> Earlier this year, Google informed us that they were going to begin charging for reCAPTCHA.
Wait. Is this news? I don’t see other article about this. What is the pricing?
Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
101–110 of 200 posts
Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is a common complaint, but I personally have no issues on both macOS and iOS Safari.
Perhaps the privacy problem for you is then one of the following: - Ad blocking extension not installed or rules too lax - Script blocking not enabled - no VPN used - stores tracking Cookies If all of those do not apply to you, I would feel discriminated against by Google, even more so, than usual.
To address each of your points:
1. I do have an ad blocker installed, but it's not very aggressive.
2. All scripts are enabled. I already have trouble with some sites due to my fairly lax ad blocker.
3. I do not use a VPN (since it just transfers who is able to see my traffic from one party to another). Additionally, virtually every service provider penalizes VPN IPs to the point where it's probably not worth the hassle.
4. Not sure what you mean by "stores tracking Cookies".
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> If all of those do not apply to you, I would feel discriminated against by Google
I do not agree with that (mostly because of point 3). The reality is that VPN traffic is significantly more "spammy"/bot-filled than non-VPN traffic. It's a perfectly rational and justifiable way to protect sites (albeit ReCAPTCHA is of dubious effectiveness).
Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're forgetting the main benefit for google, which is getting humans to train all their vision models for free. At one point they were just forcing X% of clicks to fill out a captcha regardless of origin or identity just to get more data. I for one am getting quite tired of trillion dollar corporations getting things for free out of me. Hard pass.
This really shows how popular perceptions of Google have changed for the worse over the years. I remember when RECAPTCHA was first launched, everyone knew right away that it was just helping Google train their vision models, but at the time we all thought it was cool, like "Wow, I'm helping the cause of AI research at the same time as stopping spam". But now it just pisses everyone off. Hell, for a little while Googl…
> But now it just pisses everyone off.
Though we're still just talking about a few HNers here who complain about doing "free work for Google", not the broad population.
Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
#104There are plenty of services that will happily accept a screenshot from a developer, send it out to live humans who solve it in real time, and then return the answers to the developer.
I'm not going to link to them, but you can find them yourself by googling "buy recaptcha solver". The prices for the top two results are $0.50 and $1.39 per 1000 solves (respectively, $0.0005 and $0.00139 per solve).
At that price point, it's feasible for the truly determined to just use those solvers to bypass ReCAPTCHA (or similar services).
Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
#105One of the more insidious elements of ReCAPTCHA is its propensity to challenge users who have robust cookie blocking in place. So as we encourage people to be more privacy-aware, the web gets harder and harder to use. We've seen ReCAPTCHA pop all over ecommerce, all over benign websites with little to no need to challenge use almost completely because of the increase in privacy-aware users. ReCAPTCHA essentially flie…
You're forgetting the main benefit for google, which is getting humans to train all their vision models for free. At one point they were just forcing X% of clicks to fill out a captcha regardless of origin or identity just to get more data. I for one am getting quite tired of trillion dollar corporations getting things for free out of me. Hard pass.
Except in this wonderful new world, you don't get the choice to "hard pass". As someone whose ISP has too few public IP addresses, I see Cloudflare's "one more step" pages at least several times a month. It's terrifying to realize just how much of the internet is behind that thing right now.
Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
#106IMHO CPATCHA is a lazy way to protect your service as you shift the burden to your users. Maybe if you are big and essential for some users, you can afford that. But if not, be aware that users will turn their back on you if you add obstacles between them and your service. Edit: meant to say “be aware that some users will turn their back to you”
But if not be aware that users will turn their back on you if you add obstacles between them and your service. You have to balance that against how many users you'd lose if the site was down/vandalized/compromised by an attacker if the captcha protection wasn't there to keep it out. It's often worthwhile moving the captcha away from the initial login or signup form and only putting it on the second or third attempt t…
> It's often worthwhile moving the captcha away from the initial login or signup form and only putting it on the second or third attempt to login
Though if your service is a lucrative target for {uname,pass} combolist spam, you'll see that each attempt comes from its own IP address and only makes that one request. It's pretty sobering.
Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
#107The enterprise grade hCaptcha[1] is not free either. Does anyone have pricing information? [1]: https://www.hcaptcha.com/#plans
According to the article Cloudfront is paying, but is paying "a fraction of what reCAPTCHA would have [cost]". Recaptcha is $1/1000 challenges, so apparently hcaptcha is some small fraction of that.
Cloudfront might get a discount for running some of the infrastructure on their own servers, on the other hand that might also be an integration hassle that actually costs them money.
Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
#108hCAPTCHA looks interesting, although it seems they use Blockchain for no real reason compared to just storing the payments as rows (i.e what they gain from being chained on top of another)
The point of a blockchain is that to edit an earlier record, you would need to edit every record that comes after (due to storing a hash of the previous block in the current block). However, it doesn’t make sense when one entity controls the entire system because if a hacker (or even an insider) can change one record, they could change all of them. Hence why a good blockchain would be distributed . Then, if one node…
However you can do a local blockchain (or hash chain, or whatever you want to call it) and distribute just the hashes. If you have a local git repo and regularly tell me your commit IDs I can testify that the code existed at that point in time, and can later verify it wasn't changed if you choose to expose the full commit to me. And because it's a chain, you only need to communicate one commit ID for every external timestamp you care about, not for every commit you care about.
Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of a blockchain is that to edit an earlier record, you would need to edit every record that comes after (due to storing a hash of the previous block in the current block). However, it doesn’t make sense when one entity controls the entire system because if a hacker (or even an insider) can change one record, they could change all of them. Hence why a good blockchain would be distributed . Then, if one node…
Yes if do not you want to distribute your data with random people over the internet, you need a Merkle tree. Not a stupid blockchain with all the downsides a blockchain have.
If you strip out the proof-of-work algorithm you're basically left with a chain of Merkle trees, and the payloads hashed by the Merkle trees. Calling it a blockchain is just a way to make it sound more familiar to potential investors.
Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the vast majority of which will not be empathically awful Yeah, most of the time it's "just" really, really obnoxious, not to mention coercive in a way that aligns with Google's interests. Thanks, Google. > How, in your opinion, should Google have handled the matter in a way that does not give spammers or other abusive users ways to get around the measure? "Our anti-spam systems believe that you might be a robot. Y…
In my opinion and experience, ReCAPTCHA isn't really, really obnoxious most of the time. I suspect that most of the time it trips up bots who have no emotional experiences whatsoever. Most of my personal encounters with it involve solving no puzzles whatsoever. With that in mind, I expect humans and their completely real reactions might not be the default case. Of course, this is speculative, as I do not have any kin…
> In my opinion and experience, ReCAPTCHA isn't really, really obnoxious most of the time.
The percentage of that time goes up as you move away from Chrome and Google cookies.