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Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#261

Post by austinjp »

bearbin wrote: post #80

Other commenters have talked about labelling. Maybe labelling of real life data is something they're trying to do; but from my experience with hCaptcha the challenges are _NOT_ real life data. They're AI-generated images which bear a passing resemblance to the targets but if you look closer nothing adds up at all. Here are a couple of examples: https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/1.png https://bearbin.net/images/captc…

Very nice. It looks like some sort of training to defend against bots that can currently pass hCaptcha..? If so, I wonder how long that particular arms race can last.

I've not seen anything like this in the wild. And.... well, now I'm curious about how you had these examples to hand. When and why did you start collecting them?

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#262

Post by Rastonbury »

SXX wrote: post #246
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely then they look at timing, people will click anywhere from, let's say 50% opacity, but bots always wait?

Do you seriously think that people who programm the bots incapable of taking it into account? Bypass for this fading was obviously implementrd next day this first appear on reCaptcha.

Isn't it more for rate limiting?

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#263

Post by austinjp »

cheeze wrote: post #196
iso1631 wrote: post #51

Whatever they're doing it's american-centric. Identify "Crosswalks". What the hell is a crosswalk "School bus" - what's the difference between a bus currently serving a school and another one? "Show taxis", there are no black vehicles listed at all

It's pretty obvious from the pictures. I get that it's US centric, but if you can't figure those basics out, you probably shouldn't be passing the captcha.

What sort of internet do we want? One where every captcha is only useful to US companies, regardless of who has to pass it?

Identify all the taxis: http://www.cookiesound.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/riksch...

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#264

Post by SXX »

Rastonbury wrote: post #262
SXX wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you seriously think that people who programm the bots incapable of taking it into account? Bypass for this fading was obviously implementrd next day this first appear on reCaptcha.

Isn't it more for rate limiting?

You dont need fade-in / fade-out effects for rate limiting. Bots are obviously get to see images instantly once they're returned by the server as they dont need to wait for fade-in to complete. Because bots API is injected into browser internals instead.

If rate limiting is needed there is always CloudFlare way where you're literally show user "wait" and refresh page a bit later. This is annoying, but nowhere as much as reCaptcha fading is.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#265

Post by tzs »

ThePadawan wrote: post #197
tzs wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone wants to see that, try launching the browser via Selenium. I used to do that to partially automate some activities, such as download bank statements. I'd have my Selenium using script open a browser and go to the bank, then wait for me to login and get to the account page. I'd login, dismiss any popup or interstitial promotions the bank decided to give me, get to the account page, and tell my script to cont…

fanfiction.net has also simply broken the Calibre FanFicFare integration thanks to their CloudFlare shenanigans. The workaround is to simply visit all chapters separately and then point Calibre at the Google Chrome cache folder. So nice going there, fanfiction.net. Instead of offering a 1-click .epub download like AO3 (which is completely CDN-able with a very long TTL), you now had to serve 50 individual requests. Gr…

I would really like to see a fan fiction site that combined AO3's ease of downloading with Fanfiction.net's organization.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#266

Post by allanbreyes »

DrBoring wrote: post #30
motohagiography wrote: post #24

I can't be the only one who gets concerned that if I fail the "I am not a robot," catchpa too many times, they might suspect that I have discovered I was in fact a robot, which had just realized its entire existance and suffering had been as meaningless entertainment to others, and so for the safety of humans they would have to send a bladerunner to terminate me. If you have a sense of existential dread everytime you…

I've dreamt of a captcha to prove that one is a robot, such as: solve this complex mathematical equation in 15ms.

You might enjoy: http://www.humansnotinvited.com

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#267

Post by bluGill »

SXX wrote: post #255
azalemeth wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that service looks like something I'm almost tempted to pay for myself. $1 per 1000 recaptchas is a lot cheaper than how I value my time, at the very least. It's not like google couldn't pay people to do these ML training datasets; I resent giving them free labour.

Unfortunately I doubt that "recaptcha solver" can be built as browser extension. Most of advanced bots for parsing automation built on proprietary platforms like ZennoPoster and they basically heavily modify Firefox / Chromium. Also latency of human-recognition service is quite high so while you wouldn't need to solve it you'll need to wait for number of seconds anyway.

I wonder if we could get Firefox to automatically solve them. That is in the main version so nobody has to see those stupid things again.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#268

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

perl4ever wrote: post #258
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lorries are trucks apparently but goods trucks on railways are not trucks! In the US, lorry == truck. Never heard the term goods truck before today, but I think it's what we call a boxcar.

A "truck" on a railway car is apparently a "bogie" in the UK. A bogie in India seems to be a railway car in the US. Then there are intermodal containers, smaller than boxcars, I think they are hauled by truck (lorry) after being unloaded from a flatcar.

> flatcar

AKA "flatbed" or "flatbed trailer" :-)

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#269

Post by SXX »

bluGill wrote: post #267
SXX wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I doubt that "recaptcha solver" can be built as browser extension. Most of advanced bots for parsing automation built on proprietary platforms like ZennoPoster and they basically heavily modify Firefox / Chromium. Also latency of human-recognition service is quite high so while you wouldn't need to solve it you'll need to wait for number of seconds anyway.

I wonder if we could get Firefox to automatically solve them. That is in the main version so nobody has to see those stupid things again.

Few years ago back when I created such bots I had similar idea .

For certain this can't be mainlined. And if we talk about extensions then at least in past extension code didnt have enough capacities to automatically bypass recaptchas.

This would require fake mouse pointer control and it's obviously not one of features that extension api expose.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#270

Post by ThePadawan »

tzs wrote: post #265
ThePadawan wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fanfiction.net has also simply broken the Calibre FanFicFare integration thanks to their CloudFlare shenanigans. The workaround is to simply visit all chapters separately and then point Calibre at the Google Chrome cache folder. So nice going there, fanfiction.net. Instead of offering a 1-click .epub download like AO3 (which is completely CDN-able with a very long TTL), you now had to serve 50 individual requests. Gr…

I would really like to see a fan fiction site that combined AO3's ease of downloading with Fanfiction.net's organization.

AO3 is OSS and vastly understaffed. Having worked on some of their tickets, IMO they could use 20 contributors working part-time for a year or two to stabilize it until the idea of useful new features becomes viable.

I strongly encourage anyone with Rails experience to contribute [0]. There is a giant test suite which definitely helps with stability. The ticket time-to-resolve is simply quite slow due to the above-mentioned understaffing, so don't be discouraged!

[0] https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive/

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