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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

#411

Post by behringer »

joaobeno wrote: post #355
behringer wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works for me. Assuming one uses something like Privacy Badger and it if it were programmed to block reCaptcha, these websites that require recaptcha will go the way of anti-adblocker popups. People will simply say no and hit the X and go to their competitors.

Sure, my gov (Brazil) uses reCaptcha on the page where you can check your electoral status (For example: if you can vote, where, and if not, what is missing). Where can I find a competitor for that?

Ask your political representative why they're relying on a foreign ad service to manage their government websites.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#412

Post by Faark »

jimmaswell wrote: post #276
Faark wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that will never change if significant services keep blocking Tor users. Thus we have a feedback loop effectively fighting privacy...

Somehow I doubt most Tor users are really just in it for privacy for general browsing, especially since it's so slow and limited. You can get a VPN for that. Unless you're a total privacy purist, there's not much incentive to use Tor unless you're buying drugs/something else illegal or just curious to look around the dark web.

Tor is free with no signup / cc required. This makes a huge difference, especially for younger users. Did for me back then, at least.

Initially it was slow, yes. But totally fine the last few years for normal browsing and reasonable downloads. Speedtest.net, speedtest.googlefiber & fast.com just now gave me 5, 6 & 10Mbps for whatever server in Ghana i got. Only the high ping causes loading times to still be a bit annoying.

But right now the biggest reason not to use Tor for anything "legit" is the many services blocking you, since indeed most current Tor users are not what those services want and the race to the bottom of Tor will continue, if we haven't reached it already.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#413

Post by LinuxBender »

dmux wrote: post #339
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forum software like vBulletin and Invision often has this feature built in, and I've used it on a forum I help run. Unfortunately, after writing four or five custom questions, I soon found server logs showing spam bots blowing through the questions in seconds -- I suspect that since this is a common enough strategy, it's worth their time to pay someone $0.10 to pick the correct answer, then save the question and answ…

I don't remember what forum software it was, but they'd render a number or word using all periods (kind of like ASCII art) and ask you to enter it in a text field. I wonder how well that worked.

Here is a rough silly first pass using figlet. [1] It just displays a word. Next I need to accept a post of that word and do something. Maybe another version will use a game.

[1] - https://tinyvpn.org/up/d/

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#414

Post by saagarjha »

benreesman wrote: post #402
kbenson wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't take a lot of compute resources to have multiple profiles, and when evidence of a high assurance level (a referring URL that is known to designate a specific user of a major service) to link it with other profiles that also have that designation. To me, that seems par for the course for any service that's generating profiles of browsing behavior and trying to make any sort of decisions based on it. It redu…

GitHub is always at your disposal. NV doesn’t sell the consumer cards to enterprises. So on AWS a multi-GPU box will cost you about 12 dollars an hour. If you can disambiguate, let’s just say 85% of profiles absent IP or cookies, well I think you just broke the academic SOTA and I’d love to make some calls. Cheat sheet: you can’t.

> GitHub is always at your disposal. NV doesn’t sell the consumer cards to enterprises. So on AWS a multi-GPU box will cost you about 12 dollars an hour.

I don’t see how this is related to the claim, since it doesn’t solve the problem. But the advertising company that I let run code on my website will certainly do the job pretty well, I’d say.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#415

Post by saagarjha »

benreesman wrote: post #331
bad_user wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about our friends and family? Should we configure a VPN for them too? Btw the argument you just made applies to any form of surveillance or censorship. Just because your can still find functional VPN services for China, is China's great firewall OK? And what happens when web services start blocking VPNs? Netflix does it quite successfully. And I'm sure Cloudflare could provide such a service for free.

I’m not making a moral argument for the surveillance state, I wear Curve25519 on one arm and the word “citizenfour” on the other. I agree that there is a vast and almost impossible to regulate overreach by these companies. Your argument is extremely compelling. But when HN users complain about being spied on I smell a FAANG rejection letter.

> when HN users complain about being spied on I smell a FAANG rejection letter

I work at a FAANG: here’s my complaint about being spied on.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#416

Post by zcid »

benreesman wrote: post #393
__jal wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have no right to use my website Of course. > Recaptcha is simply part of this negotiation. It is only a negotiation if I know it is there.

You’re commenting on HN, you know it’s there.

And what about the other 99.99999% of people that use the web? Do they also understand what is going on behind the scenes?

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#417

Post by snlnspc »

benreesman wrote: post #393
__jal wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have no right to use my website Of course. > Recaptcha is simply part of this negotiation. It is only a negotiation if I know it is there.

You’re commenting on HN, you know it’s there.

I didn't, but assume this is the case with everything. I mostly care about giving my data away for free (cut me in please), but none of my non-HN commenting roommates knew. Is their privacy less important than mine?

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#418

Post by ajxs »

__jal wrote: post #299
benreesman wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment adds a lot to the conversation, so I don’t want to be more contrary than necessary. It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years). Much like the highest information-gain feature for the future price of a…

> It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years). That may be the case for some people, but that is not my complaint, nor that of many folks I know. I simply don't care how FB, Google and other surveillance outfits mak…

If I could upvote this comment twice, I would. This succinctly summarises my views on the subject. We shouldn't have to justify _why_ we don't want our private information harvested by these companies. I would still feel remarkably uneasy even _if_ Facebook and Google were demonstrably benevolent citizens of the online world, but we've seen time and time again how invasive and malicious they can be. The fact that both of these companies have political ambition makes the entire situation much scarier. Count me out.

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#419

Post by dang »

anth_anm wrote: post #358
benreesman wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment adds a lot to the conversation, so I don’t want to be more contrary than necessary. It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years). Much like the highest information-gain feature for the future price of a…

> source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years Why would anyone ever trust a goddamn thing you have to say about their data? Unless they pay your salary and are asking you to give your expertise on hoarding and abusing user data, obviously.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our many requests to stop.

If we allow users to harass and attack people who have genuine expertise for posting here, does that make HN better or worse? Obviously worse. Mob behaviors like this are incompatible with curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

#420

Post by incompatible »

ballenf wrote: post #213
1_player wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with Brave: I'm logged in into a gmail account and a custom domain hosted on gmail, yet every time there's a reCAPTCHA widget on the site, I have to do it 2 or 3 times before I'm let in. One trick that seems to help fool that awful piece of tech: click slowly on the images, as if you were thinking a second or two before each click. Maybe click a wrong image and deselect it again. In other words, behave like a sl…

I also have the feeling that making mistakes — selecting an image that looks like a traffic light but isn’t — sometimes results in faster admittance than being surgically accurate. Again, being slower and more error prone seems to be rewarded.

I don't even know what the right answer is in a lot of cases. There's a bit of the traffic light casing at the edge of a square, does that count as a traffic light, or only the lamp itself?
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