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

quora.com

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

#621

Post by Legogris »

jgrahamc wrote: post #511
morpheuskafka wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what OP is talking about is Cloudflare not Google's decision. Google provides the CATCHPA API but Cloudflare decides to flag nearly all Tor traffic and make it go through the CATCHPA.

Sigh. We changed this so long ago yet people repeat this over and over again. Do you use the Tor Browser? Please show me a site on Cloudflare which uses CAPTCHA on Tor.

I don't know about TOR, but a couple of years ago we had a site on Cloudflare that had the CAPTCHA come up for visitors from mainland China - where the great firewall blocked the requests to Google. Chinese users were effectively locked out. We contacted Cloudflare about this and got dismissive replies.

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

#622

Post by Legogris »

Frondo wrote: post #405
Frondo wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That comment is not very constructive for discussion and against the guidelines, just like the replies. Downvoting is not censorship. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#623

Post by Legogris »

roywiggins wrote: post #42
SilasX wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, maybe one day they can show a bunch of pictures of sand, where each subsequent pic has a grain removed, with the instructions "click on all the heaps". Spambots will solve the Sorites paradox!

"Click all the ships of Theseus"

"Is there no ship? Close the browser window."

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

#625

Post by learc83 »

robk wrote: post #531
learc83 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why not add a "PLEASE USE THE XML DUMMY!" line to the returned results when you figure out it's them?

Tried that. They didn't seem to care.

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

#626

Post by ValleyOfTheMtns »

I feel somewhat vindicated by this story. I was talking to a couple of work colleagues about the "I'm not a robot" box and they were convinced it worked purely as a time delay, to slow bots down. I had a feeling that there was far more to it than that, but I didn't know how/where to get that information at the time.

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

#627

Post by iheartpotatoes »

Anarch157a wrote: post #575
iheartpotatoes wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently replaced a bunch of securimage captchas with reCAPTCHA v2. During testing I had to shut it off because it became increasingly more complicated every page reload. First it was just one page of traffic lights, but 20 minutes later I was having to click through 5-6 pages of images. This worries me that user's might get pissed off. I'd really like to know if I've made life harder for my users in an attempt to…

I cancelled and deleted my Spotify account because of that. Now any site that asks me to fill a Google recaptcha is met with a swift click on the Back button.

Really? You gave up one of the best streaming music services because you had to use a captcha every now and then? Huh. Good data point. But you're probably not our target audience if you give up that easy, we sell engineering tools for solving difficult problems.

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

#628

Post by beatgammit »

blitmap wrote: post #584
eridius wrote: post #43

Lately I've been getting reCAPTCHA prompts all the time even though I'm not browsing in incognito mode and haven't cleared cookies. All I'm doing is running a very basic ad blocker, using Safari (which blocks third-party tracking), and very rarely loading a Google site. The most interaction I have with Google is when I end up having to use my corporate Google account as SSO for some other site. Given that I'm not doi…

I have noticed this too. I've switched to DuckDuckGo for everything and I haven't changed my habits. Started getting more captchas a couple weeks ago and I know I answered several of them correctly (I'd get tested 3 times in a row). Possible fingerprinting?

This is why I love container tabs in Firefox. I like putting all of the recaptcha stuff in one container so it can't snoop on my other stuff (I'm too lazy to look into what it's doing with cookies and whatnot).

But honestly, I wish it would just die.

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

#629

Post by tyteen4a03 »

Is there an easy-to-implement, simple-to-use alternative solution out there that delivers better UX, does not require i18n treatments and stops spambots just as well?

I'm not seeing any except asking questions about the site, and even that takes effort to translate. Numerical math questions I assume can be easily bypassed.

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

#630

Post by thatoneuser »

retro64 wrote: post #595
renlo wrote: post #594

I’ve had a number of reCAPTCHA incidents where I could not pass the test for tens of images, it was a very frustrating experience. Please do not use reCAPTCHA. The items one is supposed to select often overlap the grids, so it becomes a kind of Keynesian Beauty Contest[1] at that point; I assume they validate based on how much in alignment you are with previous answers, so it becomes a problem of “What nearby grids w…

You’re overthinking it. I have had a similar experience. The worst were the “stop light” questions. Does it mean the pole, the light, the tiny corner overlapping another square? I used to try to include everything as it was technically true. Very frustrating – until I finally started to not care. Click on the most obvious pictures. Click click click. Done. Get it wrong? Click click click on the next one. Way faster w…

Hell I try to figure out what wrong answers to give to fuck up their training data.
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