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Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

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

#391

Post by xnull2guest »

foxylad wrote: post #385
xnull1guest wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's services are not free. You trade your data, screen real estate, and attention for their service. This is worth a lot - Google is worth a lot. They didn't do it by giving out services for free.

I know what you are saying, but actually this service is free. Blocking bots effectively is in both the website owner and Google's interests, because bots disrupt the value propositions of both. And you could argue that it is in the website reader's interests too, by extension. Given their scale and resources, Google are able to provide a far more effective bot detector than any of us could do on our own. I for one a…

Not sure what blocking bots have to do with the freeness of the service. Perhaps you'd like to reply on one of the comments further down to get into why you believe the service is free?

You may argue that the trade is in the website reader's best interest. This is a different argument than whether it is free.

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

#392

Post by mehwoot »

jotm wrote: post #353
robertfw wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://duckduckgo.com/

Sorry, as much as I tried to like it, the results just don't match what I need...

Because they don't make any money, because only the sorts of shitty practises people often complain about are what enables making money providing free services.

If enough people were actually willing to pay to use a search engine you could have an awesome search engine with none of that.

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

#393

Post by xnull2guest »

frostmatthew wrote: post #378
xnull1guest wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how this clarifies the term free? Free as in beer is used to specify the freeness of a product or service, rather than the freeness of 'freedom', say from authoritarianism. This conversation is about the meaning of ' money ' modulo this understanding of free-as-in-beer - i.e. whether non-fiat scarce resources (user data/screen real estate) count as money.

free has 20+ definitions.[1] A discussion about what we mean when we say Google's services are (or are not) free is using free the same way we use it in free as in beer [thus its definition is relevant]. Colloquially we usually use free to mean not having a financial cost. Another word or phrase is usually used when referring to non-monetary costs. i.e. I would say "Google is free" but I would never say "Google costs…

The top sentence is granted - not sure it was ever in question.

The bottom part you use personal anecdotes to support the claim that a broader 'we' do something. I'm not sure, as my personal experience differs. But it does get to exactly what I was saying in the above comment - what the discussion centers about is what counts as 'money' (as you say "referring to non-monetary costs").

I think the place we differ is whether non-fiat scarce resources count as money. I think they do. Historically they have. In economics literature and practice they do.

Or perhaps the reservation is that the scarce resources in this instance are 'soft' resources like attention, screen real estate and personal data? Much of what is traded by financial institutions (for example) today are very virtual - trades of risks, credits (promises), futures, bets. Even real estate is traded on the idea that it occupies space of human attention and investment - not necessarily because it can be used as a means to 'produce' something. I'm hesitant to draw firm lines between these soft assets - I'm not sure where I could sensibly draw them.

Either way, I'm glad we agree that Google costs something. I do think that the OP intended their use of free (in capitals and context) to mean "Google costs nothing."

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

#395

Post by progress »

roc wrote: post #244
jotm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also tripped Google's bot filters. Frankly, I'm more offended that Google is discriminating against robots, seeing as they are one of the leading companies in automation and AI :-)

Though you were joking, it's worth noting they're certainly not discriminating against robots. They're discriminating against your robots. Which is to say: they're perfectly willing to let your crawl-able content and internet use help train their robots, they just don't want their crawl-able content and internet use to train your robots.

^ Probably the most underlying comment in this topic.

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

#398

Post by dlss »

joelthelion wrote: post #319
dlss wrote: post #271

What am I missing? Breaking this looks much easier than a regular captcha... This is the sort of problem that genetic algorithms are well suited for (a small, well defined input domain with a binary oracle). You'd simply generate a random path, run a smoothing function over it, see if that works, then iterate. edit: does anyone know a site that is actually using this new widget? I only seem to be finding the older ve…

You're missing the fact that they're relying on many cues, not just mouse movement. I don't think they're even discolosing everything they use.

You're missing the fact that they went from something that is quite difficult to get a program to do (essentially an AI complete task) to one that's not AI complete.

It doesn't really matter how many non-AI complete components they are measuring... without at least one AI complete task, they removed the thing that makes CAPTCHAs work.

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

#399

Post by puzzl »

dantillberg wrote: post #240
ricg wrote: post #95

It's definitely not only relying on cursor movements. A simple $('iframe').contents().find('.recaptcha-checkbox-checkmark').click() proved that I'm not a robot, without me touching the mouse.

At best this would be just trigger another arms race with people developing bots to trigger a series of "human-like" mouse events, which I'd imagine is a far-simpler problem than OCR. Not to mention that it could only be used as a heuristic and not a test; so, eventually the weight of that heuristic will just be reduced to zero once someone publishes humanlike_mouse_driver.js with carefully-tuned-to-look-statisticall…

You know a peculiar thing that humans do? They do things slowly. You know what bot (programmers) hate doing? Doing things slowly. When you've got bots that are diving through thousands of registration forms per minute, and suddenly you need to slow them down to 15 seconds per form, well, that's already an enormous win for the site owners, even if it makes the new captcha fail (if the quoted statistic of 99.8% of captchas being solvable by bots is correct).

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

#400

Post by FunCaptcha_Jim »

userbinator wrote: post #170

"If we can collect behavioural data from you, and it matches closely the behaviour of other humans, you are a human. Otherwise you're not a human." Does anyone else get that feeling from the description of what Google is doing? I've tripped their "we think you are a bot" detection filter and been presented with a captcha countless times while using complex search queries and searching for relatively obscure things, a…

We were actually just discussing the "what if I trip their filter" concern at our morning meeting. Full disclosure: my company (as the username implies) builds FunCaptcha, a CAPTCHA alternative. Your concern, to us, is a very valid one and has been a driving force behind our own design and mentality. Our lead designer is (understandably) passionate about this so he actually wrote a few words on the blog that dives pretty deeply into the topic, if you're inclined: https://www.funcaptcha.co/2014/12/04/killing-the-captcha-wit....
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