Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Recaptcha v3: new way to stop bots

webmasters.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 147 posts

Re: Recaptcha v3: new way to stop bots

#31

Post by ucaetano »

pwnna wrote: post #21
ucaetano wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who says the sites using CAPTCHA are also the sites that have an ad based monetization model? > The other day I was logging into newegg to order something Newegg uses ads. > As an end user I do not want Google to track me across the web Sure, and as a content provider, you might not want users who refuse to go through CAPTCHA. Nobody is forcing you to access the content. > the side effect seems to be conveniently i…

>> The other day I was logging into newegg to order something > Newegg uses ads. That's not my point. We generally understand that newegg is there to sell you something. I was using it as a convenient example and perhaps a better one could be found. Just because they use ads does not invalidate my point there. From the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not…

> Theoretically speaking, this is true. I can opt to simply close the page, turn off my computer, etc. However, it may not be practical to do this all the time. Some example maybe school/government institutions that you have to use deploys reCAPTCHA, or something like the CloudFlare pages that makes you fill out a reCAPTCHA for each website (which amounts to a large part of the internet).

Sure, but what's your suggestion? Not using reCAPTCHA? Using one of those other crappy CAPTCHAs that impact far more users?

reCAPTCHA seems to only impact a small number of users with adblock (which is largely a personal choice). Seems like a fair trade-off from the content provider's perspective.

Again, what would be the economically-viable alternative?

Re: Recaptcha v3: new way to stop bots

#32

Post by sleavey »

Recaptcha is a horrible experience if you block tracking. Sometimes I fill in literally 10 pages of CAPTCHAs and it still can't work out if I am a bot or not. It's not even clear to me why having tracking cookies is even a sign that a client is not a bot.

Re: Recaptcha v3: new way to stop bots

#33

Post by WorldMaker »

bqe wrote: post #18
WorldMaker wrote: post #7

The "deep telemetry" nature of this doesn't sound like a good idea. It's already been annoying with v2 thinking that I clicked a checkbox "too fast" to be human, to worry about every action taken in a site/app being compared to some weird AI model for "humanity". That's even before other panopticon questions of who all this added telemetry even benefits.

Websites that want to prevent automated bots from attacking them benefit immensely.

That goes without saying, and isn't an interesting answer in this case.

When I mentioned panopticon benefits, I was more directly implying the complex "cui bono?" question of whether or not this data continues to entrench Google's behavioral analysis arms that use such data to sell our every behavior to advertisers for the purpose of buying our attention. It's not the websites using reCAPTCHA that benefit from all that extra advertising information stored on Google's servers, and it's not necessarily the individuals like you or me using those websites that's benefitting from all that extra information on Google's servers.

Especially given that in v2 it seems very clear that Google has been using reCAPTCHA as their own personal Mechanical Turk to also entrench their positions in map data and possibly automated driving image recognition, this is not an idle question.

Re: Recaptcha v3: new way to stop bots

#34

Post by robin_reala »

wild_preference wrote: post #13
hnaccy wrote: post #10

I hate Recaptcha. In my experience using Firefox and not being logged into a google account results in a very long if not impossible chain of captcha challenges.

On the flip side, abuse exists, and wishing that anti-abuse measures went away does not acknowledge reality. Just like how I'm annoyed when I have to pay for a cup of coffee, but my annoyance doesn't really inform how things should be. Besides, if a relatively simple puzzle is too much to ask, then maybe you didn't care all that much to begin with. I can think of various platforms where this would be a good filter ev…

The puzzles aren’t simple if you’re blind or hard of vision. Or don’t have a US cultural background (I personally know a sidewalk is US English for a pavement, but I definitely don’t recognise all US street signs or shop hoardings, and have been caught out by that before).

Re: Recaptcha v3: new way to stop bots

#37

Post by sli »

brianolson wrote: post #3

Slightly creepy, they want to track users around your site to see if they go page to page like a human or like a bot. (Instead of just checking before form-submit or some other action.) But if you already have Google Analytics you're probably not giving up any more information by adding this.

I can block GA with uMatrix and things continue to work.

If I block this with uMatrix, I'm likely permanently gated from whatever I'm trying to access. If Gitlab updates, I won't be able to access my repos, because they (for some reason) make me solve a reCAPTCHA before doing anything on my own repos.

Re: Recaptcha v3: new way to stop bots

#38

Post by mattkevan »

As a site owner I know captchas are vital in the battle of not being overwhelmed with spam, but as a user I hate Recaptcha with a passion.

Every time I’m asked to identify the motorbikes or traffic lights I feel like google should be paying me a few cents each time for helping train their machine learning algorithms.

And on mobile the experience is even worse. Depending on the placement of the captcha box half to a third of the tiles might be off the edge of the screen, making it impossible to solve. Seriously, how can Google not have a mobile version in 2018?

Re: Recaptcha v3: new way to stop bots

#39

Post by avip »

_pghu wrote: post #22

No, no, no, no. I do not want Google to have any more fucking data about me than it already does! "Put this blob of JavaScript on every page of your site so that we can see how users are clicking, scrolling, and browsing around. Think of the children^W spam and abuse!" I just cannot believe that Google somehow gets away with spinning this as some sort of "guardian of the Internet" thing when it is a transparent attem…

You seem to subtly express the notion that we are somehow "entitled" to access a website, just because it has a public IP address and we happen to have an http client.

Well - we're not.

Re: Recaptcha v3: new way to stop bots

#40

Post by sgillen »

Kaveren wrote: post #27

I use Firefox with maximum tracking protections and a VPN, so I'm first in line to claim frustration about being forced to solve reCAPTCHAs. But on the other side, it needs to be understood just how important having a CAPTCHA is. The amount of destruction to user experience that bots can cause is sometimes far worse than the pain the CAPTCHA causes. The long chains of reCAPTCHAs annoy me to no end, and I hope a middl…

What exactly do you mean by computational challenges? That seems like the exact kind of thing a bot would be much better at compared to a human.
Post reply on HN