91–100 of 647 posts
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Google used to HATE my VPN, couldn't do anything on Google through it without a dozen damn pics to choose from. My VPN must have gotten white listed (or cracked down on some of their traffic patterns) because that stopped.
Or did they just get better at fingerprinting us?
I feel a sense of dread whenever I see this box. Is it going to let me through, or am I going to spend the next few minutes futilely clicking signs and lights, only to give up and leave the site?
Every time I fill one of these out I get the picture test, and I answer them correctly...but am asked 3-5 times to identify which blocks contain a school bus or stop light. It's very annoying.
Every time I fill one of these out I get the picture test, and I answer them correctly...but am asked 3-5 times to identify which blocks contain a school bus or stop light. It's very annoying.
When trying to detect ad fraud, one problematic scenario is that of replay attacks. It's basically when a scammer records human behavior on a site, and then replays a mix of actual their sessions to fraudulently click an ad. The Quora answer is interesting but it's not clear to me whether the "I'm not a robot" box cannot be defeated in a similar manner.
I work on bot detection at hCaptcha.com. (Hiring: reach out if you want to apply machine learning to stop bots and help websites monetize their traffic without ads) In order to successfully execute a replay attack you would also need to pass the Turing Test, i.e. click the correct images. If you design a bot that starts a combinatoric attacking by trying random guesses we can easily confuse it, so most attackers try…
I'm convinced that part of the reason Google released headless Chrome is as a honeypot for bot authors to use. The idea is that instead of going through the effort of fingerprinting and identifying new bot software, release something that bot authors will use instead that you have a capability to detect.
Somewhere inside of headless Chrome, there's one or more subtle changes that make it so Google can detect whether you're using headless Chrome or normal Chrome. There's no limit to how subtle the indicator could be - maybe headless Chrome renders certain CSS elements slightly slower than normal Chrome, etc.
It sounds pretty crazy/complicated but I could definitely see it being worth it if it means detecting $X,000,000 worth of ad fraud every year
Every time I fill one of these out I get the picture test, and I answer them correctly...but am asked 3-5 times to identify which blocks contain a school bus or stop light. It's very annoying.
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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…
I think you are partially wrong. Maybe Google is not doing this intentionally but it also doesn't happen just because traffic is coming out of a tor node. I am using ff with some of the recommended extensions from https://www.privacytools.io/ and I get to fill in traffic signs all the time. And yes I am logged into Google.
Another thing that sets it off is virtual machine usage, I can be logged into chrome and gmail on the same residential IP for hours but the moment I try to search google for a problem inside a VM it's a minute of slow loading captchas.
Have moved to bing instead, that sort of wasted productivity is a burden.
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> 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, (...) This does not agree with my experience. I browse without cookies and severely limited javascript (using umatrix), and I also encounter the myriad of ridiculous inconveniences that the OP was referring to. On the good side, however, the web is much faster a…
> I browse without cookies and severely limited javascript (using umatrix), and I also encounter the myriad of ridiculous inconveniences that the OP was referring to. Isn't this also something that many bots do (don't run javascript and don't have realistic cookies)? It seems like just another instance of reducing your distance from the "bot" cluster in agent-space.