Live data from Hacker News

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

quora.com

521–530 of 647 posts

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

#521
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there rules against selling to robots? I mean, a great portion of the stock exchange is just that, essentially, no?

Robots can't own property, as they are not recognized as a person. You may sell to someone represented by a robot, but you're not selling to the robot. When using a vending machine, your making a trade with the vending machine company, not the machine itself.

Hm, so selling to a robot without someone behind to represent would be extralegal I guess, and if any problems occur during the trade you'd be on your own?

The closest thing would probably trades with wild animals. Are there any laws on that? (Probably not, but the situation is not unthinkable.)

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

#522
post #520
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a good OSS alternative for ReCaptcha?

I'm doubtful about any good solution for having computers decide whether we are sufficiently human.

> I'm doubtful about any good solution for having computers decide whether we are sufficiently human.

Two questions: - Couldn't a computer just temporarily hire a human to prove there is a human involved? - Why are we using recaptcha or verifying humanity anyway? I understand stopping spam, scams, and fraud, but scraping already public data doesn't present significant harm.

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

#523
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for google, you are the enemy. not even bots. captcha is google master blow against ad blockers. a regular user, who they have all the info, give them dollars per ad impression. You, with your doNotTrack (ha! that was a joke) and privacy addons makes them only cents per ad impressions. you are google's enemy. remember this when you get stuck in captcha hell (and consequently censored from most sites until changing de…

Yup. It's insufferable. Even on sites where I'm a paying customer, I have to go through captcha garbage.

If you're a paying customer, complain to the company. Let them know their site is annoying and frustrating to use because of this.

If they lose enough customers over this, they will probably remove the captcha.

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

#524
post #382
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What isn't subject to definition creep? Murder now, for some, includes abortion. Censorship now includes, for some, private companies removing bad actors from their private systems. Come on, that's lazy to dismiss it that way when society literally changes all the time.

Offtopic, but regarding abortion: Whether or not abortion is a murder is not about definition of "murder" it is about definition of "human being". There's no doubt that abortion involves killing a living creature, the whole pro-choice vs pro-life debate is basically about one simple question: "is fetus a human being?". If you answer that with "yes", then every abortion becomes a murder, plain and simple. This also ex…

Isn’t the compromise position essentially ‘after X weeks’, where the value of X is highly contested? (And on the binary yes/no question there’s nuances too which get debated eg if continuing the pregnancy would be a significant threat to the mother’s life)

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

#525
post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it somehow less tacky to give that value away to Google for free? Yes, mainly because we're talking about fractions of cents. Also, it's not for free; the website and its users get a good anti-abuse measure in return. There's a big difference between something that cannot make money and something that makes pennies for the site. But, to be fair, 99.9% of users aren't going to notice the difference in captcha bra…

Google's entire business model is leveraging of fractions of a cent on a mass scale

I assume you're talking about ads. But you're bidding at least cents on Adwords and making at least cents on Adsense. In Adsense's hey day, I had relatively low-volume sites making over $1 per click and paying my rent in lucrative niches.

I didn't find any pricing examples on hcaptcha's website. For all I know, people are bidding 5 cents per image.

Anyways, I definitely want to see more serious contenders in the captcha space so that we all aren't contributing to Google's middle-manning of the entire internet, and I'd like to try hcaptcha even out of curiosity.

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

#526
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think quora over states what Google looks at by a wide margin, just try to access a captcha in incognito, they won't have access to as much info as they do on you and yet you're still presented with the same level of captcha (if not more of them, which is to be expected)

Sometimes just checking the checkbox is enough. Sometimes you need to identify cars and store fronts. I think the better Google knows who you are, the more likely just the checkbox is going to be enough. If you go incognito, you have to train their neural nets, if you give up your privacy, you get in for free.

The clever part from Google's perspective is that you have to trade one of these things to Google in order to get access to sites that do not belong to Google at all. Google convinced site owners to have their users pay a tax to Google.

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

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this. Funnily enough one of the reasons I did it was because Google’s spam filters gave me too many false positives and my gmail account attracted enough spam that sorting through manually was a pain.

Has it been a good experience for you? What are you using? My point was just that even if something is provided to the customer for free, doesn't mean it's easy to produce. That causes a lot of the issues my non-tech friends have with understanding the scope of work. Just because social media is free and easy to set up as a customer doesn't mean developing a social media is easy at all.

I’ve been using exim and dovecot with rspamd for spam filtering. Have two VPSs on different providers to provide MX backup properly (they’re cheap these days and for low traffic I don’t need much more than the smallest VPS). I do DKIM and SPF but not DMARC and it gets through gmails spam filter fine and passes the various other tests you can find online. Took a while to set up right (in the end I found the best route to predictability to be writing my own exim config file rather than using someone else’s template) but pretty simple to run after that - there’s some effort to make sure I keep up to date with security patches and monitor log files for anything untoward but it’s relatively small. Using letsencrypt certs so email clients have been relatively simple to set up.

Overall it’s been a good experience. I run into a few sites which when I send to them classify my email as spam or grey list my sending IP so mail doesn’t get through quickly but then I used to have the same spam problem with some sites running my own domain through google apps.

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

#528

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)…

Telling them to fuck off (to the photo request) would have been more human. Following orders is very robot like, you know.

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

#530

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)…

Ironic, given that Zuckerburg is a robot.
Post reply on HN