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Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

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Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#51

Let's push the idiocracy to the extreme by asking Arkose to add a timeout to their captchas, so people have to solve it fast and make the default puzzle be a prime factorization. Modern web become so unusable and poluted that I don't think that it can get worse.

Careful what you wish for - it can, and probably will get worst. I still get cookie rage every time I have to deal with cookie popups. To put things in perspective, i recommend trying to run with a pihole plugged in your network. Even just for a week or two. The difference is so stark it emphasises how shit things are right now.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#52
post #49
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have bots buying your merchandise as fast as possible you don't have a bot problem, you have a pricing problem.

There can be good reasons to keep prices "below market value".

There’s nothing immoral about taking advantage of someone else’s marketing budget. If they feel like pricing below market that’s great. If you can resell their stuff for more great. If they don’t like it they can try to stop you. You can’t fix the real price of things far from market demand without the full force of the state behind you and that usually doesn’t work either.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#54
post #51

Let's push the idiocracy to the extreme by asking Arkose to add a timeout to their captchas, so people have to solve it fast and make the default puzzle be a prime factorization. Modern web become so unusable and poluted that I don't think that it can get worse.

Careful what you wish for - it can, and probably will get worst. I still get cookie rage every time I have to deal with cookie popups. To put things in perspective, i recommend trying to run with a pihole plugged in your network. Even just for a week or two. The difference is so stark it emphasises how shit things are right now.

Just a friendly reminder to anyone reading this — the "annoyances" lists you can enable in uBlock Origin get rid of basically all cookie popups. I haven't seen one in a couple of years.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#55
I came across a website that wanted to force-feed ads to me before watching a video yesterday. However, they wanted me to select the best-fitting ad of 5 different ads with one ad playing automatically after 30s of not choosing one to play.

Sometimes this branch of reality feels like it wasn't meant for productive use. Needless to say I will never come back.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#57

As someone who added CAPTCHA to their own platform recently after resisting for years because of how much I hate them, I have to tell you that the unfortunate truth is that eventually bad actors ruin the party for everyone on every platform. CAPTCHA is necessary for the same reason locking your car/house is necessary. You can probably not do it 9 times out of 10 and it will be fine, but then that 1/10 happens, all yo…

A friend of mine had a startup that they wanted to be disability friendly as a large part of their community was from that group, so they avoided CAPTCHA for a long time.

Eventually they even added it. Spam and vandalism was just too bad.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#58
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A browser is a bot that interacts with the platform. It's not physically possible to use any website except by directing a tool to do it for you.

Probably the nuance that is not spelled out (and certainly should be) is that AirBNB expects only interactive user agents, and not automated/batch user agents.

All those lines of code in a browser are automation.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#59

Let's push the idiocracy to the extreme by asking Arkose to add a timeout to their captchas, so people have to solve it fast and make the default puzzle be a prime factorization. Modern web become so unusable and poluted that I don't think that it can get worse.

I read here on HN that Google has come up with new way to buypass all trackers and adblockers and I think things are going to get really bad for web.

I think it's time we build a directory of applications or a search engine which indexes only the websites that do not use any trackers. The damage of tracking industry to whole web is irreparable but I think we have an opportunity to build a new web that can have mechanisms to prevent any sort of tracking.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#60
post #3

It's Arkose Labs (also used by Roblox, GitHub, Dropbox, Twitch, and more). There's some more links here: https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/178 (Buster is a browser extension for automated captcha solving). You can subscribe here https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/320 Their audio captcha (no longer available?) involved listening to 3 MIDI tunes and picking "the sad one".

> Their audio captcha (no longer available?) involved listening to 3 MIDI tunes and picking "the sad one".

Given that a large part of the world doesn't use the major/minor dichotomy, or even equal temperament, this seems like a terrible way to verify someone is a human...

My favourite recaptchas, if one can have such a thing, are the shape sequence selection ones as they don't make significant assumptions about culture or education.

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