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HBO Max new Captcha system

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Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#281

Post by michh »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #254
tombert wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I do not understand about business is basically everything, but I still don't really understand why they felt the need to remove existing programs. I can understand canceling Close Enough and Infinity Train because they're too expensive, but I don't really understand what it's hurting for them to just say on the servers and continue to be streamable. Hard drive space is pretty cheap, especially at HBO's scale. I…

It's certainly taxes. But no idea how that works.

Yeah i think it allows them to write the ‘loss’ of the content on their balance sheet at some estimated value it would have cost them if they hadn’t made it themselves.

That sort of management-by-spreadsheet without any of the humanity or long-term vision almost every corporation used to have seems to be an ongoing trend, especially in media, and it’s showing. Discovery, who have McDonnel-Douglassed HBO and are behind this mess, are a particularly good example of the kind of garbage heap that leadership style gets you.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#282

Post by tetromino_ »

x-complexity wrote: post #81
sph wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: who has a decent plan to create proof-of-human systems that are not only CAPTCHA based? We will soon need this, and I feel government will gladly present a solution: provide your ID when you connect to the Internet, and we will guarantee you are a human. Who's actually working on this and has released papers I can study? Because all this AI nonsense will only accelerate us towards this total control…

> Serious question: who has a decent plan to create proof-of-human systems that are not only CAPTCHA based? > We will soon need this, and I feel government will gladly present a solution: provide your ID when you connect to the Internet, and we will guarantee you are a human.' I'm extremely hesitant to give any State the ability to track an individual user's online activity that intensely. It's been extensively docum…

> The alternative is relatively straightforward: Utilize compute-intensive & memory-intensive tasks in CAPTCHAs.

Visitor A is a legitimate human being from a poor country using a bargain brand Chinese phone with hardware that could be charitably described as "slow as molasses".

Visitor B is a troll for hire with a rack of used crypto mining machines in his basement, running hundreds of Chrome processes proxied through hundreds of hacked residential IP addresses.

Your approach would make the website unusable for human visitor A, while being the tiniest bit inconvenient for visitor B's hundreds of alts.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#284

Post by mbcros »

wackget wrote: post #40
Borgz wrote: post #23

This is Arkose MatchKey. Hopefully, they will one day fix the UI covering the images. https://www.arkoselabs.com/arkose-matchkey/

The entire site is an exercise in delusion and marketing bullshit. I am absolutely convinced that the people selling this abomination of a product have either never used it themselves or are abjectly and wilfully misleading people. Some other choice quotes from the page: > Users have a bad association with difficult photo CAPTCHAs. > Instead of type what you hear (or alphanumerics) puzzles, we ask users simple questi…

An interesting thing is that for Arkose to be effective against bad actors, they can't just make CAPTCHAs that are hard for bots. They also have to be not-easy or at least expensive for a subset of humans who aren't legitimate users, namely 'CAPTCHA Farms' like https://anti-captcha.com/.

Most CAPTCHAs, including ones made by Arkose, have site keys that are unique to that CAPTCHA and public/visible in the browser -- so companies like Anti Captcha can then automate sending challenging CAPTCHAs directly to a human solver in a 'CAPTCHA farm' who can solve it (in a different browser) and have the CAPTCHA return that it was successfully passed, usually all within ~a minute.

So to get around this and -- as Arkose's site says -- make fraud expensive for hackers, Arkose Labs has to make their CAPTCHAs hard/slow to solve. If they do that, then it becomes expensive for bad actors to rely on labor to solve them (anti-captcha.com cites 58 seconds/$3 per CAPTCHA).

As long as the site key is publicly exposed, this basically isn't going to change; you either need to also couple it with other anti-fraud tactics like device fingerprinting, or use a CAPTCHA that doesn't expose the site key at all.

Disclaimer - I work for a company (Stytch) that has a competing CAPTCHA product.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#285

Post by ohwellhere »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #261
mdasen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some it was probably "this gives us an excuse to rewrite the system, but better this time!" Rebranding often gives a certain amount of cover to do things you want to do even if you don't have to do it. Often new management wants to put their stamp on things. I've been in situations where we've had to do major redesigns because a new leader wanted to leave their mark. I've been in situations where each new leader want…

I can tell you that the old app (on AppleTV) was a bug farm. It was constantly crashing and hanging. I often had to force-quit it. I haven't had enough time with the new app, to see if it's better. To be fair, many of the other apps also suck. I think it may be because Apple allows TV apps to be written in JavaScript, and some of them are almost certainly poor ports of Web apps.

Neither the old app nor the new app feels like it was written by someone who uses Apple TV.

My pet peeve on the last version was having a carousel movie expand when you pause on it so that it moves things around and hides what you were looking at.

My pet peeve on the new one is a normal swipe on the remote blows through 80% of the carousel items instead of just one.

Neither annoy me as much as Amazon’s hijacking of the touch pad during video so that I can no longer tap the pad to see how far through the movie I am.

I get it, everyone wants their spin on things. But all I want is a usable, consistent experience. It drives me bonkers.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#286

Post by generalpf »

lxgr wrote: post #275
HeavyStorm wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is probably way simpler than people think: the current HBO Max app is rated at 2.8 stars in half a million reviews in the android app store. I imagine a similar rating on apple's store. A new app gives you a blank slate, which is easier than reverting old ratings.

Doesn’t Apple already reset ratings between app updates? I remember being nudged for repeated reviews by many apps, some explicitly listing that reason, before that was prohibited by Apple.

No, they don't, you can manually ask for a one-time reset of your ratings before you do a major update. They could have done it here.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#287

Post by ChiperSoft »

bjtitus wrote: post #128
mdasen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some it was probably "this gives us an excuse to rewrite the system, but better this time!" Rebranding often gives a certain amount of cover to do things you want to do even if you don't have to do it. Often new management wants to put their stamp on things. I've been in situations where we've had to do major redesigns because a new leader wanted to leave their mark. I've been in situations where each new leader want…

Rewriting doesn't require a new listing on really any of these platforms. They could have rewritten every single thing and still made it an update. I'm guessing there was some contractual thing (perhaps cable related) around the HBO name or else someone made a very poor choice.

Would changing developer accounts cause it? Like maybe Discovery insisted on a new ADC account?

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#288

Post by polytely »

fnomnom wrote: post #235
boomboomsubban wrote: post #149

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.

it gets worse when you factor in translation problems. lets take google/recaptcha/hcaptcha image captchas. english: "click on the images with bikes" this could mean motorbikes or bicycles in english. in german it says "klicken sie die bilder mit den fahrrädern". fahrrad meaning bicycle exklusively! a motorbike would be "motorrad". then the images will show no bicycles so you skip - wrong - so you click on the motorbi…

wonder how this affects the models that are trained on the data generated by these capcha's? will german motor cyclists be less safe because of this

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#290

Post by jjkaczor »

realaleris149 wrote: post #180
lynx23 wrote: post #179

Cruel And Prejudiced Test Completely Harming Accessibility Imagine a non-native-english speaking visually impaired grandma trying to register to a random web service. CAPTCHAs are not a problem, people say, there are the audio versions, so go for it! Oh, you were never able to pick a language? Too bad you dont speak english. Oh, your hearing is not the best? You are clearly not a human, official stamp from SV. Why? O…

> 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.

Grandma is PERFECT to monetize... Once signed-up, Grandma will NEVER be able to figure out how to cancel...
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