Doesn't that particular Captcha also work in an incognito browser? I don't see where all this complexity comes in. You simulate the mouse movement and the click. Your browser pretends to not be able to run webgl, so no ghost image. Forcing the user to have a history with google services would lock everyone out who's new. The user agent and other browser metadata is easy to fake.
Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
471–480 of 647 posts
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Have someone take a portrait photo of the back of your head.
Or take the photo using a potato. The security at my gym requires a photo id - but you can barely see who's on the picture. It looks to be printed with a dot printer.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they bother checking the user agent when it's the easiest thing to spoof (really, you probably can't even call it spoofing)
I'd bet that the vast majority of botters/phishers which Facebook deals with are amateurs. That said, I meant using unusual user agent software, not really just having an unusual user agent string.
We have a Wordpress site that suddenly saw a surge of hacking attempts. Turns out they all had IE7 user agents. Blocked that, not a problem anymore. Wouldn't surprise me if big sites use simple measures for such simple attack attempts as well.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#474The captcha always reminds me of The Stanley Parable:
> Employee #427's job was simple: he sat at his desk in room 427 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard.
> Orders came to him through a monitor on his desk, telling him what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in what order.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#475Earlier 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…
>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.
Or a blind user who might actually rely on both labels and names. That's a bit like what arxiv does, they have hidden links that ban your ip when you crawl, but the links aren't hidden for AT users. I got myself banned that way once.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would've made an awesome SciFi short story. The twist at the end is that she's lying.
I can't imagine that a car dealership would even care, as long as they got to sell a car. "Oh dang, you ticked the 'not a robot' box but you are actually a robot ... Ah, no worries, I'll put a call in to head office, get the paperwork changed. Well, enjoy your car! ... And don't forget to come back in six months for your free oil change! ... for the car, I mean."
Are there rules against selling to robots? I mean, a great portion of the stock exchange is just that, essentially, no?
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#477Earlier 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.
At the risk of getting downvoted too, I'll second this. Reddit is already a great platform to read fun comments on any possible subject, let's try to keep them differentiated.
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's not like the word 'fire hydrant' exists in those countries either, so some kind of knowledge/learning/look-up is involved anyway, no?
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have received a "suspicious activity" warning on Twitter for any new account I've helped open up over the last year. You can confirm your identity by entering your phone number and receiving a text. I feel like it's more of a cheap ploy to get additional info after your first 25 tweets than it is any bot detection algorithm.
It's not, it's really not. They really do want to verify you're a person. Facebook got busted using that (security) info for marketing purposes, and the reaction was muted; but, within the security community, it was loud and angry. Within a week, they had ceased completely.
Don't they still use your phone number you give them for 2FA for advertising? https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...
Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?
#480Earlier 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)…
> 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. That's the plot of Blade Runner 2.
I would have sent them a photo of a robot.