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Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

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Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#101

Post by shpx »

kevingrahl wrote: post #54
scrooched_moose wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is noscript still the best for that? I haven't looked at other options in a long time.

If you want more granularity I’d suggest giving uMatrix a try. You’ll basically break every site at first and have to make adjustments for every site you visit (whitelist certain Ressourcen on a per domain basis) but I think it’s well worth it. NoScript (which is totally fine) just blocks all JS, uMatrix can block much more.

NoScript lets you whitelist sites. Chrome's built in Javascript blocking is about as usable.

Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Content Settings -> Javascript and then change "Allowed" to off.

You can white list a domain by clicking on the padlock or the thing that says "Not Secure" in the URL bar on the left and clicking "Site settings" and changing Javascript to Allowed.

In my opinion, the only real effect JS blocking has is you start complaining in HN comments about sites not working.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#102

Post by Kalium »

xiphias2 wrote: post #31
Kalium wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it was released back in 2017. I've seen it discussed periodically ever since. The issue with just doing memory-consuming work client-side is that it only marginally slows down spamming. Spammers tend to use compromised machines they don't own. Unless you can make it prohibitively expensive to calculate something using machines you don't pay for - perhaps not a trivial ask - you wind up needing a different set of…

Cool, I'll try it out the next time I have a problem with using TOR. You're right that ARGON2 doesn't help if CPUs/RAM are free, it just makes parallelization hard.

Parallelization is easy if you have a botnet of millions of machines owned by others to draw on.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#103

Post by kzzzznot »

ivanbakel wrote: post #93
partiallypro wrote: post #83

Every time I fill one of these out I get the picture test, and I answer them correctly...but am asked 3-5 times to identify which blocks contain a school bus or stop light. It's very annoying.

I think it's speculated that you're recorded as being a useful classifier if you answer correctly on initial test captchas, so you get given Google's datasets for machine learning. It would explain why you get picture tests even after you should definitely pass the check.

If that is true that is a huge breach of trust. Are these practices ever audited?

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#104

Post by seotut2 »

I think recaptcha and captcha in general are very overused today, as they cause way too much inconvenience for the user. Why discriminate against robots so much?

What's so wrong about crawling or using automated tools? With today's networks and hardware performance most websites shouldn't concern themselves with denial-of-service type of attacks, unless they're past a certain threshold of popularity.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#105

Post by toxik »

sk1pper wrote: post #84
xirdstl wrote: post #80

I feel a sense of dread whenever I see this box. Is it going to let me through, or am I going to spend the next few minutes futilely clicking signs and lights, only to give up and leave the site?

Glad I’m not the only one. I thought something was wrong with my brain. Or that I might be a robot.

Counter anecdote: I was actually never rejected though I’ve been subjected to the picture test multiple times. Most of the time I just get through, though it is hard not to sigh and roll your eyes when presented with one.

Annoying as they are, I don’t really see a better alternative. They’re also pretty easily circumvented with cheap labour like mechanical turk and similar services.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#106

Post by mpol »

bsamuels wrote: post #96

Slightly related, but I have a fun conspiracy to share: I'm convinced that part of the reason Google released headless Chrome is as a honeypot for bot authors to use. The idea is that instead of going through the effort of fingerprinting and identifying new bot software, release something that bot authors will use instead that you have a capability to detect. Somewhere inside of headless Chrome, there's one or more s…

Interesting idea :)

I don't think spambots are currently using Chromium or even running JavaScript. Using simple spamfilters in JavaScript still works fine on my setups.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#107

Post by RidingPegasus »

partiallypro wrote: post #83

Every time I fill one of these out I get the picture test, and I answer them correctly...but am asked 3-5 times to identify which blocks contain a school bus or stop light. It's very annoying.

The "hills" category is the worst.

Have come to the conclusion it really means any patch of grass.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#108

Post by teej »

alexpetralia wrote: post #94
partiallypro wrote: post #83

Every time I fill one of these out I get the picture test, and I answer them correctly...but am asked 3-5 times to identify which blocks contain a school bus or stop light. It's very annoying.

Yes - I feel at this point that our labor is simply being used to help provide training data for Google's algorithms.

I mean, this has been exactly the situation since recaptcha was invented.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#109

Post by clairity »

xirdstl wrote: post #80

I feel a sense of dread whenever I see this box. Is it going to let me through, or am I going to spend the next few minutes futilely clicking signs and lights, only to give up and leave the site?

just preemtively say no and leave the site. this is just another tracking vector for google and it should be discouraged.

i'm generally against this type of gating, where the people doing the right thing get punished disproportionately (even small slices of time add up to wasting thousands of human-years over the population) just to combat the tiny number of bad actors. target the bad actors directly.

it's the same for tsa security theater. let's put all those humans to work training dogs of all sorts and filtering them through people at the airport. the money for those privacy invading scanners can be put toward training and housing the dogs. our collective time is not wasted on silliness and standing in line, and we'd probably save a lot of tax dollars that way.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#110

Post by everdrive »

enriquto wrote: post #73
Kalium wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might surprise you, but it actually has to do with what traffic coming out of TOR looks like. Well in excess of 90% of traffic coming out of TOR is spam, bots, malicious, or some combination! Google isn't going out of their way to punish you for trying to protect your privacy. They're trying to stop unwanted traffic. By unfortunate happenstance, you appear to be disguising yourself in the exact same way a shocki…

> Google isn't going out of their way to punish you for trying to protect your privacy. They're trying to stop unwanted traffic. By unfortunate happenstance, (...) This does not agree with my experience. I browse without cookies and severely limited javascript (using umatrix), and I also encounter the myriad of ridiculous inconveniences that the OP was referring to. On the good side, however, the web is much faster a…

It's often the website provider redirecting users to a captcha based on certain conditions.
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