Live data from Hacker News

An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

arxiv.org

161–170 of 338 posts

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#161
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just made me ponder again—where does the assumption that the Internet should allow unconstrained anonymity come from, other than that’s how it used to be for some time? The real world doesn’t allow that. It’s hard to remain anonymous in the real world. The real world largely runs on identity and (identity) trust. Why should the Internet be different?

Theoretically you don't need to reveal your identity to prove that you're human. You can use a zero knowledge proof instead, likely attached to something like an EU Digital ID, which would allow you to remain anonymous and also prove that you're human.

How could renting out one's ID to provide access to bots for spamming/manipulation be avoided then?

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#163
All of these papers miss that captchas have multiple levels of difficultly. People who get an enterprise account or work closely with the captcha providers will find very different results. Many captcha providers now decide what captchas to send out, in hard mode based on what LLMs cannot solve

Captchas are purposely not made too hard as people like pex.com need to be able to bypass them for copyright enforcement. Note I’m biased as I was a founder of hcaptcha

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#164

The relevant data for the claim of the headline is in Table 3. On all the tasks with enough data, bots were both faster and more accurate than humans.

Yeah, the claim of the headline comes from the first sentence in Section 5.5. I think either the title should match the paper's title or that should be pointed out as part of the submission - not sure how HN's title guidelines work.

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#165
post #81
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By recall you mean a completely routine OTA software update done while the driver is asleep.

A recall for essential maintenance is just that. I would focus on the need for an urgent update due to the flaws rather than the issuing agency's lack of more accurate terminology for a relatively new element to cars. Rolling around in semantic mud on the term recall is not sensible, as the definition in regards to cars is fairly specific [0]. Basically a recall just means there is a safety defect that must be addres…

It would be much more expensive and a bigger mistake to have the vehicles physically returned. The distinction is very important. There's also a difference whether a safety defect last for 1 hour/1 day/1 week or a year.

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#166
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, except: While these are considered just an excruciating security pain for users, they do serve a non-theatrical purpose in many cases of throttling the speed of brute force attacks (or at least costing your opponent money).

> they do serve a non-theatrical purpose in many cases of throttling the speed of brute force attacks Might do that unobtrusively for the average person, by using projects like mCaptcha [0] for instance. [0] https://mcaptcha.org/

Is it similar to https://friendlycaptcha.com/ ?

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#167
post #128

The main road to tell computers and humans apart will soon be that computers are a bit too fast and accurate to be humans.

Instead of just solving the task, computers will now have to simulate humans using humans' real data. It's not a hard dataset to train on.

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#168

I guess validating a payment card is going to be the next step to sign up for whatever. Don’t allow pre paid BINs and let’s go. Gonna be pretty miserable, however someone needs to find something as I currently would rather pay 0.01$ instead of solving a captcha. Especially the select all the bicycles; it’s a waste of life.

or just use Worldcoin

All roads bring us back to Worldcoin eventually...

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#169
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they do serve a non-theatrical purpose in many cases of throttling the speed of brute force attacks Might do that unobtrusively for the average person, by using projects like mCaptcha [0] for instance. [0] https://mcaptcha.org/

Oh what a perfect find. I have on my todolist to add POW to some of my api endpoints

I've had that idea for years.

Two versions that I experimented with. One is where the incoming POW hashes contribute to hashing power for some blockchain mining. An alternative "pay as you use the API" system.

The other using hashcash. Just a way to slow down abuse.

Both, however, suffer from the downside that many/all "ASIC resisting crypto mining" suffer from as well: the cheapest CPU power is CPU power from machines/power you don't own. Botnets, viruses, trojans etc.

So such a mechanism to throtthe or protect APIs won't hold back spammers and abusers for long.

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#170
post #87

How did the OP get from the article linked to the title of this post?

Section 5.5: "Table 3 contrasts our measured human solving times and accuracy against those of automated bots reported in the literature."

Although it's not clear to me that the humans all really were humans.

Post reply on HN