Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#121

Post by machello13 » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #100

noad wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

At least the original reCAPTCHA was used for OCR'ing public domain books. Even if it had the effect of training Google's OCR tech, it was at least making literature searchable and indexable for the public good. Modern reCAPTCHA is nothing more than training for Google Maps and, seemingly, self-driving cars, both of which are commercialized.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#122

Post by TechBro8615 » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

This is fantastic news for privacy on the web. Thank you Cloudflare!

I’ve been seeing hcaptcha in more and more places recently. It’s a bit rough around the edges still, but it works well and feels far less hostile than recaptcha.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#123

Post by karatestomp » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #87

_jal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Captchas are fundamentally anti-human. I'm not saying there isn't a problem to be solved, I'm saying Captchas are a behavior enforcement mechanism overseen by robots and are anti-human. I write the site owner short note when they go bad explaining why they just lost a customer and go somewhere else. Life is too short to put up with shitty tech.

You've made an assertion, not an argument. What does "anti-human" even mean? You're angry, sure, but you haven't expressed what exactly it is that you're angry about. Nor have you proposed a realistic alternative way to distinguish bots from humans. This kind of histrionic, sweeping hot take is not productive.

Considering captchas operate by pushing the work of avoiding bots on your site (your problem) onto all the human users of your site, I think on the basis of that alone "anti-human" is warranted. Or "anti-social", if you prefer, which might better capture the fundamental problem with that aspect of it. That they proceed to perform textbook gaslighting on some of those people makes it even worse ("no, you didn't select all the buses in those images" but, of course, you did). Whether these things are necessary for it to operate is beside the point.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#124

Post by _jal » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #115

_jal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Captchas are fundamentally anti-human. I'm not saying there isn't a problem to be solved, I'm saying Captchas are a behavior enforcement mechanism overseen by robots and are anti-human. I write the site owner short note when they go bad explaining why they just lost a customer and go somewhere else. Life is too short to put up with shitty tech.

What, in your opinion, is the pro-human way to address the problem to be solved? I'm always curious to hear what other approaches might be worth considering. CAPTCHAs tend to tick the boxes of performing well enough for website-controllers and being low-effort for them to deploy.

I have no suggestions for the general case, and suspect it is one of those problems that doesn't have general-purpose solution. That doesn't mean captchas don't suck.

As for specific things one can do, like anything, more effort means better results. I'm not going to talk about this much, but we do look at a lot of different behavioral and other signals for fraud detection, as that's an important aspect of our business.

If others are fine with annoying their customers to offload risk, they can make that call. I don't have much sympathy about lost sales, though - it is literally choosing to waste customers' time and increase frustration for one's own benefit.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#125

Post by mikkelam » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

noad wrote: post #26

zachware wrote: post #21

One 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.

I really don't think the challenges we're giving at still hard for computers.. a lot of these are super simple.. google would've cracked many of the driving ones years ago

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#126

Post by JakeTheAndroid » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #107

devy wrote: post #5

The 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.

*Cloudflare

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#127

Post by maallooc » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

I hope this captcha is tor friendly.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#128

Post by rurp » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

tcd wrote: post #30

tgv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By now, I almost immediately close a page with a reCAPTCHA, because the stream of buses, traffic lights, and cycles never seems to end when you're using Firefox. And then it says "too many requests from this computer" and refuses to continue.

I'm amazed Mozilla hasn't sued Google for discriminating against their browser - I also use Firefox and suffer endlessly using privacy tools. I can prove there are no more busses and I'm 100% right, but I can predict 100% of the time it'll say "please try again". The pattern seems to be 2/3 'right' guesses. on sites like eBay, the captcha is broke on firefox. I complete it, and it says "you need to resubmit this form…

>I can prove there are no more busses and I'm 100% right, but I can predict 100% of the time it'll say "please try again".

I frequently run into the same issue of having correct answers rejected, and have read posts from many others who experience the same. At some point I started intentionally picking random squares for the first couple image sets. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to end up taking any more submissions overall than when I try to pick the right answers from the start.

Plus, polluting Google's free work data set ever so slightly gives me a small amount of pleasure.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#129

Post by curiousgal » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #57

Well. That's probably fantastic news; using ReCAPTCHA (and thereby making users subject to Google's tender mercies) was honestly my main reason to dislike cloudflare from a user's perspective. ReCAPTCHA is utterly foul; it follows you everywhere it can, exists to undermine privacy, punishes non-Chrome users, and throws you in an infinite loop when it decides that you're not a human.

I don't blame reCAPTCHA for existing, I blame Cloudfare for using. It made using Tor literally impossible. Hopefully this will be better.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#130

Post by wyre » Wed, Apr 08, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #120

RadiantUnicorn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever been "hellbanned", but I've certainly spent more than 5 minutes on trying to get a captcha to work. After a while I usually need to ask friends in the US to help me, because it asks me a non-localized question. My favourite question was: Select all fire hydrants. I selected only the classic red one's you see in movies. Fail. I selected the one's that were yellow too. Fail. I sent a picture of…

It is pretty straightforward to train a neural network to solve these -- e.g. fire hydrants, traffic lights, cars. I would have thought ReCAPTCHA would take into account human factors (e.g. speed of clicking) as higher priority to the accuracy of the selection.

AFAIK it takes into account mouse movement and the speed of clicks.