hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet • Hacker News Board

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#161

Post by DharmaPolice » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #102

dsabanin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently Google's captcha asked me to mark all the traffic meters on the photos, and amongst the choices was a photo of a mailbox. It didn't let me through until I marked it as a meter as well. Good luck to whatever self driving car they are training using this data.

Maybe would be kind of fun if we, the users, could form a coalition to deliberately mislabel photos on captures on a mass scale. It just seems there lacks a way to make it happen beyond the hacker community.

4chan users already used to do this for the old text based ReCaptcha. The idea was everyone put in a particular racial slur (they're not very imaginative) for the second word. I doubt it had any impact.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#162

Post by lowlevellimbo » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

protoduction wrote: post #154

slx26 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems to me there's usually a way to handle that without invading the user's privacy or wasting their time As much as I agree with your dislike of captchas, I don't think this is true at scale (unless universal online identities existed, which could and should include anonymous identifiers by design). When you need to accept information from anonymous users (comments, votes, forms, registrations), there's no way…

I built an alternative[0] that takes a proof of work approach. As a site owner you set the difficulty that makes sense for you: so perhaps you would want 20 seconds of computation before you can submit. The nice thing is that this can happen entirely in the background while the user fills in the form. Also with multiple requests from the same IP in a short timespan, the difficulty increases. There are downsides to to…

> FriendlyCaptcha will prevent 99.9% of spam

For someone who has little expertise in this specific field, how are you calculating this?

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#163

Post by adkadskhj » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 wrote: post #156

fab1an wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With our hCaptcha Enterprise product ( https://www.botstop.com ), showing a CAPTCHA actually only happens in rare cases (relatively speaking..) - vast majority of bots are caught and stopped in the background (using ML), and most users will never see one.

I have a VPN so like ~50% of web sites present a captcha to me ... had to subscribe to a service solving captchas automatically.

> had to subscribe to a service solving captchas automatically.

What a bizarre world we've made for ourselves.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#164

Post by Normille » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #48

I dislike the widespread use of captcha regardless of provider. I realize anything connected to the internet will be subject to automated abuse, and it's impossible to run some types of services without taking some steps to defend against it, but it seems to me there's usually a way to handle that without invading the user's privacy or wasting their time. The exact details will vary based on the type of service, of c…

  >One particularly egregious misuse of captcha in a service I use presents one after I enter a correct username and password

Is it eBay by any chance?

That recently started randomly showing reCaptchas to me when I'm already logged in and have been using the site for some time. When this happens, it descends into a never-ending cycle of more login screens and then more reCaptchas.

But thankfully eBay have taken note of the dozens of complaints about this on their user forums, dating back to 2018 and rushed their best people in to fix it.

[That last sentence was dripping with sarcasm, in case anyone unfamiliar with the company thought eBay ever took any notice whatsoever of their users' concerns]

I'm not a violent person at all. But if I ever meet the person who spawned reCaptcha and all its equally annoying clones, which are a pox on the internet, I won't be responsible for my own actions.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#165

Post by intellirogue » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #90

fab1an wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google uses reCAPTCHA labels exclusively for themselves, and is extracting hundreds of free person years of labor from internet users every single day via this. hCaptcha lets anyone access this type of service, provided they follow certain ethical AI guidelines

How long has the content of the recaptcha puzzles been entirely unchanged, despite being shown to billions of users? Like five years? It should be painfully obvious that there is no actual labeling going on at this point, they have all the training data they'll ever need for traffic lights... And by a corollary, since they haven't started labeling different kind of data, it's clear that either they no longer need any…

For me at least, the images on recaptcha have been getting much much worse, to the point of often being almost indistinguishable. So although they are still typically asking for the same things (cars, buses, stop signs, traffic lights) they do seem to be actually still making progress on the labelling effort.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#166

Post by BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

blindm wrote: 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…

And you are also contributing, without pay, to G$$gle AI and their plans of world domination.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#167

Post by landerwust » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

raspyberr wrote: post #139

blindm wrote: 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…

Lots of websites sit behind a single company which has now changed to use its own captach is a good thing?

It's not ideal but it is an improvement.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#168

Post by protoduction » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

lowlevellimbo wrote: post #162

protoduction wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built an alternative[0] that takes a proof of work approach. As a site owner you set the difficulty that makes sense for you: so perhaps you would want 20 seconds of computation before you can submit. The nice thing is that this can happen entirely in the background while the user fills in the form. Also with multiple requests from the same IP in a short timespan, the difficulty increases. There are downsides to to…

> FriendlyCaptcha will prevent 99.9% of spam For someone who has little expertise in this specific field, how are you calculating this?

Admittedly it's not calculated so it may be a stretch, it's based on the assumption that the vast majority of spam out there just looks for forms to submit without smarts (which is also why honeypots can be pretty effective, especially if you have a small website that nobody will take the effort to work around it.)

I've seen people report that they have reduced spam to near nothing already with just a honeypot, but of course I can't verify those claims.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#169

Post by intellirogue » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

drngdds wrote: post #62

Is hCaptcha less of a pain for users who block tracking (with Brave, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, etc) than reCaptcha is? I'm not sure I've ever solved an hCaptcha, but I find reCaptchas to routinely be incredibly time-consuming, and I suspect it's because I block their trackers.

I'm using Brave plus NextDNS, and am on a CG-NAT IPv4 address, so reCaptcha absolutely hates me. I always need to do at least 5 rounds of matching before it'll let me past. My record has been 12 rounds.

hCaptcha seems to pretty consistently only make me do 2 rounds, so I certainly prefer it.

Re: hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

#170

Post by forgotmypw17 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

blindm wrote: 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…

As a nojs browser, I only think it's great in the sense that I don't have to waste my time with sites which don't care about accessibility.