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

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141–150 of 647 posts

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

#141

Its getting weird when you have to fill that box in with pen and paper Marci Robin was buying a Fiat 500X from a West Palm Beach, Florida dealership, and was in the final stages of signing all the paperwork, when she was presented with a strange but simple question: was she a robot? This wasn’t online or anything, she was right there, in person, in front of the sales person, who wanted her to check a box, with a pen,…

This would've made an awesome SciFi short story.

The twist at the end is that she's lying.

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

#142
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…

[deleted]

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

#143
post #7

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…

>This might surprise you, but it actually has to do with what traffic coming out of TOR looks like.

That's a massive load of bullshit. Google has a captcha challenge that only humans can solve. That alone is already sufficient to prevent unwanted traffic. That is how every captcha system works. However google is an exception. If you're logged in to a google account or are using chrome then google can use that information to track your captcha history. Privacy minded people avoid google like the plague and therefore they cannot be tracked.

>Google isn't going out of their way to punish you for trying to protect your privacy. Except this is exactly what happens. It's not "unfortunate". It works like this by design.

If google cannot track you then the captcha will force you to do something that no other captcha system does: give you even more challenges even if you have solved them correctly. You will spend the next 5 minutes solving captchas correctly and then at the end it will tell you you've failed. This again is unique to google: correct answers lead to failure. The problem immediately goes away if you let google track you, it doesn't matter how bot infested the network is. No other captcha system does it this way.

Google is clearly doing this to get free labour to label their datasets, force people to have a google account and encourage them to use chrome.

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

#144

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.

There's nothing inherently wrong with crawlers and automated tools, but there's a lot of poorly written scrapers out there that can easily generate a huge volume of traffic along with the associated maintenance.

Why waste time catering to people who are too lazy to write a decent scraper? Most people would prefer to spend their time working on things that will benefit the other 99% of their users.

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

#145
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait til it's standing between you and your bank account.

Phone banking hasn’t died yet, luckily.

Yeah it's ironic. It's more convenient to use the phone to get my balance, even if you count the time spent listening to the recorded message telling me how much better my life would be if I used Internet banking.

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

#146
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?

The worst thing is that it prevents me from accessing my BANK account. Shame on you FIDOR for blocking my own access to my own finances!

Send them a message. Switch to another bank, close your account, and tell them why.

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

#147
post #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.

Clicking the box tells Google that you're a human.

Identifying the lights and cars and bicycles is you training Waymo's self-driving AI.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And this feeling right here, is why Google is able to do all of the things that it does. ;)

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

#149
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'm willing to bet if you record how long you spend clicking signs and lights on average, it's going to be more like several seconds than a few minutes. This must be hyperbole. There are the outlier cases where it gets fairly annoying but otherwise, I'm not sure I understand the hostility toward such a benign system that actually does thwart bots very effectively.

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

#150
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…

It's either that or getting your entire forum spammed with hundreds of spam posts.

I'm using that captcha on my website, and I can tell you, that one works 100% while the other ones don't.

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