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Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
91–100 of 218 posts
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#92This is so eye-opening. I've been frustrated with these things for a while and I always figured it was me. When asked to click on the traffic signs, I'm never sure whether to click on just panes that have a part of a sign or include cells that show the posts it is attached to. I finally got so discouraged, I tried the audio clues and have found that to be easier. I've found that, after listening closely, I only need to identify a single word and that is usually relatiely easy. All in all, however, I really do hate these things.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#93What many commentors here don't realise is that Google also uses reCaptcha to make you do free work for them.
Can you elaborate on this? What work are people actually doing for Google when they complete these awful captchas?
On any level, the data represents an average product of human visual calculation. A simple use case would be comparing that with the product of machine visual calculations to better understand and optimize the systems they are designing.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#94Google reCAPTCHA is the absolute worst. It makes me solve several puzzles very often, usually when I use a mobile network and I’m not logged in with any Google account. It’s so frustrating that most of the times I find a reCAPTCHA I give up before trying and just go elsewhere e.g. when a site uses reCAPTCHA for sign up or after the first failed login, I’ll most likely skip if I don’t absolutely need to access such we…
Bad guys also are getting tired and they start to hack more accounts of normal users because now those normal user accounts are worth more.
This is one of the major pains of building a platform: you also have the limit the damage that a "trusted" user can do, like if a moderator were to get hacked by username/password reuse.
I learned this the hard way on a forum I built and ended up painstakingly building a feature that lists all moderator actions and a "Reverse" button next to them. ...Among many other similar features.
It's funny to think back on the day I decided to build a forum: "How hard could it be?"
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#95[deleted]
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're doing it right. Google is gaslighting you; lying and telling you you've failed challenges when you actually solved them correctly. They do this to punish users who opt out of the google 'ecosystem' by not having a google account, not using chrome, using adblockers, etc. The proof of this assertion comes when you manage to enable the noscript version of reCAPTCHA (which is only available on sites that have opte…
I actually don't think that they are trying to punish people for not being logged in. If that were the case, they would make it clear that having a Google account and leaving it logged in, and using chrome would make the captchas appear less frequently or not at all. In reality, I think they are telling people they were wrong in order to extract just a little bit more free machine learning data from them. And really,…
> In reality, I think they are telling people they were wrong in order to extract just a little bit more free machine learning data from them
I doubt it because I've been seeing the same images for several months.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people realize that, but is it much worse than proof of work that is helpful to nobody? It's easy to take a position against Google and Recaptcha. It's easy to take a position against something that inconveniences you. What people actually don't seem to realize ITT is that abuse is becoming so easy and such a problem that we are becoming increasingly reliant on centralized services like Cloudflare and Google.…
I liked the idea when they just showed images of words that an OCR couldn't read accurately. But now all this damn clicking of hydrants, crossing, traffic lights, store fronts, vehicles etc. etc. is becoming really irritating. And no, I disagree that we have no option but to rely on "centralised" services like cloudfare or Google.
> I liked the idea when they just showed images of words that an OCR couldn't read accurately.
Like I said, popular spamming software like Xrumer could crack those captchas ten years ago.
> And no, I disagree that we have no option but to rely on "centralised" services like cloudfare or Google.
Can you pitch alternatives, though? For example, an attacker can still spoof IP addresses in 2019 and create volumetric attacks that you certainly cannot endure without someone's help upstream (i.e. centralization). No need to bother with spoofing though since you can rent a botnet for peanuts. Attackers have decentralized attacks but there is increasingly only centralized defense.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#98That's why I created hashcash.io in 2014 =) Some ridiculus examples - https://twitter.com/hashcashio =)
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#99For Google ReCaptcha, simply install the Buster addon, it solves the captcha for you via speech-to-text. 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 b…
Unfortunately Buster no longer works. Google detects it now and makes you start over.
The next release will use native messaging to send native user input events to the browser. It's already working well, I just need to finish the app installation bits.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. As I said, this is a huge reason stuff like Recaptcha exists, and why custom ones can't work here, even if they're probably better if done correctly. 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 spec…
#3 (a rotation of specific questions) is definitely a measure some sites could use, but as you point out, it's incredibly niche -- I've only even seen it on forums. For example, what questions could Reddit ask you? Wario Forums is pretty much the ideal on the niche spectrum, so it's not a very useful baseline for comparison. I rotated questions on the /register page for a large forum I run, but as my forum became mor…
You're right, it's only a solution for niche sites rather than ones aiming at all users. Obviously, Reddit/Facebook/Google/YouTube/whatever are out of luck here, their audience is basically 'everyone on the planet' and they don't have any real way to test that.
And you've also got a point that a certain percentage of legitimate users would be pruned out by a simple, topical question. There are probably a few people who couldn't register on Wario Forums cause of this sort of thing, and there were probably a few who couldn't join my previous sites cause of it.
So your questions would have to be very much tied to the audience. General gaming site? Asking who this is with a picture of Mario, Link, Pikachu or Sonic the Hedgehog would work pretty well. Niche site? A bit more obscure, to go with the audience likely to be visiting there.
That said, I think a few things will need to kept in mind:
1. Firstly, a lot of niche sites already have fairly strict requirements to get in, and have a more drawn out approval process than the norm. For example, quite a few I know of have you required to post an intro in an 'approval' forum in order to get access to the rest of the site or server. So I suspect users on these sites may be more used to having to think/research the process to join a forum than those on Facebook.
2. To some degree, it also filters for people who are genuinely interested in the topic to a more than average degree, which may overlap well with 'people likely to stick around for the long run'. For example, the people likely to remember King K Rool's guises in Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 may be good users at DK Vine, someone who could identify Rawk Hawk or Flavio would be more likely to be a good Mario RPG forum member, etc.
It's a bit like the comments I've heard about Ling's Cars... the only people who shop there really, really need a car.
Actually, maybe a bit like Hacker News too. The people most likely to 'tolerate' the old school design here are well, web developers, old school hacker types, etc.
Either way, it definitely all depends on how niche the site is.