Live data from Hacker News

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

quora.com

111–120 of 647 posts

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

#111
post #84
post #80

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?

Glad I’m not the only one. I thought something was wrong with my brain. Or that I might be a robot.

01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01100110 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100

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

#112
So basically they do very advanced browser fingerprinting? I wonder if they keep that data around, as that would tell them who uses which third party services (not that they would have trouble working this out by other means) and would make a nice addition to their tracking efforts.

It’s quite depressing to see that almost all sites now require sending data to Google just to log in to them. Not to mention that they help to turn billions of users into clickworkers for annotating AI data. Tell me what you want but I’m pretty sure they show image captchas to users that they are absolutely sure are no bots. I use Chromium on Linux and I’m logged into a Google account, still I have to solve three or four image captures at times to use a login.

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

#113

I think recaptcha and captcha in general are very overused today, as they cause way too much inconvenience for the user. Why discriminate against robots so much? What's so wrong about crawling or using automated tools? With today's networks and hardware performance most websites shouldn't concern themselves with denial-of-service type of attacks, unless they're past a certain threshold of popularity.

One thing is account creation. It's usually a bad idea that user accounts are created by non-humans. In general, anything that writes to a database may have concerns about robot/automation/abuse.

I agree with you, for "read only" content, let the robots crawl.

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

#114

I think recaptcha and captcha in general are very overused today, as they cause way too much inconvenience for the user. Why discriminate against robots so much? What's so wrong about crawling or using automated tools? With today's networks and hardware performance most websites shouldn't concern themselves with denial-of-service type of attacks, unless they're past a certain threshold of popularity.

Well, it's useful on places where genuine human interaction is important, like Craiglist or Reddit.

(in reality though reddit has a huge bot / astroturfing problem anyway, so perhaps the value of captchas really is overstated)

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

#115
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I prefer uMatrix. It has a nice CSS-ish quality to it, e.g. you can whitelist random subdomains like *.cloudfront.net _if_ the root page is a domain you trust already. It's still a pain to get rolling at first but it feels more friendly to me than noscript

uMatrix is a serious pain in the ass with reCapcha however, and for any site that embeds video. Plus it treats every site as unique so you have to redo the green boxes on every site.

If you click on the asterisk between the domain name and the on/off button, it switches to global rule mode. Any allows/denies you save will be used across all sites.

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

#116
post #80

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?

I hardly ever get to just check the box. I think uBlock Origin and Safari's intelligent cookie blocking removes a lot of identifying details, and ReCAPTCHA relies a lot on browsing history and cookies.

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

#117
post #80

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?

just preemtively say no and leave the site. this is just another tracking vector for google and it should be discouraged. i'm generally against this type of gating, where the people doing the right thing get punished disproportionately (even small slices of time add up to wasting thousands of human-years over the population) just to combat the tiny number of bad actors. target the bad actors directly. it's the same f…

Yeah... but I really want to buy that , so meh, I'll put up with it. There are only so many hills I'm willing to die on.

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

#118
post #106

Slightly related, but I have a fun conspiracy to share: 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 s…

Interesting idea :) I don't think spambots are currently using Chromium or even running JavaScript. Using simple spamfilters in JavaScript still works fine on my setups.

Most modern credential stuffers use headless browsers with all the bells and whistles, html5, javascript, etc.

Login attempts are usually spread over a massive botnet of residential IPs as well, where they'll only use each IP for one or two login attempts before moving on to the next.

It's a very fascinating problem space

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

#119
post #97

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.

How to label your ML data for free.

Using highly trusted users thinking that they are just proving their honesty.

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

#120
post #80

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?

just preemtively say no and leave the site. this is just another tracking vector for google and it should be discouraged. i'm generally against this type of gating, where the people doing the right thing get punished disproportionately (even small slices of time add up to wasting thousands of human-years over the population) just to combat the tiny number of bad actors. target the bad actors directly. it's the same f…

I'm getting closer to doing that. Lately, I check the box, and if I'm presented with images, I leave.

I have also trained myself to wait a few seconds before clicking the box, which seems to help assert my humanity.

Post reply on HN