11–20 of 218 posts
tbh I'm sick of just how often I have to solve those click-on-image captchas. It's a pain.
newegg lost some of my business recently after thinking it was a good idea to make me fill in a captcha before taking my money.
> Google wouldn’t say what factors go into that score, other than that Google observes what a bunch of “good traffic” on a site looks like A few days ago, I signed up for some service on a new-ish laptop, and it made me pass the storefront captcha three separate times. This is yet another example of the social credit score being implemented in the US; in this case punishing users for opting out of continuous tracking…
And, I would add, you're in part trivializing the horrendous impact of the social credit system by making this comparison, because it gives others the impression that this is merely a difference of degree, rather than of substance. It allows people to make arguments like "Oh, the US credit score is just like China's social credit score, so the social credit system can't be that bad." Yeah, NO. You don't get denied freedom of movement between cities or states because you owe a few dollars, you don't have your passport revoked because you don't use Google cookies, you're not forced to sit in the back of the bus because of something vaguely political you posted on twitter, you don't get denied the ability to send your kids to certain schools because you rolled a stop sign.
The social credit system is not a _tracking system_, it is a _legal system_ (made possible by surveilance), and while the US may one day be there, to suggest they are anywhere even on the same planet yet is laughable. Your average person in the US still, even after decades of abuse, has innumerably more rights than your average Chinese citizen.
I find if I use VPN then google will display one on search. In particular, when I try using Opera VPN then I always get one. I decline to do them so search via bing instead. Forcing users to prove their not bots is totally the wrong approach. They should be forcing bots to prove they're human so that real humans don't see this nonsense. Easier said than done, but that's not my problem.
How do you tell who's the user? A bot can look like a user and a user can look like a bot.
tbh I'm sick of just how often I have to solve those click-on-image captchas. It's a pain.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the not too distant future they were hauled up before the courts on discrimination grounds, and not before time. There's something very wrong when a human consistently fails CAPTCHAs. For one thing I've tried selecting all boxes containing parts of a traffic light/fire hydrant, and only the ones that mostly contain parts of the object and have failed both times.
For captcha's in general, I think we should stop pretending that we can prevent bot traffic from a dedicated attacker without annoying the users.
A simple captcha from the 2000's (the ones with lines over a word or number of letters and numbers), should be good enough to hold off basic script kiddies. Same for a basic TTS audio clip.
I find if I use VPN then google will display one on search. In particular, when I try using Opera VPN then I always get one. I decline to do them so search via bing instead. Forcing users to prove their not bots is totally the wrong approach. They should be forcing bots to prove they're human so that real humans don't see this nonsense. Easier said than done, but that's not my problem.
As a case in point, the same issue crops up with lots of users going through the same corporate proxy.
And it's the same reason that you can run Netflix (for example) through a personal VPN with no issue but will run into problems if you use a popular, retail VPN service.
The issue isn't just that humans struggle with them or that bots are getting better or what not, it's because there's no way to make a captcha that works across multiple websites like a standard 'library' and expect it to remain uncracked. Anything that becomes common will be attacked and defeated, because there becomes a financial incentive for spammers and no gooders to do so. The solution is to make captchas that…
This doesn't really hold water. 1. It's not feasible for various website to implement their own custom CAPTCHA formats. Building custom CAPTCHAs is a lot of work. 2. The custom CAPTCHA tasks wouldn't be that different from each other. As the article discusses, image/text/audio recognition are some of the only universal tasks that can work for CAPTCHA. 3. Nothing is stopping a malicious actor from implementing a "chec…
2. You can also use stuff like timing how long it takes someone to fill in the field, hiding form fields with CSS or JavaScript, randomising field input names, checking the referrer, etc. All these come up in tutorials about captchas.
3. You could ask them niche specific questions instead of requiring them to do general tasks. This is what I do with all topical internet forums and sites; have a wide array of custom written questions on the topic in place of stuff a bot can easily figure out. For instance, all questions on Wario Forums are about Wario Land and WarioWare games, not things meant to be 'culturally neutral'.
I find if I use VPN then google will display one on search. In particular, when I try using Opera VPN then I always get one. I decline to do them so search via bing instead. Forcing users to prove their not bots is totally the wrong approach. They should be forcing bots to prove they're human so that real humans don't see this nonsense. Easier said than done, but that's not my problem.
I agree with you, but, to be clear, the issue isn't VPNs, it's that the VPNs you are using are also used by spammers/bots/etc. or a large amount of other people. If you set up your own VPN somewhere that is just used by you and your family (for example), you will never run into this issue. As a case in point, the same issue crops up with lots of users going through the same corporate proxy. And it's the same reason t…
tbh I'm sick of just how often I have to solve those click-on-image captchas. It's a pain.
I avoid them as much as possible -- if someone wants me to train their machine learning algorithm, they can pay me. newegg lost some of my business recently after thinking it was a good idea to make me fill in a captcha before taking my money.
Probably they are combatting fraud, especially the variant "check if the credit card is still valid". There's not much defense against a botnet operator trying out a 100k dataset of stolen CC numbers other than captchas :(
For the interested, this kind of fraud simply orders cheap (on the order of 1-2$) stuff online to check if the card/cvv is valid. Doesn't draw much attention unless one of the victims has transaction notification active or diligently checks their CC bill.