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

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

#201

Post by noir_lord »

brokenmachine wrote: post #174
cr0sh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fake-users-as-a-service business op? I can see it being possible - racks of "robot arms" that move mice based on whatever criteria is needed (in this case, reCaptcha). It works for 3D printing, as well as device testing - so in theory, this could be done too...

I don't get why you'd need a physical robot arm? Just have a usb device that simulates the mouse movements. Or just software to move the mouse virtually.

You don’t, you wouldn’t even need a webcam, you could just splice into the video signal at output and interpret it directly (much as the HDCP bypasses do).

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

#202

Post by gcb0 »

tracker1 wrote: post #162
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.

they stopped using the text because some forum campaign that promoted typing cursewords instead of the unkown word. they probably started showing cursewords on the rendered search highligths on google books.

there was a decent write up from a whitehat showing the damage, but I can't find it

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

packetslave wrote: post #60
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…

This. The reality is, Google (and Cloudflare, and everyone else trying to block scrapers and malicious traffic) use heuristics that boil down to "99% of our traffic behaves like this". If you go out of your way to fall into the 1%, e.g. using Tor, disabling Javascript, randomizing your user-agent, etc., you're going to get CAPTCHAed.

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by ianferrel »

gcb0 wrote: post #202
tracker1 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they stopped using the text because some forum campaign that promoted typing cursewords instead of the unkown word. they probably started showing cursewords on the rendered search highligths on google books. there was a decent write up from a whitehat showing the damage, but I can't find it

Cite?

I can't imagine some forum has enough traffic to meaningfully screw up their data, and they don't tell you which of the two words is the unknown word, so you're just going to fail a lot doing that.

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

#205

Post by paul7986 »

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.

One solution is to remove Google out of your life as best as possible.

Personally I now use...

- iCloud.com instead of Gmail

- DDG for search though I do have to !g like 20 to 30% of the time for things like driving directions (from X point to Y point), local movie times nearby and flights.

I still use

- YouTube

- Google Maps some as its great for getting distance between X and Y

- Google News (is there a better substitute)

- Google Photos (is there anything that compares)

Hoping in time to rely a ton less on Google products.

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

#206

Post by gcb0 »

udfalkso wrote: post #190
jammygit wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get most of my captchas while attempting to access products I've paid for already (very few at purchase time).

Imagine if those sites had to build their own captcha service instead. How much more expensive would they be?

wonder if someone is collecting actual data instead of listening to udfalkso, the google sales rep here.

maybe to save them a few $ from bots and spam (bandwidth and storage is very cheap today) they might be losing new users by the thousands (and traffic acquisition is far more expensive than the formers)

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

#207

Post by drusepth »

darkpuma wrote: post #194
drusepth wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always figure they're looking for a population consensus. They're doing image recognition at scale and these are clearly ambiguous, hard images to classify. They could easily have a few people at Google say, "I determine this is a storefront" and make that the "correct" answer, but I think they're more interested in a consensus of what most "normal" people would classify as a storefront, especially in potentially-v…

What they're actually getting though is the population consensus of what normal people believes Google's image classifier believes. The system incentivizes users to reinforce misconceptions their classifier has. Does this look like a mountain to you? https://0x0.st/zzvr.jpg Google's image classifier would think that's a mountain. If you disagree, google will classify you as a robot. After failing these sort of challe…

What makes you think Google's image classifer would think that's a mountain?

Especially if this is all used for learning, enough people saying "that is clearly not a mountain" would reinforce that it's, in fact, probably not a mountain. Even if I got classified as a robot, I'm not sure I would think "oh, a system designed to classify images would think this not-a-mountain is a mountain", so I definitely wouldn't double down and keep marking it as a mountain. I'd, well, not. And assume the system is at least as good as classifying the images it chooses to use as I am.

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

#208

Post by neolefty »

CodeMage wrote: post #11

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…

Nope, because it's a cat-and-mouse game with robots. It's not in Google's interest to publish it because it would give an advantage to the bot writers.

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

#209

Post by detritus »

alcover wrote: post #169
detritus wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I was being a bit pithy, but in that case, surely there's some sequence of smart fuzzily-heuristic analysis that can be played out to check that my humanised identification isn't acting like a bot?

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

#210

Post by SahAssar »

sneakernets wrote: post #177
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My timezone has not changed, my IP address and rough location has not changed, my screensize has not changed, my broadband speed has not changed, and my general computer dexterity has not changed, yet I am relentlessly targeted. On chrome I never saw these challenges, but on firefox with the privacy plug-ins I am always always always challenged. That's because Google isn't just profiling "Tor users". They're going…

There is no Google "punishment algorithm". It's just computers being dumb.

Somebody made those computers dumb in that exact way. That's the complaint.
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