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Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

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Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#391

Post by drivebycomment »

chillfox wrote: post #350
drivebycomment wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio captchas are considered broken completely (search for various papers over the past decade, including one from CMU), so it has limited usefulness only in a very narrow context in practice. I suspect this is a harbinger of things to come - as we close the gap on passing the Turing test, captchas are likely to get less effective, and we will need to transition to a very different solution for bot detection.

or, just let the bots be. often it's easier to just use a website as api instead of using some broken xml nightmare that requires knowledge of the database tables. If the concern is rate limiting then just rate limit the website. And if you don't like people operating websites with bots then I don't know, maybe stop making websites.

I think you do not understand why website owners use captcha. Website owners use captcha services, because doing so saves money for them.

Captcha will stop saving money, if the captcha becomes so ineffective that the short-term and the long-term downside (annoying users who are subjected to captcha) exceeds the cost saving ("cost" here is potentially many different things - it could be quality of service for normal users, it could be opportunity cost, it could be the cost of serving the traffic like network bandwidth or cpu or database capacity).

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#392

Post by DrJosiah »

fred123 wrote: post #354
DrJosiah wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I work at hCaptcha (we handle the CF captchas), and to respond specifically: audio is inaccessible for those with visual and auditory processing issues, as well as being broken by ML techniques. Not to project, but we suspect this is why Google turns it off if your browser looks at all suspicious. Another user mentioned the Privacy Pass solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23902870 While Privacy Pass is…

Captcha submit requires two touches on iPhone 6S because the submit button will scroll out of view on first touch. Do your devs or product people ever use your own product? That’s one of the first things I’d notice and fix.

I run android. Other devs run Android and recent iPhones. Someone may have an iPhone 6S to test and fix on, I'll check.

In the future, if you've got a bug that's preventing you from doing your thing, we have bug reporting instructions: https://www.hcaptcha.com/reporting-bugs

ETA: two different people have tested on Chrome and Safari on iPhone 6S locally, and can't reproduce. Please take a screenshot and provide more information to: https://www.hcaptcha.com/reporting-bugs if you want to get this fixed.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#393

Post by DrJosiah »

manquer wrote: post #318
DrJosiah wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I work at hCaptcha (we handle the CF captchas), and to respond specifically: audio is inaccessible for those with visual and auditory processing issues, as well as being broken by ML techniques. Not to project, but we suspect this is why Google turns it off if your browser looks at all suspicious. Another user mentioned the Privacy Pass solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23902870 While Privacy Pass is…

Yes there are subset of people with visual problems who also have auditory problems, that does not mean you should not support the ones with vision only problems. Are there not "ML techniques" for visual captchas too ? With more and more powerful models like GPT-3 coming along every few months, Even if the accuracy levels are less for visual over audio today how long do you think that is going to last ?

> Are there not "ML techniques" for visual captchas too?

There are.

> how long do you think that is going to last?

I don't know. So far it hasn't been difficult to recognize the garbage traffic when we take the time to look. And attackers always make it easier by releasing github source and / or announcing their results on Twitter.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#394

Post by alexnewman »

fred123 wrote: post #354
DrJosiah wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I work at hCaptcha (we handle the CF captchas), and to respond specifically: audio is inaccessible for those with visual and auditory processing issues, as well as being broken by ML techniques. Not to project, but we suspect this is why Google turns it off if your browser looks at all suspicious. Another user mentioned the Privacy Pass solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23902870 While Privacy Pass is…

Captcha submit requires two touches on iPhone 6S because the submit button will scroll out of view on first touch. Do your devs or product people ever use your own product? That’s one of the first things I’d notice and fix.

Is this on safari?

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#395

Post by alexnewman »

manquer wrote: post #367
maccam94 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they meant that audio captchas have become inaccessible to humans in general. Bots have gotten so good at audio captchas that the difficulty level has to be high enough that humans are also unable to complete them.

Visual captchas too can be quite very hard these days for the same reasons, there are many other ways to verify bot or human, many of them may not allow you to remain anonymous while doing so, pretty much any 2FA method could work for example. I would say given the choice for a number of people the accessibility is more important than loss of privacy. At least it is choice they should have instead of shutting them of…

Hi HCaptcha-er here. You don't lose all your privacy with our accessibility option. Also we always abide by DNT style protections even for accessibility. That being said our privacy pass solution is totally private and safe.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#396

Post by alexnewman »

miki123211 wrote: post #250

Cloudflare is horrible for blind people. Screen readers, the programs that use synthesized speech to tell us what's on the screen, cannot read images. Good captchas usually have audio equivalents (which come with their own set of problems), but this one doesn't. If you're blind and flagged by Cloudflare for some reason, you're cut off from accessing half the internet, potentially critical banking/governmental/medical…

As a founder of HCaptcha with a legally blind sister I take accessibility very seriously. We implemented this solution when we were still a tiny startup and I think our accessibility is by far the best of all the captchas. Please email support@hcaptcha.com if you are having any issues and we will find a solution. I'm sorry for the confusion and difficulty you may have suffered.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#397

Post by alexnewman »

alexnewman wrote: post #396
miki123211 wrote: post #250

Cloudflare is horrible for blind people. Screen readers, the programs that use synthesized speech to tell us what's on the screen, cannot read images. Good captchas usually have audio equivalents (which come with their own set of problems), but this one doesn't. If you're blind and flagged by Cloudflare for some reason, you're cut off from accessing half the internet, potentially critical banking/governmental/medical…

As a founder of HCaptcha with a legally blind sister I take accessibility very seriously. We implemented this solution when we were still a tiny startup and I think our accessibility is by far the best of all the captchas. Please email support@hcaptcha.com if you are having any issues and we will find a solution. I'm sorry for the confusion and difficulty you may have suffered.

https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#398

Post by alexnewman »

fred123 wrote: post #354
DrJosiah wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I work at hCaptcha (we handle the CF captchas), and to respond specifically: audio is inaccessible for those with visual and auditory processing issues, as well as being broken by ML techniques. Not to project, but we suspect this is why Google turns it off if your browser looks at all suspicious. Another user mentioned the Privacy Pass solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23902870 While Privacy Pass is…

Captcha submit requires two touches on iPhone 6S because the submit button will scroll out of view on first touch. Do your devs or product people ever use your own product? That’s one of the first things I’d notice and fix.

We test on iPhone 6s and it seems to work for us. Perhaps file a support ticket and we can take look?

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#399

Post by kazagistar »

jariel wrote: post #338
kazagistar wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is clear regulation in many countries: nazi speech gets you thrown in jail, the rest is mostly fine. See njmerious european countries like Germany that aren't some dystopia hellscape. That reflects a lot of what happens voluntarily today anyway, but it can't of course be formalized into regulatory law in the USA, because such regulation is restricted by the first amendment. Your panic is unwarranted anyways, be…

"Its just a fictional slippery slope made up to protect hate speech" Ah, and there is the ugly, authoritarian, Stalinist argument right there. "We only ban, denounce, destroy those who are GUILTY of Hate Crimes, so how could you have any worry about that?" People are banned all day long on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Stripe, comments sections etc. for any and all sorts of made up reasons that have nothing to do with…

> We can't leave this issue up to corporate CEO

I agree completely. I think democratizing speech so that it cannot be controlled by any source of power, government or financial, does have real importance. But its not the most important right, compared to life or wellbeing: instead, its important because it supports what's actually important.

But I have a message of good news: it turns out speech can be lightly restricted while leading to less authoritarianism or cronyism, as can be seen from numerous examples, by simply restricting speech in a way that is kept controlled by the specific people who are subject to it.

Re: Turns out half the internet has a single-point-of-failure called “Cloudflare”

#400

Post by thereticent »

ksec wrote: post #294
renewiltord wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a sad story, but maybe you'll like this read about one of the guys who laid the foundation for their tech and his sad decline: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline... I really liked the stories of his skill when he was in his prime. Very inspiring.

I dont know how I missed the Cloudflare IPO and this Story. So thanks for posting it. Extremely good writing, though the story was very sad. I wonder if there are any relationship between FTD and how clever a person or how much brain a person uses.

Nothing beyond the normal "cognitive reserve" findings that high education and broad cognitive engagement makes the brain pathology take longer to reduce your functioning to a dementia state.
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