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The CAPTCHA arms race: from distorted text to browser identity

browserbase.com

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Re: The CAPTCHA arms race: from distorted text to browser identity

#31

Post by netik »

So this is a basically a shill advertisement ending in "Your AI Agents can avoid captchas if you pay us."

The last example is a false narrative, that captchas will only happen if the "browser looks suspicious". Systems like Altcha put an end to this argument. They don't care if the browser looks suspicious, only that the browser can perform a proof-of-work to get past a captcha designed to slow down the request rate.

When applied consistently, it will effectively block and slow down AI crawlers, which is what this company wants to promote.

Re: The CAPTCHA arms race: from distorted text to browser identity

#34

Post by wildzzz »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #25

As TFA points out, a major change is that bot traffic now comes from honest users via their LLM sessions, so you don't even necessarily want to block automated bots anymore. The game is shifting to a better ideal: how do you design a service knowing that any user/request might be automated? Especially in place of the historical, easy solution/hack where you have some sort of gate that, once passed, puts the user in s…

You use API tokens for things intended to be machine to machine communication and captchas for things intended to be filled out by humans. Not every site or service wants automated input, even if it's being directed by a human. I dont want forums like HN just filled with a bunch of agents talking to eachother, where's the human connection?

Re: The CAPTCHA arms race: from distorted text to browser identity

#35

Post by prmoustache »

willmadden wrote: post #18
thenthenthen wrote: post #16

Omg. I am on various VPN’s and now and again Google Auth (for youtube) throws me a captcha. They are mostly unreadable, but there is an audio option… which is just insane and does not make any sense, anyone had that? It sounds like a recording of 300 people speaking at the same time in a call center while on various dosages of LSD

They give you that (or hieroglyphics) if you are using certain VPNs and don't leave a specific browser fingerprint.

There is a point where not leaving fingerprints becomes a fingerprint in itself.

Re: The CAPTCHA arms race: from distorted text to browser identity

#37

Post by gruez »

netik wrote: post #31

So this is a basically a shill advertisement ending in "Your AI Agents can avoid captchas if you pay us." The last example is a false narrative, that captchas will only happen if the "browser looks suspicious". Systems like Altcha put an end to this argument. They don't care if the browser looks suspicious, only that the browser can perform a proof-of-work to get past a captcha designed to slow down the request rate.…

>Systems like Altcha put an end to this argument. They don't care if the browser looks suspicious, only that the browser can perform a proof-of-work to get past a captcha designed to slow down the request rate.

That doesn't really work out in reality because bots are happy to wait 5 seconds or even 5 minutes for a PoW challenge to complete. Humans on the other hand will not, especially if they're on a mobile device with limited compute and energy.

Re: The CAPTCHA arms race: from distorted text to browser identity

#39

Post by giancarlostoro »

I remember at one point in my teens, someone had made a web app that would snag the captcha and show you only the captcha, and you would just endlessly solve captchas, while the application tried different passwords on a backend, and logging any successful logins.
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