The No CAPTCHA problem

Q//But google now is better at recognizing those numbers.... A//Right... that's why they now request the next "way to expensive" to implement "free" service from you, your recognition... and association capabilities.

Is the whole point of this to encourage hackers to get working on this AI challenge of identifying similar photos?

Either they need to hire a lot of people to sit around making these sets or they have an automated way of creating these sets which can be reversed. It would seem to be an arms race where google is paying people, but attackers can have people break it at a cost less than creating them (takes less time to match them up then to find good photos, clean them up, tag them, etc.).

An attacker would also just target the database where this is all stored. With the text recaptcha, it would seem that they have all of these photos and scanned books and you have 8+ character strings of [a-zA-Z0-9], random guessing would not be good enough, so the attacker needed to solve the OCR problem.

However, given the option to select x of 9 images, if you assume that the extremes are less likely of 1/9, 2/9, 8/9, 9/9- then I can hope to get lucky picking 4 or 5 each time, the order does not matter. If you distribute the attack to get around rate limits, etc. - perhaps just picking the first through fifth images gives you a sufficiently high success rate.

Secondly, If you tell me that one dude [author] ruled the one+ year work of the engineering team at google as a flaw and simplified it as [So what Google is trying to sell us as a comprehensive bot detecting algorithm is simply a whitelist based on your previous online behavior, CAPTCHAs you solved.] and that you believe it, I would question your intelligence.

This is supposed to be tech savvy community at least to some degree, what the fuck.

Now, in the google's blogpost it reads [Advanced Risk Analysis backend for reCAPTCHA that actively considers a user’s entire engagement with the CAPTCHA—before, during, and after—to determine whether that user is a human.]

[However, CAPTCHAs aren't going away just yet. In cases when the risk analysis engine can't confidently predict whether a user is a human or an abusive agent, it will prompt a CAPTCHA to elicit more cues, increasing the number of security checkpoints to confirm the user is valid.]

So my guess would be they analyze users behaviour on the page where captcha is located, things like mouse movements, time it takes to type out the words, spelling mistakes corrected and whatever else humans do differently than bots - and only then combine that with your historical cookies. Maybe it is much more complicated than that, I, as well as you, don't know the details.

Do you really think that they would go ahead and implement a such system without rigorous testing of effectiveness? I am sure that they tested it extensively with users, AND with bots, and decided that it is better than the current system, and ONLY then deployed it. Rant off.