Live data from Hacker News

Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

theverge.com

201–210 of 218 posts

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#201
post #24

Google 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…

I can't use Google search directly any more without being presented with a never-ending series of these things. Thus I use DuckDuckGo, and if it returns inadequate results I rerun it with "!g" at the end which sends it to Google. That seems to work without CAPTCHAs.

Or use !sp to get StartPage results, which is basically anonymized Google results.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#203
post #178
post #24

Google 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…

its because google no longer just tests if you are a human- they also train their model- try this- and I've tried it successfully far too many times- Enter your first captcha wrong and then half the times, on the second one it won't say you did first wrong. (it's because first was a learning set). do the second one right and then you're good. I deliberately mark the exact opposite of right boxes in the first captcha…

You are training it to better translate scanned books for Google Books. That's where the samples come from. They are words from actual books that Google isn't sure about. Stop messing up Google Books, please.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's using you as human labor to label data. That's why you have to solve multiple. It's annoying but greatly helps accelerate research and development since data is king.

> It's using you as human labor to label data. That's why you have to solve multiple. That's actually not cool: recruiting your time under false pretenses to create value for themselves.

reCAPTCHA helps Google to digitize books that are too illegible to be OCR'd. Do you appreciate Google Books?

It's not as bad as you're making it out to be.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#205
post #24

Google 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…

also is blocked in China, so all Chinese visitors fail the captcha and can't proceed.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's using you as human labor to label data. That's why you have to solve multiple. That's actually not cool: recruiting your time under false pretenses to create value for themselves.

reCAPTCHA helps Google to digitize books that are too illegible to be OCR'd. Do you appreciate Google Books? It's not as bad as you're making it out to be.

No, I don't enjoy Google Books, but that's really not the point.

If that's what I'm helping you do then tell me that and let me opt-in. Maybe I want to contribute. But, don't instead throw up a road-block to the service I'm actually trying to consume, under the guise of providing that service, then double my required effort to help you provide some other service.

It's actually implemented as a dark pattern. If you want cheap labor then use Mechanical Turk or otherwise. But, don't steal thousands of hours of your customers' time under misleading pretenses.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't use Google search directly any more without being presented with a never-ending series of these things. Thus I use DuckDuckGo, and if it returns inadequate results I rerun it with "!g" at the end which sends it to Google. That seems to work without CAPTCHAs.

Or use !sp to get StartPage results, which is basically anonymized Google results.

!s also works for Startpage

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's using you as human labor to label data. That's why you have to solve multiple. That's actually not cool: recruiting your time under false pretenses to create value for themselves.

reCAPTCHA helps Google to digitize books that are too illegible to be OCR'd. Do you appreciate Google Books? It's not as bad as you're making it out to be.

This isn't true any longer -- reCaptcha used to help digitize text but now it's all Google Maps (streetview) images they're using to train their own self-driving and Maps software.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reCAPTCHA helps Google to digitize books that are too illegible to be OCR'd. Do you appreciate Google Books? It's not as bad as you're making it out to be.

No, I don't enjoy Google Books, but that's really not the point. If that's what I'm helping you do then tell me that and let me opt-in. Maybe I want to contribute. But, don't instead throw up a road-block to the service I'm actually trying to consume, under the guise of providing that service, then double my required effort to help you provide some other service. It's actually implemented as a dark pattern. If you wa…

Google isn't providing a service to you, they are providing a service to the site that uses the captcha. And they haven't put any roadblocks, the site did - by installing a captcha.

You should complain to the site that decided to offload their captcha costs to you.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#210
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its because google no longer just tests if you are a human- they also train their model- try this- and I've tried it successfully far too many times- Enter your first captcha wrong and then half the times, on the second one it won't say you did first wrong. (it's because first was a learning set). do the second one right and then you're good. I deliberately mark the exact opposite of right boxes in the first captcha…

You are training it to better translate scanned books for Google Books. That's where the samples come from. They are words from actual books that Google isn't sure about. Stop messing up Google Books, please.

As far as I know, reCaptcha stopped being used for books a long time ago. It's now used to improve Google's mapping data instead.
Post reply on HN