Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA

...Which means you can start the countdown on the development of widespread countermeasures, which will disproportionately harm smaller sites.

Just fabulous. /s

Gotta love the patent system. Reading the summary made my eyes roll so far into the back of my head.

Basically, they've patented shadow-banning via CAPTCHA. And I'm left also wondering if they've taken the "that's not a bug, it's a feature" meme to a whole new level. I've run into the scenario described by this patent on a few occasions over the last year. I'll be given a CAPTCHA on Google's search results page that has no solution, and they're cleverly frustrating -- not just pictures of roads asking for you to identify lakes, but "click on pictures of street signs", you click, they disappear, new ones appear but there are no street signs left and the submit button yells at you to "make sure you check the new pictures". So you start wondering if it's a trick question; maybe they're using the phrase "street signs" in a manner you weren't previously familiar with?[0] I hate it when my search engine tires to screw with my head.

A hard-refresh resolves it (or I could have probably picked the audio version and been fine, but I have a difficult time understanding those). Running into this bug, the very first thought I had was "this would be a rather novel way of frustrating a bot", followed immediately by "that's got to be what's going on" (and a bit of profanity about how lovely it is to be a false positive)[1]. I mean, combine a freshly loaded PC with an obscure set of search terms and you tend to get a long CAPTCHA. Perform some action that triggers a CAPTCHA while logged in to Google and you'll get a CAPTCHA-less CAPTCHA (check the box to continue). It's only logical they'd have the opposite extreme of "we're going to reject this one because the maliciousness rating indicates that we're being visited by satan coding in brainfuck".

[0] It seems to be occur the most when searching for obscure, specific error messages with commands like "allintext:" (since Google likes to just pretend I didn't actually mean what I asked for) along with portions of the search in quotes. It also doesn't trigger until I hit page 3, or have performed the search a few times with changes only in what I'm including in quotes. It's been happening a lot since I started doing CUDA development. I guess Google really, really, hates bad CUDA developers. Joking aside, since I usually have to get a few pages in, I probably look like a search-engine scraper combining variations of rarely searched terms with no click-through traffic.

[1] I have a funny history with this sort of thing. I was banned from Bing Rewards years ago for ToS violations that I didn't violate. My guess was they assumed my search traffic automated for reward harvesting (because, you know, the rewards would have ever been worth wasting the time developing a bot). And it probably looked that way since obscure searches on Bing, way back when, rarely yielded any relevant results (a half-page of log files, often). Things over there have improved enough that I use it as a fallback when I don't feel like clicking pictures of storefronts, though the banning was a personal insult, so I have to be really cranky about the CAPTCHA interruption to "Ask Chandler".

edit: I felt that neither "satan" nor "brainfuck" deserved title casing.

>In Google's case, it doesn't do that at all --- solve one CAPTCHA successfully and all you get is another, immediately.

I have experienced Google doing the endless captcha when using Opera's built in VPN.

The first time I went through about 3 captchas and then I "knew" they were messing with me.

So, now, I just change my location in the VPN, and get back the searching...

The patent isn't from Google, it's only listed on Google Patents.

Original Assignee: Juniper Networks, Inc.

I think most people don’t realize this “endless” CAPTCHA is actually an average of three iterations. You’re supposed to stop when you see no squares with X in them. That is, you should click submit even when there are zero squares matching the CAPTCHA criteria.

Once you realize this it’s way less confusing, and in fact it even clearly states the instructions at the top of the CAPTCHA. But it’s super confusing and definitely a usability nightmare.

The goal, as I see it, is to increase the number of round trips to google required to solve a CAPTCHA, in order to increase the cost for those using CAPTCHA solving services.