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Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com

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Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#81

I always assumed Google's use of reCAPTCHA was to augment the OCR used to digitize Google Books, particularly in results the software couldn't confidently match to a word. Is this true? It's interesting that it's still the fallback for the new method.

That was the original goal of the project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

"By presenting two words it both protects websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas[2] and helps digitize the text of books."

For some time, you could pass a reCAPTCHA test by just entering the more distorted word correctly.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#82
So now spammers will use botnets… Oh wait, they already do.

They already have the botnets. Now they need to use those end-user machines as proxies, using the credentials already on the machine. They just need to figure out the other parameters: maybe it's running js code ? Then you can use a browser engine/selenium). Maybe it's the click pattern ? Just generate the json data and send it. They can even apply the same machine learning techniques to figure out the best way to circumvent the captchas.

And the escalation continues.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#83

Oh, so just program bots to provide a mouse movement toward a form element along a distorted path, and always trigger them through the UI rather than as events. Got it!

The spammers thought the same when Bayesian spam filtering started working: "I'll just program a Markov chain to insert some none-spammy words". It did not work out quite so well.

I've also been thinking on how to defeat this, but even the mouse movement seems hard. You are trying to beat the big data statistics that Google has on these mouse movements. Programming a distorted mouse path does not take into account micro-movements (compare with saccades) or speed. To simulate mouse movements convincingly, I figure you'd need a model based on actual mouse movement data on these Captcha's. Also, you may succeed once or twice, but the third time the system is detecting your bot, making all your work void, since your code is now a new signature for bot-detection.

Bots want to quickly leave a message and move on to the next one. Real users first read an article, before they comment. If "Time on site before filling in Captcha" is a feature, then there may be no other way around detection, than for your bot to wait 5-10 minutes before filling in the Captcha.

I think this new system really makes it easier for non-bots to quickly fill in a captcha, and makes it harder for bots. Also because reputation (of IP, of cookies and behavior on Google domains) now seems to play a larger role.

The result of this reputation system for Captcha's is that Google admits to tracking their users outside their own domains. This also places the entire Google+ eco-system, analytics code, Chrome, fonts, charts and Google Hosted Libraries in a different light. Google tracks you everywhere, and the actions you take build or break your online reputation. I am not sure as a legit user that I want to trade this privacy concern, just so I can show my "humanity" and that I am not an evil bot. An evil bot would crawl the pages where these captchas are hosted, and join this data with the captcha user data. Then you can get personalized advertisements when you comment on 4chan in political threads.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#86
post #63
post #25

Who wants to place bets on the "potential robots" more likely to be those without Google cookies or a Google Account?

I can't think of many better uses for the menagerie of different tracking methods that they have planted on me, to be honest.

Well if you ever run for political office it's going to save them a boatload on campaign contributions.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#87
post #52

It's definitely not mouse based. I tried it in an incognito tab and it showed me the old form when I clicked the checkbox.

On what page did you tested the new system?

Here you go: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#88

I always assumed Google's use of reCAPTCHA was to augment the OCR used to digitize Google Books, particularly in results the software couldn't confidently match to a word. Is this true? It's interesting that it's still the fallback for the new method.

That was the original idea behind reCAPTCHA (which originated outside of Google, acquired in 2009), but my understanding is that they long ago ran out of actual text that needed human OCR'ing, and/or found other reasons that approach no longer was helpful.

The "help OCR while also spam protecting" thing isn't currently mentioned on Google's recaptcha product page.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#89

I always assumed Google's use of reCAPTCHA was to augment the OCR used to digitize Google Books, particularly in results the software couldn't confidently match to a word. Is this true? It's interesting that it's still the fallback for the new method.

That was the original idea behind reCAPTCHA (which originated outside of Google, acquired in 2009), but my understanding is that they long ago ran out of actual text that needed human OCR'ing, and/or found other reasons that approach no longer was helpful. The "help OCR while also spam protecting" thing isn't currently mentioned on Google's recaptcha product page.

It is:

> Creation of Value

> Stop a bot. Save a book.

> reCAPTCHA digitizes books by turning words that cannot be read by computers into CAPTCHAs for people to solve. Word by word, a book is digitized and preserved online for people to find and read.

https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html#creation-o...

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#90
They've been doing this for a while. With recaptcha, you got easier captchas (a single street number instead of two words) if the system thought you were human. There was an official post about this a year ago. [1] Now they have probably improved the system enough to be confident in not showing captcha at all. It's nothing revolutionary. If it thinks you're a robot, you still get the old captcha. [2] [1] http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-j... [2] http://i.imgur.com/pCKS8p5.png
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