Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just throwing this out there. Have you considered that maybe you are a robot?
Reasonable. Just look at its name.
Just a keyboard pattern. Not uncommon enough to read anything into it.
Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
401–410 of 647 posts
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were you using an unusual user agent or a VPN or something?
Twist: he is a robot, and when he sent them a photo, it was a robot photo. Square metal head, lights for eyes, antenna coming out the top. The works.
I would assume a submitted photo of a robot would go over just as well as when I was once asked to add a picture to the company's internal website of employees by our HR dept. I never add photos of me to anything, so instead, in good humor, downloaded a random anonymous silhouette type avatar. That didn't work for them, and I was told "I need a picture of you". So, I open up photoshop, found a generic picture frame online, and added the word YOU inside the frame. Shortly after this, my supervisor comes in to pay me a visit. Some people just have no sense of humor.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#403Earlier 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.
> 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.
That's in fact true. Every single one of my Twitter account that I've created in the last few years have got banned within a few minutes even before I've had a chance to post anything meaningful with the account.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thei…
I had Microsoft do this. They notified me that my account was being suspicious, so I needed to provide a phone number to use it. I had literally just made the account though, zero activity at all. It was just to force me to give a phone number to them for their data harvest
I ran into this with MS as well. However, they explicitly stated that it did not need to be my phone number. So since it was for a work thing, I ask to use my boss' number to get around the lockout. Seemed pretty pointless.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't cloudflare the org that "Doesnt censor under any circumstances", and then turned around and censored white supremacists? Not that I agree with them (I DONT!), but it was a full 180. And also, isn't cloudflare also the one to allow booters and stressers to be online behind CF - and they used stolen CC's to boot? The Tor decisions to screw users over is just the cherry on top. Especially is egregious is when a ca…
Everyone should censor and shun white supremacists. They have no place in modern society. When they shed their noxious views, we can all welcome them back with open arms.
Hacker news is awesome today. "Shun white supremacists" getting downvoted, nice.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#406Earlier 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…
> Then, the images started getting grainier as they apparently wanted to improve their recognition in different conditions. I'd always assumed that was noise carefully tuned to throw off one machine learning model or another that was being used to beat the captcha, sort of like this: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/2/16597276/google-ai-image-... I think it might be the same when they switch to other types of objects…
>I'd always assumed that was noise carefully tuned to throw off one machine learning model or another that was being used to beat the captcha
I was thinking it was trying to dirty up the image just like the lenses on cameras get dirty. What happens to the image recognition when there's water spots, dirt, mud, etc on the lens that keeps parts of the image obscured?
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#407Earlier 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 :)
> Good thing the definition of white supremacist is commonly agreed upon and noncontroversial and absolutely isnt subject to definition creep :)
The definition is commonly agreed upon, and what "white supremacist" means is not at all controversial to most people. It certainly isn't so arbitrary as to be meaningless.
Now, the term may be misapplied at times, as may any term, but for it to be misapplied, it has to have an accepted application to begin with. A term without a definition can't be subject to definition creep, and the possible creep of a term like "white supremacist" is that wide to begin with.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wi…
This is very hostile to people who use screen readers.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#409So how does it really work? In the article a lot of words about obfuscated code reading browser fingerprint, but that's just a fingerprint, a bot can run a browser as well and fingerprint will not reveal him.
How clicking the checkbox helps? Do they measure the delay it takes me to read the captcha request and react by clicking?
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#410Slightly related, but I have a fun conspiracy to share: I'm convinced that part of the reason Google released headless Chrome is as a honeypot for bot authors to use. The idea is that instead of going through the effort of fingerprinting and identifying new bot software, release something that bot authors will use instead that you have a capability to detect. Somewhere inside of headless Chrome, there's one or more s…
It's actually not that complicated. Most headless browser drivers have some global JavaScript functions in the `window` namespace that immediately identify themselves.
I once ran into a piece of code from the scammy advertising world that tried to redirect users to a phishing site. They cleverly tried to hide themselves from the automated quality checks some ad networks do, by checking for these functions and appearing benign if they saw them. One of the checks even created an exception and then inspected the stack trace for certain flags that apparently are only there on some type of headless browser. Clever!