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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?

#331

Post by bonestamp2 »

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.

> Where is our compensation?

When you search for an address on google maps, that little tiny house number on the house was once a captcha image and now google knows that number so it can take you to the exact location on a map when you search for that number.

Everyone helps train the machine so when they want something from the machine then the machine is better at finding what they asked for. That seems pretty democratic to me.

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

#332

Post by DigitalBison »

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.

> 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.

The article explains that this is part of what reCAPTCHA does, e.g.:

> Finally they combine all of this data with their knowledge of the person using the computer. Almost everyone on the Internet uses something owned by Google – search, mail, ads, maps – and as you know Google Tracks All Of Your Things. When you click that checkbox, Google reviews your browser history to see if it looks convincingly human.

But your point is otherwise right in that it's used for ML training, which Google admits as another commenter pointed out.

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

#333

Post by felipemnoa »

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.

Maybe, maybe not. From time to time google forces me to prove I'm not a robot because of unusual search queries. Either my queries are unusual or I have an infected computer. The thing is, it also happens to me on my iPhone.

Or, maybe they feel I'm not pulling my own weight, seeing as I rarely ever click on adds. They probably need more monkeys to feed the beast so I get selected to train their AI beast.

Edit: It could also be that I'm always running on incognito mode.

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

#334

Post by sjwright »

imtringued wrote: post #143
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 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 informa…

> 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.

It's not bullshit, it just depends whether your website is being targeted directly or not. We're targeted directly and the robots hitting us are getting the CAPTCHAs solved, presumably with human help.

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

#335

Post by berdario »

shawnz wrote: post #294
yorwba wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think that's very unlikely. There are over 100,000 new accounts created on Twitter every day so we would expect a large and frequent amount of bans if what you are saying were true. Furthermore most Twitter visitors don't have accounts so it would be pretty foolish to base their anomaly detection on a metric that most of their visitors fail.

It's actually well known that you'll get blocked by Twitter within the first 2 minutes of registering, whatever you'll do.

They probably use it as a way to enforce their "soft" requirement of a phone number. After verifying that you have a working phone number, you'll get unblocked.

Also, Twitter routinely renders their tweets unaccessible to non-logged-in users, due to rate limits on their api (which is used by their web frontend).

So, I'm not one bit surprised if anyone would describe Twitter as foolish: that's exactly how they act

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

#336

Post by sjwright »

sjwright wrote: post #328
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…

As a webmaster I can confirm that I hard block all TOR traffic for this exact reason. 90% of this traffic is malicious robotic junk of some form. Also, I’m just not interested in the remaining 10% "legit" traffic from people who are aggressively paranoid about their privacy. Almost all of them ended up being dickheads who were using TOR to abuse other members of our community. To the people who think every website sh…

To the people voting me down, please understand that I am relaying factual information about my specific experience as webmaster of various large-ish regional websites. If you don't like the facts, voting them down won't change them.

...or maybe voting me down will change the facts.

Yeah, that's totally going to work.

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

#337

Post by hombre_fatal »

XCSme wrote: post #97
partiallypro wrote: post #83

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.

By offering a free service to website operators that mitigates the ever-growing challenge of abuse on the internet that they and their users have to deal with.

Seems pretty bilateral.

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

#338

Post by defertoreptar »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #223
codeulike wrote: post #128

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,…

I had roughly the same problem. My facebook career lasted for all of thirty seconds before they decided I was a robot and banned my account. I appealed and they asked me to send a photo. I sent them a photo and they said I was still a robot and there was no further appeal. Very helpful. So my choices from that point are to 1) shame them in the media and hope its an entertaining enough story that people like it or 2)…

Just throwing this out there. Have you considered that maybe you are a robot?

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

#339

Post by Larrikin »

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.

Identifying text for public domain works that Google is making available online is much different than forcing the web to train their models for their profit.

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

#340

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

Those really grainy images, they always seemed like they had to have noise added on purpose? It was like really badly processed film grain, but if the images were enlargements then wouldn't they be pixelated?

Stuff you get now often requires cultural information, like "sidewalk" isn't a cross-cultural name, I'd guess almost everyone knows it, but meh. What classes as a store, is a lawyers office a store? Also, I seem to recall I had "click on all minivans"?? Not sure what one of those is, nor really what is classed as a car in USA, is an MPV a car [I'd guess that's what a minivan is?]? Do pedestrian crossing lights (green/red man) count as [part of] traffic lights? I've often wanted a short description of the locus of the terms they're using. Of course it never tells you if you failed, just gives you a further captcha, which it might have done anyway.

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