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Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

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Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#91

Post by stirfrykitty »

gok wrote: post #64
jcomis wrote: post #47

I hate the v3 reCAPTCHA. On FF, I usually KNOW I am answering correctly and it says I failed. I always have to go through it multiple times. It's maddening. It often leaves me second guessing myself... is that sliver of car counted? is a crossing signal a street light? What about those streetlights way off in the distance, do I select those two in addition to the ones front and center? That RV looks sort of like a bu…

It's not really about getting the questions right. The challenges they present aren't that hard for modern computer vision systems. It's more about verifying that you consider the question for a "human" amount of time, make your mouse move like a human might, etc.

Captchas are hell on the blind and vision impaired. There are add-ons for this, but they mostly suck. Things like Webvisum exist but they are invite only.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#92

Post by djrogers »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #45
cbsks wrote: post #5

You can view your reCaptcha V3 score here: https://recaptcha-demo.appspot.com/recaptcha-v3-request-scor... I get .7 on my iPhone, I’m guessing that my liberal use of Firefox containers and the cookie auto-delete extension on my desktop will give me a much lower score and cause me to have to jump through extra hoops at websites that implement it, just like the reCaptcha V2 does. Edit: I also got 0.7 on Firefox with st…

What is most odd is I get 0.7 on iOS Safari which I use for 100% of my purposeful mobile browsing, but I get .9 on iOS Chrome, which is only used when I accidentally click on links from gmail (so very, very rarely).

Not really odd at all - if you're using the gmail app, there's a shared authentication cookie in all Google apps - including Chrome, so Google knows who you are in Chrome.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#93

Post by markholmes »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #61
ulfw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse when you're running a VPN (especially one of the major public ones). When I see reCAPTCHA I basically give up as sometimes I have to go through 6 or 7 full sets to be let into a site. It's the evil of the internet this.

Thanks for verifying that for me. I thought it was just me being horrible at figuring out what they want.

No, the same thing happens to me. I often run ProtonVPN + Firefox with uBlock Origin and a couple other privacy-related addons.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#94

Post by lucb1e »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #73
cyphar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the answer is (basically) all of them. Combined with CloudFlare, even websites that aren't explicitly making that decision are still opting their users into both CloudFlare and Google's tracking. I use Tor fairly regularly and it's a complete nightmare. I sometimes spend 5-15 minutes solving reCAPTCHA (since your Tor circuit changes every 10 minutes this can result in having to solve the reCAPTCHA seve…

Crummy solution, but get the FF user agent switcher in TBB. And then set it to Windows/Chrome. And all those Scroogle-captchas are easy-peasy.

I can't help but wonder if that's because of the nearly unique user-agent-string + user-agent-feature-detection combination, allowing it to identify you as belonging to a very small group of people.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#95

Post by kohtatsu »

dmix wrote: post #53
superasn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worst part is my chrome installation is 100% fresh with no browsing history and FF has cookies and history older than an year ago.. still google trusts Chrome more than FF?

If they looked for identifying information in cookies or browsing history people would be even more upset and spammers would just simulate it with browser bots... which is why I believe it takes a black box approach to each detection regardless of external state. Besides obviously the cookies set within the iframe of the recatcha. This of course doesn’t help explain why Firefox is so heavily targeted by what’s suppos…

I've heard that being signed into your Google account can make the challenges simpler, presumably reducing things like the noise and the slow-fade load animations.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#96

Post by nullwasamistake »

oil25 wrote: post #81
ulfw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse when you're running a VPN (especially one of the major public ones). When I see reCAPTCHA I basically give up as sometimes I have to go through 6 or 7 full sets to be let into a site. It's the evil of the internet this.

reCAPTCHA on VPN is difficult, but on the Tor network, they are downright impossible. I've never been able to get past it, even after a few dozen painful attempts. That means Google services are entirely off-limits over Tor, even Search, which is a disgrace.

Sometimes Google will flag you as robot and never allow you to pass no matter how many you get right. It's total horseshit

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#97

Post by qqii »

cbsks wrote: post #5

You can view your reCaptcha V3 score here: https://recaptcha-demo.appspot.com/recaptcha-v3-request-scor... I get .7 on my iPhone, I’m guessing that my liberal use of Firefox containers and the cookie auto-delete extension on my desktop will give me a much lower score and cause me to have to jump through extra hoops at websites that implement it, just like the reCaptcha V2 does. Edit: I also got 0.7 on Firefox with st…

Seeing what everyone else has posted I'm very suprised that I've received a 0.3 using Chrome on Android. I'm logged in to Google and most of my browsing is via Chrome or Chrome based webview. At least on my phone I've never cleared my cookies or done anything special.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#98

Post by rbobrowicz »

ronjouch wrote: post #46
cbsks wrote: post #5

You can view your reCaptcha V3 score here: https://recaptcha-demo.appspot.com/recaptcha-v3-request-scor... I get .7 on my iPhone, I’m guessing that my liberal use of Firefox containers and the cookie auto-delete extension on my desktop will give me a much lower score and cause me to have to jump through extra hoops at websites that implement it, just like the reCaptcha V2 does. Edit: I also got 0.7 on Firefox with st…

Using Firefox with uBlock and Cookie-Autodelete I get 0.1 Using Chrome, even incognito and with uBlock I get 0.7 (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. F you, Google, this is blatant bullying, technically unjustifyable abuse of your stranglehold over the whole web platform.

To offer a different datapoint:

On FireFox with uBlock on and logged into my corporate gmail I get 0.9, switching to a private tab I get 0.7. This is with every privacy setting turned on in the FF options.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#99

Post by rbritton »

I'm torn on this. reCAPTCHA v2 (mostly useless[0]) and v3 function largely on browser fingerprinting plus a few other heuristics (e.g., whether or not you have a Google cookie). Any meaningful privacy measures to resist fingerprinting end up with a low reCAPTCHA score. I personally run into a wall on most sites using it.

That said, it's one of the most effective means of combatting automated spam and credential stuffing attacks. In a recent implementation I did, having 2FA active for your account bypasses the captcha requirement, but the vast majority of users are still too non-technical to use 2FA and are subject to the frustrations of reCAPTCHA.

[0]: https://github.com/dessant/buster

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#100

Post by svnpenn »

superasn wrote: post #24

There are a lot of sites that are totally unusable on Firefox regardless how much you use ff. I do all my mobile browsing on FF yet when I try to use some websites I always get this Recaptcha failed error(1) while it works flawlessly on chrome though I never use it often. Try it, maybe it will happen for you too. Same happens on most sites which show you that "checking your browser" page via cloudflare too. The web i…

I have better luck if I log into Gmail :(
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