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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

#61

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…

Somebody tries to break into your house 10% of the time you leave?

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

#62

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…

That's a terrible analogy. Are you saying that once a visitor completes a captcha on your website, they can steal all your stuff? In that case, the problem is with you and your website security.

Seems like an apt analogy - adding in friction for the small minority of instances where someone would undertake an action you don't want them to. Not literally "if I don't make someone choose 5 firetrucks out of 9 pictures they're going to steal my stuff".

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

#63
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did not know this, just enabled all of them. Thank you!

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

#64

Maybe someone should do a solver for this CAPTCHA and put the code on GitHub. It does look really easy to solve using Machine Learning.

You can subscribe here for whenever it happens: https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/320

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

#65
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".

It's probably no longer available because picking out "the sad one" just amounts to picking out the one in a minor key. Machines should be able to do that fairly easily.

That's the ironic part, machines are able to solve these just fine so they defeat the purpose entirely.

I wonder, does recaptcha work with your google account? Because at some point a lot of people will end up doing some kind of identity verification on there. But I think Google and co can make a reasonable assertion about being human by looking at activity across said Google account - location, emails, documents, etc.

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

#66

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…

I run a community forum and have done so for over ten years. Spam accounts is a regular occurrence, but thanks to various services (akismet, stop forum spam), captchas, and simple word / behaviour filters (anyone with Anyway, at one point we decided to just block the IP ranges from countries like Russia and Vietnam, which seemed to have the most spam accounts.

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

#67
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 cultu…

I saw this one today, which asks you to pick a "cheese" illustration: https://imgur.com/a/fQSQpX4.

I'm very much of the opinion that almost all modern captchas are american-centric. Mailboxes, fire hydrants, Trams are not recognizable for billions of people.

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

#68

That looks like a really poor captcha, as overhyped as machine learning is I think defeating a system like this accurately is something you’d give as a class project. It might slow down legitimate users but anyone nefarious will get through. Never mind you can outsource solving these to Bali for a penny each - maybe less.

I'm not sure how effective an AI would really be on this. Distinguishing from a pattern on top of the dice vs a pattern on the side/front seems like it would actually produce a lot of false positives.

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

#69
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No can do. You would be in breach of the AirBNB terms of service: "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform. "

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.

That’s pedantic and not even that right. The browser is an agent, not a bot. A bot takes semi-autonomous actions after being instructed by a human, for an undetermined amount of time; A browser just does something it’s told for a few seconds (or as long as the website’s open)
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