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

Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 647 posts

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#11

Post by CodeMage »

Is there any place where I can find a comprehensive list of countermeasures to stop Google from recording and analyzing all the stuff that the article lists? According to the article:

It turns out they record and analyse:

- Your computer’s timezone and time

- Your IP address and rough location

- Your screen size and resolution

- What browser you’re using

- What plugins you’re using

- How long the page took to display

- How many key presses, mouse clicks, and tap/scrolls were made

And ... some other stuff we don’t quite understand.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#13

Post by jsgo »

teilo wrote: post #6
djflutt3rshy wrote: post #2

The box has made browsing using TOR insufferable! It fusses and makes me click storefronts and traffic lights until I run out of patience and close out of whatever webpage I was trying to visit. I assume it has to do with a lack of Google cookies on the browser, essentially punishing me for trying to protect my privacy.

Those images are infuriating! Click all boxes with traffic lights. Ok, well, this one box just barely contains the bottom right corner of the traffic light. Click. Nope, that little corner didn't count. Try again. Ok, well on this one, the right side of the traffic light is only barely over the line, so I won't click it. Nope, that sliver of the light mattered this time. MF!

this on so many levels.

Thankfully they'll eventually fall back to the "click the images of _object_ until there are no pictures left with a(n) _object_" in it, but those clicking block ones of a specific picture are super frustrating.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#14

Post by xiphias2 »

Kalium wrote: post #7
djflutt3rshy wrote: post #2

The box has made browsing using TOR insufferable! It fusses and makes me click storefronts and traffic lights until I run out of patience and close out of whatever webpage I was trying to visit. I assume it has to do with a lack of Google cookies on the browser, essentially punishing me for trying to protect my privacy.

This might surprise you, but it actually has to do with what traffic coming out of TOR looks like. Well in excess of 90% of traffic coming out of TOR is spam, bots, malicious, or some combination! Google isn't going out of their way to punish you for trying to protect your privacy. They're trying to stop unwanted traffic. By unfortunate happenstance, you appear to be disguising yourself in the exact same way a shocki…

They could use a memory-hard hashing function, like ARGON2 for proof of work, it would make spamming much harder.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#15

Post by malvosenior »

Kalium wrote: post #7
djflutt3rshy wrote: post #2

The box has made browsing using TOR insufferable! It fusses and makes me click storefronts and traffic lights until I run out of patience and close out of whatever webpage I was trying to visit. I assume it has to do with a lack of Google cookies on the browser, essentially punishing me for trying to protect my privacy.

This might surprise you, but it actually has to do with what traffic coming out of TOR looks like. Well in excess of 90% of traffic coming out of TOR is spam, bots, malicious, or some combination! Google isn't going out of their way to punish you for trying to protect your privacy. They're trying to stop unwanted traffic. By unfortunate happenstance, you appear to be disguising yourself in the exact same way a shocki…

> Well in excess of 90% of traffic coming out of TOR is spam, bots, malicious, or some combination!

Do you have any data on this?

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#16

Post by SilasX »

teilo wrote: post #6
djflutt3rshy wrote: post #2

The box has made browsing using TOR insufferable! It fusses and makes me click storefronts and traffic lights until I run out of patience and close out of whatever webpage I was trying to visit. I assume it has to do with a lack of Google cookies on the browser, essentially punishing me for trying to protect my privacy.

Those images are infuriating! Click all boxes with traffic lights. Ok, well, this one box just barely contains the bottom right corner of the traffic light. Click. Nope, that little corner didn't count. Try again. Ok, well on this one, the right side of the traffic light is only barely over the line, so I won't click it. Nope, that sliver of the light mattered this time. MF!

Heh, maybe one day they can show a bunch of pictures of sand, where each subsequent pic has a grain removed, with the instructions "click on all the heaps".

Spambots will solve the Sorites paradox!

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#17

Post by meritt »

A bot absolutely can, you just need to use a more sophisticated bot. This article [1] is from August 2017, so the arms race has escalated and techniques improve, but the gist is the same: You just do a better job of simulating the "human" characteristics they monitor. Gen 4 bots (bots that run on an infected user's machine) can circumvent these measures as well.

[1] https://intoli.com/blog/making-chrome-headless-undetectable/

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#18

Post by Kalium »

malvosenior wrote: post #15
Kalium wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might surprise you, but it actually has to do with what traffic coming out of TOR looks like. Well in excess of 90% of traffic coming out of TOR is spam, bots, malicious, or some combination! Google isn't going out of their way to punish you for trying to protect your privacy. They're trying to stop unwanted traffic. By unfortunate happenstance, you appear to be disguising yourself in the exact same way a shocki…

> Well in excess of 90% of traffic coming out of TOR is spam, bots, malicious, or some combination! Do you have any data on this?

An excellent, wise, and cogent question! In fact I do have data. You can find it here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/

> On the other hand, anonymity is also something that provides value to online attackers. Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network.

The obvious caveats apply, of course. It's completely possible what Cloudflare saw at the time is no longer true and TOR is no longer mostly spam. It's equally fully possible that the traffic Cloudflare sees is wildly unrepresentative of what TOR traffic actually looks like, and it's mostly people worried about their privacy. This is just the data we have at the moment.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#20

Post by kojackst »

djflutt3rshy wrote: post #2

The box has made browsing using TOR insufferable! It fusses and makes me click storefronts and traffic lights until I run out of patience and close out of whatever webpage I was trying to visit. I assume it has to do with a lack of Google cookies on the browser, essentially punishing me for trying to protect my privacy.

It goes like this: "so you want to be anonymous and won't let us track every single thing you do? ok, then you'll help us train our AI so we can improve our self-driving cars and improve how Google Maps extracts information from Street View images"
Post reply on HN