Live data from Hacker News

hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

hcaptcha.com

21–30 of 380 posts

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#21

Curious what people think about hCaptcha?

For me I find hCaptcha harder and more ambiguous than what I have experienced with reCaptcha. The ambiguity might be because my phone is set to Japanese. I got asked to identify 電車 (Densha, electric train), but there were also images of diesel train. Is it translation error, or is it really asking me to identify electric train? (The correct term for train in general in Japanese is 列車 ressha)

[deleted]

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#22
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far, far superior to reCaptcha from a user's perspective using Tor. I can solve a few puzzles with hCaptcha and I know I'll get through and see the content. With reCaptcha I might solve 3 puzzles and then get denied anyway, or I might solve 10 puzzles with no end in sight and give up.

On the other hand, many Tor users disable Javascript. Out of curiosity, does anyone know a good CAPTCHA that doesn't use JS?

BotStop by hCaptcha (enterprise). AFAIK there's also a Google reCaptcha frontend that doesn't require JS. Neither companies offer those solutions because of privacy or security benefits, but to support old IE versions of course.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#23
That's great to see! At Plausible Analytics, we had a wave of spam attacks two months ago or so and hCaptcha saved us. Great product and great service both for companies and for users. We're very happy with how it works. And great to have a quality de-Googled alternative for this use case!

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#24

This sounds kinda nitpicky but I think it's an important distinction. We're talking about the web, not the internet, right? Or is hcaptcha also used for iOS apps, Android apps, etc.?

hCaptcha runs anywhere, even works on Telegram groups: https://github.com/hCaptcha/telegram-bot

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#25
I appreciate at least having a good option that doesn't involve putting a Google product on my website. We tried to use our own captcha back in the day, and then used some third party, and they just weren't good enough. I'm glad to see them getting this market share because it means that they will get the opportunity to improve based on a large set of users similar to how Google is able to make their products so good.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#26

I really hate all these captcha codes Why can’t they do something like a reverse SSL where we have to authenticate ourselves as humans? For example if I have an Apple account on my Apple devices, why can’t they figure out a way to authenticate me as a human from that information? This doesn’t work for all scenarios (eg throwaway accounts), but it could work for the majority?

Webauthn may make it easy because it supports platform authenticators like Touch ID / Face ID. Two good demos are at http://webauthn.me/ and https://webauthn.io/

It's now supported in all major browsers but platform authenticators are likely not supported on all OS yet.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#27

Curious what people think about hCaptcha?

It's been terrible, when Cloudflare switched to hCaptcha it not only broke our app but it seems every time they make a change it breaks something else. We might be a special case but it's hard to say since all they say it's "quirks" and they keep making changes without announcing anything.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#28
post #4

Worth noting that this title is primarily due to Cloudflare having switched to them from ReCAPTCHA, and Cloudflare is... well, relatively popular, to say the least. I'm curious what kind of data may exist on the experience of switching for larger providers; do the users like it? how much more/less time do they spend solving? do they care, let alone even notice that it's not Google's ReCAPTCHA? Regardless, as ReCAPTCH…

Disclaimer: I've been an engineer at hCaptcha for a few years now building out the service. I'm just as interested in you as hearing about customer and user success/pain stories!

> Worth noting that this title is primarily due to Cloudflare having switched to them from ReCAPTCHA, and Cloudflare is... well, relatively popular, to say the least.

That's definitely a part of it, but we also have a number of other large sites and services that use hCaptcha to protect against bots, and more that get added every day because of our more advanced bot detection special sauce.

> I'm curious what kind of data may exist on the experience of switching for larger providers; do the users like it? how much more/less time do they spend solving? do they care, let alone even notice that it's not Google's ReCAPTCHA?

From what we've seen, the integration process is generally smooth, especially if you're a previous reCAPTCHA user, since we keep the interface and workflow largely the same.

Solving is roughly the same although we have a number of other protections that irritate bot maintainers and get activated when we detect them.

Not sure if the majority of people are aware of the change, I'm sure some technically savvy people pick up on it more than not.

> Regardless, as ReCAPTCHA is not only terribly annoying but also built for surveillance from the ground up, I still view this as a good improvement.

That's actually one the top reasons we've had a lot of customers come over to us; we put a heavy emphasis on user privacy / security, including adopting/supporting privacy-preserving protocols (PrivacyPass, Tor), and minimal retention of data (see our data privacy policy on our site).

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#29
post #11

I think it's great. So many sites sit behind Cloudflare now and Cloudflare now uses hCaptcha, which is a big win. And the hCaptchas themselves are easy to complete. No more wondering if you actually clicked on 'all' the traffic lights anymore, yay! I inspected the source code of Google's reCaptcha offering and was disgusted at how many bits of information they were collecting. They also seem to be fingerprinting user…

reCaptcha has also gotten increasingly annoying lately.

I forgot my password to one site and tried about 2 or 3 different passwords and in-between each it asked me to do about 7 or 8 of those labelling exercises. I finally just gave up and left the site.

Not only that, but the labelling exercises weren't clear. It wanted me to label a "公交車" which means more like a public city bus and there were also school buses which would normally not be called that in Chinese so I didn't label them but Google thought they were part of that class, and wouldn't let me proceed without me labelling them, and furthermore, punished me with more "hard" exercises like that. I guess they are trying to turn me into a stupid bot.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#30
post #11

I think it's great. So many sites sit behind Cloudflare now and Cloudflare now uses hCaptcha, which is a big win. And the hCaptchas themselves are easy to complete. No more wondering if you actually clicked on 'all' the traffic lights anymore, yay! I inspected the source code of Google's reCaptcha offering and was disgusted at how many bits of information they were collecting. They also seem to be fingerprinting user…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN