I use Firefox android with Ublock origin and am logged into Google (boo). I used to use a plugin to change my user agent to Chrome when on Google sites. This was necessary as you get the old style search results page if you use Firefox, but if you pretend to be Chrome you get the current page style which works perfectly. With that plugin enabled I always had to solve multiple recaptchas and my recaptcha v3 score was 0.1. Disabled it jumps to 0.9 and v2 gives me no puzzles. Guess I will have to live without shiny Google search results then.
Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
141–150 of 218 posts
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#142Earlier 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,…
It's not brilliant, it further ruins an already dessicated web. Brilliance in the name of pissing people off is not brilliance.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#143And I SUCK at these to the point where I think I’m not getting the rules of the game. For example, for the one with traffic lights: Am I supposed to just mark the light bulbs or also the poles and beams?
I feel like I have more success if I deliberately wait a few seconds before clicking things. Have you watched an average computer user click things? If you're posting here you probably have extreme outlier mouse skill, and I think Google penalizes anything unusual.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#144I find it strange how all the comments here are blaming Google. Isn't it obvious that CAPTCHAs have gotten difficult because AI got better at solving them? Soon bots will be better than humans at solving CAPTCHAs, and the system will fail completely. I predict that then Google and Facebook will completely block new user signup from Tor, VPNs or browsers without cookines. Everyone else will require an existing Google,…
It's not even bots that are breaking them much of the time. The spammers just get people in third world countries/using mechanical turk type services to break them. Captchas like this cannot stop a human determined to break the rules.
Right, but eliminating all attackers except the ones who are willing to spend money on human labor is an incredibly strong filter.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#145What 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?
The older captcha with words was for the digitization of books. It helped in the Google Books, and Internet Archive projects notably.
https://cogdogblog.com/2013/12/recaptcha-all-the-books/
The current one helps in identifying and navigating streets, useful for maps and autonomous driving.
https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha...
You'll notice that recaptcha always has a direct effect on current projects of Google/Alphabet: Google Books, Google Maps, Waymo.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#146Honestly, I'm finding Google's captchas quite difficult of late because its Americanised. It asks me to identify crosswalks (oh.. pedestrian crossings, I thought you meant the pavement), find traffic lights (I don't traditionally expect them to be above the road or on motorways), or identify storefronts which are not always clear, maybe because I lack the cultural context.
And I'm from a major Western European city, which is about the closest I can get to American culture without being not, I wonder if they present the same captchas if they think you're from rural China or Uganda.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
We hate them for the same reason we hate airport security theater; they do not work and have a high burden on the people being subjected to them. Plus, as it’s Google doing it, you can hardly escape the goddamned things. So yeah, we blame Google for using us as data classifiers and adding hoops and hurdles to the open net, while accomplishing precisely dick. I for one hope that AI gets to the point that it can effort…
> We hate them for the same reason we hate airport security theater; they do not work Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it. I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real…
Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites.
We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it.
I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real reason or for some trivial reason. To me, it suggests a massive misunderstanding that people have about the internet.
Or we’ve just managed to notice that CAPTCHAs don’t seem to keep millions of bots, spammers, dummy accounts, shills, etc off the net. I’m glad you’re having such perceived success, but it’s not a universal phenomenon.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thanks!
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#149Every time a CAPTCHA thread comes up I have to point this out. By using one you’re externalising your business costs onto your users. You can make that choice, but if you do you’re far more likely to negatively impact the section of society that already has problems online: those who need to use assistive technologies.
I came here because that last point is getting lost in the discussion.
> While a bot will interact with a page without moving a mouse, or by moving a mouse very precisely, human actions have “entropy” that is hard to spoof, Ghosemajumder says.
It's bad enough that systems working from this (highly dubious, IMO) premise will force us all to use the mouse even if we're used to the tab and arrow keys; much worse is that there's no workaround for people who _can't_ use the mouse and rely on switch control. It sounds like an accessibility nightmare.
Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
It's not brilliant, it further ruins an already dessicated web. Brilliance in the name of pissing people off is not brilliance.
Villains can be brilliant too.