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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?

#361

Post by fargo »

defertoreptar wrote: post #338
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Turing self-test

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

#362

Post by snarkyturtle »

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.

There's an xkcd for that https://xkcd.com/1897/

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

#363

Post by opportune »

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,…

this reminds me of a cargo cult or something. People following strange rituals they observed others perform for no reason

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

#364

Post by darkpuma »

drusepth wrote: post #319
darkpuma wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 "…

> "You don't think Google wants to hear the correct answer?"

They may want it but they don't reward it. I don't care what sort of answer they want, I only care what sort of answer they accept. I'm not going to donate my time to these bastards by doing anything more than what's necessary to pass their captcha.

> "If everyone just answered "no, that's trees" instead of a hand-wavy "I think you think it's trees","

That's just not going to happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

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

#365

Post by darkpuma »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #303
darkpuma wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tile fade-in is also egregious. The only reason that exists is to punish humans.

Well, it punishes bots in an equal amount, in that the bots have to wait longer before they can retry.

It punishes humans more than computers because computers are more efficient multitaskers. A computer can find a productive way to use the second between each tile fade in, but a human has no realistic way to productively use that second. The human sits there staring at the screen waiting, while the captcha-solving computer does other things (perhaps solve other captchas given to it through other connections.)

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

#366

Post by justtopost »

clairity wrote: post #109
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?

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 do this after being blackholed by goolgles captcha a dozen times. If your site reli3s on google you are the problem at this point. I am not a data point. I am a free man.

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

#367

Post by ttty »

koonsolo wrote: post #150
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…

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.

But how many real people are you losing? You have no idea

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

#368

Post by foxylad »

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?

It's actually not that hard, assuming you control your form generation. Bots usually fill in fields using the actual field name - not the label the user sees. So provide a field labelled "Age" but named "email", and simply check it contains digits. If it's got an email address in it, it's a bot.

Labels can also be obfuscated with javascript, replacing the raw HTML "Email" with "Age"on page load. Getting this right will require the bot to parse both HTML and JS, and we can force them to handle CSS too. Add a "zip" field, and hide it with complex CSS rules. If it contains a zip code, it's a bot.

If you're really paranoid, randomise combinations of distinguishable fields (name, email, phone, age and hidden fields) every time you generate the form, so even if a bot herder manually maps names to fields one time, it'll fail the next. At this stage it'll be cheaper for the bot herder to use Mechanical Turk, after which even Google's captcha is compromised.

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

#369

Post by UncleMeat »

taneq wrote: post #312
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…

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."

Machines have been able to beat captchas for years and years. The point is that it costs money and that's good enough to prevent free and scalable abuse.

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

#370

Post by echelon »

defertoreptar wrote: post #338
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I know this comment is in jest, but please don't joke on Hacker News as you would on Reddit. Posts like this add little informational content, spawn a thread of joke responses, and take time away from hundreds of people who are here to read high signal commentary.

Sorry to be so profoundly un-fun.

edit: I'm being downvoted, but consider the comment chain this has generated.

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