Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box? • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by RussianCow » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

singularity2001 wrote: post #92

xirdstl wrote: 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!

As superficial as it seems, this kind of stuff drives me away from businesses. I almost changed my mind about opening a retirement account with Charles Schwab purely because they block access to their site from the VPN that I used at the time. That said, for services from which I gain a lot of benefit, the annoyance is worth it, so it ultimately doesn't matter.

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

#162

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

miguelmota wrote: post #156

As a user who's constantly clicking on the crosswalk or storefront images you can't help but to think that you're essentially working for free training Google's machine learning models by providing them with supervised data points.

That's what ReCaptcha always was... it was originally a known and another unsure text blurb from scanned books/text documents. Now it's street signs etc.

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

#163

Post by littleweep » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

miguelmota wrote: post #156

As a user who's constantly clicking on the crosswalk or storefront images you can't help but to think that you're essentially working for free training Google's machine learning models by providing them with supervised data points.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Where is our compensation? It's our time and brain power training Google's AI that will one day be sold back to us. I'm really not into this.

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

#164

Post by Bartweiss » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

xirdstl wrote: post #120

clairity wrote: post #109

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…

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.

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

I wonder how many different weird rituals are out there for 'beating' CAPTCHA?

For me, I usually make some effort to keep moving my mouse and being "active" after clicking the box, on the idea that an isolated click event looks less human. It's based on a friend's tip and it seems to help, but I have no confidence that it's actually relevant in such a complex system. I sort of suspect Google has created a new generation of meaningless routines fit to rival historical standouts like sports rituals.

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

#165

Post by sigotirandolas » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

flixic wrote: post #116

xirdstl wrote: 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.

I use Firefox with containers (so ReCaptcha can’t see my Google cookies) and also uBlock Origin + a few more extensions. I don’t use NoScript or similar. I get the manual test for ReCaptcha pretty much 100% of the time.

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

#166

Post by taftster » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #157

taftster wrote: post #152

I'm not convinced that picking the pictures has anything to do with actually convincing google if you're a bot or not. I mean sure, it's an indicator. But I _know_ that I can pick the right pictures of school buses and store fronts every freaking time, so that's only a very small indicator. More likely, the majority of the algorithm is devoted to the "fingerprint" of your browser. If you have adblock running, you may…

You're assuming that the picking-of-pictures validation logic cares solely about what pictures you pick. What if it cares about your "mouse click timings" not being random, but rather looking like the mouse movements of a human who is using eye saccades to examine and classify images, and then moves their mouse only when they see and find one, and sloppily at that?

Right, that's what I'm saying. I was putting forth that humans are pretty random with their timings. But the truth is, they are probably not and that we all probably click in some uniform distribution.

But I am pretty sure, if you click on the images too quickly, you're going to get stopped. Slowing down your clicks, moving around a little like you're "thinking" seems to help. That's been my experience at least.

I'm personally rooting for the AI here. When the robots and crawlers become so smart to become too hard for Google to distinguish between them and humans, then we will all benefit. They are becoming smarter, which is why captchas are becoming more difficult for humans.

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

#167

Post by lallinuo » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

littleweep wrote: post #163

miguelmota wrote: post #156

As a user who's constantly clicking on the crosswalk or storefront images you can't help but to think that you're essentially working for free training Google's machine learning models by providing them with supervised data points.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Where is our compensation? It's our time and brain power training Google's AI that will one day be sold back to us. I'm really not into this.

You might be interested what https://hcaptcha.com is doing.

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

#168

Post by wl » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

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…

Running uBlock origin seems to trigger the same thing, even on a static IP. It feels an awful lot like punishment to me.

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

#169

Post by alcover » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

detritus wrote: post #138

clairity wrote: post #109

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…

Sadly, the parcel tracking functionality of the Royal Mail's site here in the UK uses it, so I have little choice but to go through this rigmarole a few times a week. On the one hand, fuck Google for wanting another vector with which to track me, on the other hand, why can't it remember that I proved to it that I'm human (allegedly) two days ago?

> why can't it remember that I proved to it that I'm human

Maybe to prevent bot operators from manually aquiring a human-cookie then let their bot operate for ever ?

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

#170

Post by RussianCow » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

eridius wrote: post #43

Lately I've been getting reCAPTCHA prompts all the time even though I'm not browsing in incognito mode and haven't cleared cookies. All I'm doing is running a very basic ad blocker, using Safari (which blocks third-party tracking), and very rarely loading a Google site. The most interaction I have with Google is when I end up having to use my corporate Google account as SSO for some other site. Given that I'm not doi…

Anecdotally, I've gotten way more reCAPTCHA prompts since disabling third-party cookies and installing Cookie AutoDelete, so I suspect you are correct.