Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

nullpt.rs

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 378 posts

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#111

Post by webstrand »

OmarShehata wrote: post #20
tumsfestival wrote: post #8

I can only imagine how much worse they'll make the captcha after stuff like this picks up speed with the users all the while being ineffective against the bots.

captchas are broken, forever. There is no way to prevent bots without also preventing a bottom tier of human users (visually impaired people, old people, or just impatient people). Like this xkcd [1] comic suggests, we need to just focus on rewarding and punishing specific behavior, regardless of whether the agent is human or not [1] https://xkcd.com/810/

PoW like hashcash (not a cryptocurrency thing) might be a better solution. Users could even delegate solving the PoW puzzles to a 3rd party for low power devices like phones. But it imposes a cost on spammers that's inescapable.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#112

Post by [deleted] »

fresh_broccoli wrote: post #48

I wasn't a very active 4chan poster to begin with, but when they introduced this awful CAPTCHA, and later the 300s countdown before making the first post, I completely lost interest in using the website. Anonymous boards were supposed to be low-friction, but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around. It takes a special kind of dedication to post there, which I seriously doubt helps the q…

[deleted]

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#113

Post by [deleted] »

joe-collins wrote: post #102
alekratz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the biggest problems that 4chan has to combat is spam. unfortunately, at 4chan's scale, hcaptcha and recaptcha are not free. 4chan is not exactly a font of money, either. the only reason they turned to this awful homebrew captcha was because recaptcha stopped being free. is there any better way to do it with a single developer for a website that serves millions of people a day?

Not the rampant racism or sexism or simple misanthropy or outright calls to violence or overflowing hostility. It's the spam that tops the problem list.

[deleted]

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#114

Post by hombre_fatal »

prettywoman wrote: post #56
fresh_broccoli wrote: post #48

I wasn't a very active 4chan poster to begin with, but when they introduced this awful CAPTCHA, and later the 300s countdown before making the first post, I completely lost interest in using the website. Anonymous boards were supposed to be low-friction, but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around. It takes a special kind of dedication to post there, which I seriously doubt helps the q…

> 300s countdown I don't get why they added that nasty "feature" to the post form, it really discourages you to post(maybe it's because they want to sell you their 4chan pass), I don't understand why 4chan is still active

Presumably, anyone who regularly uses 4chan would register. Once you register and click the login link in your email, you just get the easy Cloudflare captcha and no countdown.

The horrible captcha + 300s countdown is for completely unauthed users. Most sites don't even allow unauthed users to post at all.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#115

Post by krmboya »

joe-collins wrote: post #102
alekratz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the biggest problems that 4chan has to combat is spam. unfortunately, at 4chan's scale, hcaptcha and recaptcha are not free. 4chan is not exactly a font of money, either. the only reason they turned to this awful homebrew captcha was because recaptcha stopped being free. is there any better way to do it with a single developer for a website that serves millions of people a day?

Not the rampant racism or sexism or simple misanthropy or outright calls to violence or overflowing hostility. It's the spam that tops the problem list.

> Not the rampant racism or sexism or simple misanthropy or outright calls to violence or overflowing hostility.

Isn't that more easily solved by just not visiting the site in the first place?

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#116

Post by [deleted] »

fresh_broccoli wrote: post #48

I wasn't a very active 4chan poster to begin with, but when they introduced this awful CAPTCHA, and later the 300s countdown before making the first post, I completely lost interest in using the website. Anonymous boards were supposed to be low-friction, but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around. It takes a special kind of dedication to post there, which I seriously doubt helps the q…

[deleted]

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#117

Post by tomxor »

Bet it can't break reCAPTCHA on a VPN.

[edit]

More specifically I mean when they insidiously give you infinite tests even though it's impossible to pass because the IP has been blacklisted... There's a special place in hell for the anti-human's that made that decision, and yes it involves captcha.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#118

Post by blackjackfoe »

tomxor wrote: post #117

Bet it can't break reCAPTCHA on a VPN. [edit] More specifically I mean when they insidiously give you infinite tests even though it's impossible to pass because the IP has been blacklisted... There's a special place in hell for the anti-human's that made that decision, and yes it involves captcha.

I would also be inclined to believe that my project to solve the proprietary 4Chan text CAPTCHA cannot solve an unrelated image CAPTCHA. I'd bet a lot of money on it, in fact!

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#119

Post by throwaway314155 »

normie3000 wrote: post #45
blackjackfoe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This project was really my first decent introduction to computer vision and machine learning (along with that of those who helped me in various ways; none of them desired to be credited here other than the guy who collected some of the data for me.) It was definitely a successful learning exercise, and it's made me more confident tackling some other problems I've had in mind for awhile.

How did this project help you to learn computer vision? I'd also like to write a basic captcha solver as an intro, but superficially this project just looks like a dump of generated code.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN