligence test" that just generates endless pages of questions until you hit a "cancel" or "give up" button (it's been a while) - your score is based on the number of pages it takes before you figure out what it's doing.
Re: Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
#29I've been on the receiving end of this when using some VPNs -- after a few you realise you're being stonewalled. It's an _incredibly_ frustrating experience for real users caught in this
I guess they figure "real users" don't use VPNs.
I see this occasionally, but just change servers. And it's typically just temporary. Affected servers are OK in a day or so.
Re: Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA
#30This started happening to me after I stopped using Chromium and went back to Firefox couple of years back. Switching to Duckduckgo eliminated this nonsense completely.