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An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

arxiv.org

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Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#191

Post by eesmith »

jhrmnn wrote: post #131
szundi wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU digital ID, asking for mobile number and sending text, so something that is linked to an ID and/or costs money to have. Goodbye anonimity, probably.

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?

The real world does allow it.

People have been able to write anonymous letters and send them through the mail for a long time. Still can.

No one checks my id before I stick an envelope in the mail box.

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#192

Post by rezonant »

croemer wrote: post #183
rezonant wrote: post #100

As best as I can tell this study explores many facets of how humans solve captchas. I couldn't find anything about AIs outperforming humans in the study. Can someone give me a section reference? Solving reCAPTCHA v2/v3 requires more than just clicking the box and an image puzzle. If that was all it was we would be overrun by now. Lots of folks commenting that the title's statement makes sense because CAPTCHAs are mea…

Yeah, the study is really not about AI solving captchas but how humans solve them. Quite a clickbait title - but those do well on HN unfortunately.

Seems like folks just want to discuss CAPTCHAs generally more ad-hoc, that's cool too, but given how AI has evolved this year, far too many people see this headline and will walk away assuming that the recent AI innovations have made CAPTCHAs useless, but it does not appear to be the case, thankfully.

...Yet, I suppose.

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#193

Post by NotSammyHagar »

leobg wrote: post #44
caymanjim wrote: post #42

Google CAPTCHAs were designed and deployed as a mechanism to train AIs. That's why they are the way they are. Any security theater surrounding them is entirely incidental. So it's no surprise that the AIs are now good at solving them. We've trained them for years.

I still find it funny that Google, with the advantage of having millions of Internet users train their AI like galley slaves for free, hasn’t yet been able to crack vision driven self driving. Tesla had no such advantage when training their FSD to recognize traffic lights, bicycles, motorcycles, etc.

The tesla system is exciting and dangerous, because it does identify many things in the environment, but it's extremely unsafe because on city driving it will not make the right choice most of the time. On the freeway it does much better, but then that's a more restricted environment.

I have an older tesla S with the pre-ai so called autopilot. It has one camera in the front and a radar and the system detects a few things like speed limit signs. The main extent of what it can do is follow the current lane pretty wall, even when it curves, slows down if it comes up to a car going slower than its preset speed. The good thing is it works on any road. It does a shockingly good job.

The later systems with onboard special processors are like a crazy beginning driver to has way too much confidence and drives in dangerous situations willy nilly. There are many other people who have explored it and written long posts. It's not safe. You can try to use it be you have to be constantly paying extreme attention. It's like watching your kid drive the first time. I know you should be watching the stupid ai all the time, but it's far from being safe.

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#195

Post by IIAOPSW »

latexr wrote: post #182
IIAOPSW wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I ask it to lie to me, it says its sorry but as an online AI language model it would be unethical...but when I ask it to tell me a story its happy to comply.

It feels like you left out context, otherwise what’s the problem? Do you get mad at fiction authors for lying to you when you read their books? Or are you OK if someone lies to your detriment then later says “I was just telling a story, bro, but with us as the characters and without explaining it was a story”?

I suppose my point is that the rules which openAI attempts to impose on what their AI should and shouldn't be allowed to do are contradictory and thus the exploitable loopholes will never be fully closed. Its not supposed to be able to "lie" to me but it is supposed to be able to "tell me a fictional story". Define the difference in an enforceable way?

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#196

Post by tarruda »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #48

The solution could be a cryptocurrency which can be mined in the browser. Hashcash, which was one of the inspirations for Bitcoin, was initially invented to prevent email spam. Consumer devices have a lot of spare CPU and RAM. So a proof-of-work algorithm which consumes those resources for a minute might work? If it generates $0.01 for the website owner in that minute, maybe that would work?

That is a very interesting concept

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#197

Post by croemer »

tarruda wrote: post #187
croemer wrote: post #171

Bot operators can already pay human captcha solvers as the paper mentions. So all this does is potentially replace those humans with AI, driving down prices for bot operators. As prices for bot operators decrease, website operators will increase the challenge and drive up effort for the intended website audience (humans) who are solving captchas instead of paying bots. In the end, the website operators will have to s…

> Website operators can use alternatives, like asking for micro-payments Similarly to how dApps work in ethereum-like blockchains?

I don't know anything about ethereum

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#198

Post by croemer »

rezonant wrote: post #192
croemer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the study is really not about AI solving captchas but how humans solve them. Quite a clickbait title - but those do well on HN unfortunately.

Seems like folks just want to discuss CAPTCHAs generally more ad-hoc, that's cool too, but given how AI has evolved this year, far too many people see this headline and will walk away assuming that the recent AI innovations have made CAPTCHAs useless, but it does not appear to be the case, thankfully. ...Yet, I suppose.

True, the discussion is more about captchas in general. The study isn't bad, I read through it and it's interesting to see real numbers on how long it takes users to solve various captchas. However, a more appropriate title would have been something like "Measuring real user solving times of various captchas" or something like that.

Re: An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

#199

Post by rezonant »

berkes wrote: post #169
JCharante wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 machin…

Dirty energy is (often) cheap, so that's the energy the bad actors will use. I don't know that incentivizing bad actors to waste energy in a climate crisis is the best way to fight this problem.

You might correctly claim clean energy is often cheaper, but you must also consider the regions in which they'll get away with nefarious activity, and whether those areas have made the investments into making clean energy cheap.

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