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HBO Max new Captcha system

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Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#191

This is going to be one of the best parts of the new AI-ridden world: humans gradually getting locked out of and giving up on online services because the bots are more patient and more skilled at proving their humanness than humans are. Twitter’s new captchas are also pretty insane, though not quite this bad last I ran into them.

I've started getting blocked on amazon in the evening, and being constantly redirected to captchas and puzzles and invariably whoops ... "the dogs of amazon" pages. (I block amazon ads)

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#192
post #42
post #39

Time's a flat circle. We've reinvented cable and have it delivered via the internet. The quality of the content has fallen off now that folks have been roped into the platforms and everything's getting bundled back up so you have to subsidize garbage just to watch a show or two you like per platform.

You know one service which has never stopped being reliable, easily available, high quality, and free to use? Piracy.

That is illegal in most countries though

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#193

Not saying these are good, but it's been ~10 years and I still have no idea what I'm supposed to click when Google says "click the traffic lights." Just the light sections? What about the edge that takes up 10% of the adjoining box? What about the back or side of a different traffic light? I've tried them all, and my success rate doesn't noticeably change.

I think that’s all accounted for.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#195
post #193

Not saying these are good, but it's been ~10 years and I still have no idea what I'm supposed to click when Google says "click the traffic lights." Just the light sections? What about the edge that takes up 10% of the adjoining box? What about the back or side of a different traffic light? I've tried them all, and my success rate doesn't noticeably change.

I think that’s all accounted for.

I always get it wrong on the first try, so I guess they're accounting for me being a robot.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#196

Terrible UX aside, aren't these really... REALLY easy to solve for a bot? Sum the digits on the dies? 5 lines of openCV should do the trick Find which of 3 (three!) extracts is a repeating pattern?? Could this be any easier? This sounds actually easier for a machine than for a human being!

I've been observing that the custom captcha process itself is a very good bot repellent because someone has to reverse engineer captcha behavior and most malicious actors actually don't know how to. Sprinkle a bit of obfuscation and your 2+2 captcha will be more effective than pages of traffic light selections.

I've made a solver myself recently for a custom captcha, but I think it's more a testament of how bad the custom captcha was. The captcha was a 'select the right picture (singular)' type, and didn't have a nonce so I just attempted every single answer and would eventually get in. I was able to build up a database of correct answers before they fixed that.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, we just couldn't think of any other solution, so we implemented CAPTCHA Or more likely they do not care, grandma is very hard to monetize.

That makes no sense in this case since you have to pay for MAX anyway.

Thats one absurdity. Having to solve a CAPTCHA for a payed account. What are they afraid of? Another absurdity is having to solve a CAPTCHA for an already existing account with usage history. Lenovo wanted me to solve a CAPTCHA after login before I could submit a new ticket. This is madness.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#198
post #47
post #20

So the audio captcha was just two one-of-three challenges? How does this slow an automated bot down, it could just guess repeatedly and get it right 1/9th of the time.

I’m also fairly certain an FFT of the audio would instantly uncover the repeating patterns. The repeating tones would show up as taller spikes.

Even easier would be computing the autocorrelation: essentially you just slide two copies of the signal until they match.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#199

Just to give credit where it's due, we're linking a Twitter thread where Meg posts a video with a Tiktok watermark from user gavinj1998.

What I don't understand is why the original video isn't linked, since you can also hotlink videos from TikTok?

https://www.tiktok.com/@gavinj1998/video/7237700278647016746

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#200

Not saying these are good, but it's been ~10 years and I still have no idea what I'm supposed to click when Google says "click the traffic lights." Just the light sections? What about the edge that takes up 10% of the adjoining box? What about the back or side of a different traffic light? I've tried them all, and my success rate doesn't noticeably change.

Honestly I don't think it matters which boxes you click

I think it's based on mouse movements, time delay between clicks, and browser fingerprinting tricks that detect headless browsers

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