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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?

#311

Post by Frondo »

sincerely wrote: post #308
Frondo wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trying to generalize a useful rule ("shun white supremacists") but it doesn't work in this case. I don't think we need to, either. We're not robots. We can shun white supremacists and leave everyone else alone. This isn't a slippery slope, it's just good sense (no more white supremacists, hey!). Humankind will get along just fine if we tack on that one extra rule and all follow it.

Good thing the definition of white supremacist is commonly agreed upon and noncontroversial and absolutely isnt subject to definition creep :)

What isn't subject to definition creep?

Murder now, for some, includes abortion.

Censorship now includes, for some, private companies removing bad actors from their private systems.

Come on, that's lazy to dismiss it that way when society literally changes all the time.

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

#312

Post by taneq »

rococode wrote: post #200
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.

It's actually pretty interesting to see how the captchas have evolved as, presumably, Google decides "OK, we have enough data to consistently identify this thing" and moves on to the next challenge. I recall the modern (non-text) captchas used to be cars pretty much every time. Then, the images started getting grainier as they apparently wanted to improve their recognition in different conditions. Then crosswalks and…

Google: spins off robotic car company Waymo, announcing public-facing robotaxi service launch in 2018

Also Google: "Our standard for 'what a machine couldn't possibly do' is identifying a stop sign."

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

#313

Post by bpicolo »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #272
rococode wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually pretty interesting to see how the captchas have evolved as, presumably, Google decides "OK, we have enough data to consistently identify this thing" and moves on to the next challenge. I recall the modern (non-text) captchas used to be cars pretty much every time. Then, the images started getting grainier as they apparently wanted to improve their recognition in different conditions. Then crosswalks and…

Yep. With the possibility of almost uniquely identifying us on the web through fingerprinting... Google, of all companies is in the perfect position to know that my web request was made by me... And therefore I'm not a robot. You can only conclude that recaptcha is a ml training exercise.

>You can only conclude that recaptcha is a ml training exercise.

They're not secretive about it

https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/

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

#314

Post by alcover »

detritus wrote: post #209
alcover wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If this heuristic is constantly necessary then there is nothing to remember.

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

#315

Post by CamperBob2 »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #286
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.

Helping scan all the world's books as part of a plan to make them freely available to all is much easier to get behind than tuning map objects for their self driving cars. Particularly when most books that were scanned never, ever showed up on Google books.

OTOH, succeeding at self-driving cars has the potential to save lives by the thousands.

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

#317

Post by hombre_fatal »

JohnFen wrote: post #254
udfalkso wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or they could just use one of the many free CAPTCHA applications that are around.

Off the shelf spam software like Xrumer[0] has been cracking those captchas for 10+ years.

Recaptcha isn't obnoxious for fun, it's obnoxious because this is the state of the arms race right now. There's also the challenge of creating a captcha that allows blind people in.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer

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

#318

Post by cbhl »

yorwba wrote: post #282
shawnz wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you using an unusual user agent or a VPN or something?

I got banned from Twitter within 5 Minutes of trying to figure out the user interface, and my best guess as to why it happened is that their anomaly detection is overfit to their existing users. So when a new user starts exploring randomly instead of directly going to look at ads, they're behaving much more like a scraper than what the system has learned to recognize as a normal user.

I wouldn't be surprised if the anomaly detection is overfit to banned users: comes from Kenya, or Russia, or China. Doesn't initially seed the account with in-person connections. Shares an IPv4 address or telephone number with other folks who have been banned before.

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

#319

Post by drusepth »

darkpuma wrote: post #234
drusepth wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doub…

> "What makes you think Google's image classifer would think that's a mountain?" Because every single time it asks me to classify mountains it rejects my answers if I don't click on trees on the horizon (and often trees on the horizon are the only "mountains" presented) and every single time it accepts the answer that such trees are mountains. I've gotten the mountains challenge dozens of times, the results are very…

>So I have absolutely no incentive to make my life harder by insisting on correct answers, and every incentive to tell Google what they want to hear.

I guess this is where the misunderstanding is. You don't think Google wants to hear the correct answer?

Trying to guess at what the daily/monthly flavor of "correct" is seems like it'd do more harm than good, resulting in some kind of nondeterministic guessing game of "well, trees on the horizon are probably assumed to be a mountain" that never settles on actually-correct answers (and, I'd wager, is often more inconvenient to the user than just answering correctly would be, because now there's a layer of indirection on what they think a system thinks of an image, rather than just what they think of that image).

If everyone just answered "no, that's trees" instead of a hand-wavy "I think you think it's a mountain", I feel like this captcha would be significantly easier for us humans (because we could actually give real answers), as well as less inconvenient for people who just want to pass on through and get on with whatever they were doing before a site wanted to verify they weren't a bot (because they can just, well, identify images instead of playing a game of "what does the machine think?").

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

#320

Post by kevingrahl »

jammygit wrote: post #129
kevingrahl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want more granularity I’d suggest giving uMatrix a try. You’ll basically break every site at first and have to make adjustments for every site you visit (whitelist certain Ressourcen on a per domain basis) but I think it’s well worth it. NoScript (which is totally fine) just blocks all JS, uMatrix can block much more.

I found umatrix required me to turn so many things on for the average site that I wasn't sure it was blocking anything significant anymore. I suppose I have up after a while

I can see why you’d feel that way but for me it still blocks a lot of stuff I don’t want. I block some domains/companies via my hosts file and run a pihole but there’s always the odd advertising network etc I, or my pihole didn’t knew about that gets blocked by uMatrix.
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