Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would've made an awesome SciFi short story. The twist at the end is that she's lying.
Isn't that basically 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'?
More like Second Variety
Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
371–380 of 647 posts
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#372I think recaptcha and captcha in general are very overused today, as they cause way too much inconvenience for the user. Why discriminate against robots so much? What's so wrong about crawling or using automated tools? With today's networks and hardware performance most websites shouldn't concern themselves with denial-of-service type of attacks, unless they're past a certain threshold of popularity.
At work we have a scraper that likes to use a particularly expensive search query using hundreds of different ips dozens of times per second, all so that they can scrape data that is freely available from us as an XML feed at a different url. Every time I found a way to fingerprint and block them, they'd change their bot to avoid detection. Captcha for rate limiting seemed like the least bad option. However, eventual…
Awesome idea giving them crappy data. I do the same thing with loyalty programs. Someone has already registered XXX-555-1234 as a phone number in your area code. I like to think I'm adding a little bit of chaos to their data tracking.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
My personal blog has a spam filter for comments.. it's either that or captcha.. or sign in with Google/Facebook.
Often a trivial non-standard thing like "what's the name of the author" works well enough. Especially outside the English language. Spammers won't spend the time to bother adopting their scripts for that. If this somple thing comes from a popular WordPress plugin the equation for the spammer changes, of course.
There's certainly a period of time where that solution is sufficient as it stops the lowest level of drive-by spam.
But it also sucks the first day you get an attacker who solves it once and then spams you thousands of times.
Modern spam tools are pretty impressive these days and minimize the targeted work the human spammer needs to do in these cases. In the early 2000s, you could set a custom question and then assume no attacker is going to manually code for your little blog.
But even in 2008 I was using spam software (out of curiosity) where you could import a massive blog list, and it would pause spamjobs with failed comment submissions, let you pencil in a value for this unknown field, and then click resume.
You could also choose other actions for that field like "prompt me each time" and sit at your computer multiplexing your labor across hundreds of blogs. And that was pretty polished ten years ago.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#374"the language also changes as it is read" Lol. Quora and its nonsense.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just throwing this out there. Have you considered that maybe you are a robot?
Reasonable. Just look at its name.
Interesting use of "its" but it is entirely possible that a robot has a preferred set of gender pronouns, and you just mislabeled them. Many of our assumptions support the biopatriarchy.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The occasional exception is reasonable, if the exception is exceptionally clever.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the argument boils down to "how do you fill out the captcha if you use a screen reader"?
They already have an accommodations for the visually impaired with the audio captchas. https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/6175971?hl=en
If you score low enough on their automatic checks, they refuse to serve you the audio challenge.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#378Earlier 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…
Not just for Tor. I use Firefox with a few basic extensions (Privacy badger, uBlock, Google Container) yet every time I am presented with having to pick out traffic lights over and over and over again. I usually have about 5 or 6 "challenges" before I give up and use another site. My timezone has not changed, my IP address and rough location has not changed, my screensize has not changed, my broadband speed has not c…
Same thing happens to me, same extensions involved, mostly browse incognito. I bet your suspicion is spot on.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#379As 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 subs…
I'm in the same boat, friend. Expelling Google from my life.
Apple Maps works for me. I appreciate that's not the case for everyone, but it's come a LONG way. I sincerely use Apple news (on iOS) and have been loving it, but appreciate it's not for everyone's use case.
Google photos.. yeah wow. There really isn't much like it. I've resigned to storing my photos myself on a private server and slowly making albums/things come together. But I have to NOT use google photos. It's too scary.
Gmail was easy
Youtube I use a fake gmail account that's not linked to me in the slightest and only use it on 1 iPad, else not logged in.
It's a quest. But I'll get there. Someone really ought to make a Google Photos competitor though, there's nothing that has the same level of polish right now.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#380Earlier 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…
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…
The fire hydrant one always annoyed me - in many countries stand-up fire hydrants are nonexistent or at least look very different. I guess they're banking on people having seen enough American movies/TV shows?