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Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com

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Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#111

Post by tim333 »

ashmud wrote: post #53
id wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been like this for a while now. AFAIK you have either - the actual captcha and a word from a book (Google Books) - the actual captcha and a house number from Street View (Google Maps) Only the actual captcha has to be typed in correctly.

Do people ever intentionally type in nonsense for the non-captcha part, out of spite, for instance? If you could persuade enough people to provide non-answers for the non-captcha part, would Google stop using it (the non-captcha part)? My guess is it's like spam. As long as it works a small fraction of the time, it will still exist.

I'm sure people do intentionally type nonsense sometimes - I just did for example. Google can get around that by looking for the same answer a few times. Like if the responses are 0000, 4513 and 4513 it's fairly evident which is correct.

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#112

Post by [deleted] »

daenz wrote: post #76
zwegner wrote: post #45

This particular issue (AI performance on captchas) is really quite fascinating. It's an arms race, but the problem is, only one side can win. Google is claiming they have improved their system in some (understandably) unspecified way, but there's only so far this can go. Captchas need to detect whether someone is human, but it has to work for everyone, ideally, even those with disabilities. Any simple task a human ca…

> It's an arms race, but the problem is, only one side can win. I don't disagree, but although this specific problem can be automated, the arms race will continue as newer problems (requiring uniquely human intelligence) are presented. We can keep moving the bar until the singularity. For example, a captcha: "Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed. To solve this,…

[deleted]

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#113

Post by EGreg »

Basically consider why we want to eliminate computers from accessing the sites -- because we want to make account creation expensive, to prevent sybil attacks and giving away scarce resources.

What is expensive? Reputation. That's where credit money's value comes from.

I wrote a more comprehensive piece here, in case anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601690

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#115

Post by ilitirit »

To be honest, I can't even solve those reCAPTCHAs on that page (that's one of my biggest gripes about reCAPTCHA). I think we're nearing a point in time where if some(thing) can solve a particularly hard CAPTCHA, we can safely assume that it's not human.

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#116

Post by crawrey »

Trezoid wrote: post #104
daenz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an arms race, but the problem is, only one side can win. I don't disagree, but although this specific problem can be automated, the arms race will continue as newer problems (requiring uniquely human intelligence) are presented. We can keep moving the bar until the singularity. For example, a captcha: "Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed. To solve this,…

The odd thing with a question like that is how "most dangerous" is determined. Logically the volcano is the most unsafe environment, and people do die on them, but statistically far more dangerous, at least by death count, is the bed. This is the kind of problem that would still cause issues for some people, especially if you had to scale them to produce identical captcha's relatively rarely (if the same one shows up…

Dangerous does not necessarily mean fatal. The posed question specifically states environment, and the bed as an environment is typically a flat, soft, blunt, rectangular prism.

Whereas volcanoes, and more specifically, active volcanoes can be unpredicable and spurt out hot lava and ash.

The question is worded fine and your attempt to poke holes into this is invalid.

Even if a question is worded well, it can always be interpreted incorrectly. The question should not be blamed for a person's inability to process information.

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#117

Post by thrownaway2424 »

nathancahill wrote: post #46
vowelless wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Luis von Ahn, creater of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA. He calls this "human computation". He is also the founder of Duolingo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ht4qiDRZE8

He's also one of the few famous entrepreneurs from Guatemala.

That's fantastic. I was trying to guess from the name. Latin American? German? Vietnamese?

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#118

Post by Lambdanaut »

zwegner wrote: post #73
Lambdanaut wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure how that would mitigate people from passing the government signed public key to their bot and letting it take over from there.

That's what I was referring to with services only allowing one (or N) accounts per person. A spammer could use the signature multiple times, but would need new email providers for every single account. And as an uncle (?) comment points out, there could possibly be blacklists of signatures of spammers shared between providers. That definitely would cause some new problems, of course, but who knows what the future may…

Oh I see. I hope it doesn't ever come to that!

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#119

Post by adw »

zwegner wrote: post #82
daenz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an arms race, but the problem is, only one side can win. I don't disagree, but although this specific problem can be automated, the arms race will continue as newer problems (requiring uniquely human intelligence) are presented. We can keep moving the bar until the singularity. For example, a captcha: "Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed. To solve this,…

That runs into the scalability problem that I mentioned--someone (say, a Mechanical Turk user) can solve that problem once, and put it in a database. To avoid this, there needs to be a way to generate them cheaply, so you pretty much need a computer that can solve the problem in the first place. Basically, my point is that there's no such thing as "uniquely human intelligence". There's lots of problems that fall into…

So that begins to look a bit like the RSA problem, doesn't it? Find a problem which can only be solved efficiently given some "secret" knowledge – where, instead of that knowledge (the prime factors) being secret, the knowledge is something it's easy for a computer to use but hard for it to recognize.

I'm probably overgeneralizing, but it's an interesting framing.

Re: Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy

#120

Post by notatoad »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #35

From that caption "CAPTCHA images correctly solved by the algorithm", there are at least two of them that I'm not sure _I_ can correctly solve on the first try. Which is generally my experience with captcha's these days, I only have about a 50% success rate. CAPTCHA is a failed strategy, time to give it up.

it's a failed strategy for deterring spammers, but apparently reCAPTCHA has done a good job of training google's computer vision algos. which probably have better things to do than try to beat captchas.
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