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

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

#121

Post by slacka »

allochthon wrote: post #95
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,…

"Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed. My sense is that IBM's Watson could tackle this particular question. Also interesting to note that the question introduces external considerations, such as whether or not there's someone dangerous near the house, bed, park, etc. A human respondent will have to ignore the matter of whether there's additional context and seco…

Like Deep Blue, Watson represented a major advance in the state of weak AI. However at its core, it's still just a text-based statistical search engine. It has no ability to "learn" new abilities. Its algorithms will use previous answers to adjust ranking of answers, but once a category is finished, that data is lost. For new data, its database needs to be re-indexed. For new behavior like recognizing pictures or playing a game, it needs to be programmed.

Watson played a simplified version of Jeopardy with no video or audio questions. This was a key compromise to allow a text based system to compete with humans. The AI problem of recognizing pictures is practically unsolved. It took Google's best researchers, a massive database of cat pictures, and a supercomputer just to train a computer to recognize when a cat was in a photo. So your sense of Watson's present abilities is a little skewed and unrealistic.

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

#122

Post by BoppreH »

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…

All captchas I have seen were used to stop spam. The problem with spam is that 1) it's noise and 2) appears in large amounts.

Captchas approach the problem 1), by assuring only people can post and then hopefully increase the signal quality. It sucks because it requires mental effort, is hard on people with disabilities, blocks potentially useful bots (see reddit bots) and leads to an arms race.

What if we tried to solve the problem 2)? One possible solution is requiring a proof of work. Some computation that requires a few seconds, easily disguised while the user is typing the comment or filling the fields. It's an old idea but I've never seen an implementation in the wild. (yes, it would fail for mobile devices. fall back to captcha or something)

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

#125

Post by frozenport »

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 is only a security problem is somebody keeps track.

You can be issued a secure key ('a passport') to make new ids ('HN registration') but nobody needs to know who ('the passport') generated the website specific ids once your key has been used. The passport only gives access to generate further keys.

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

#126

Post by User8712 »

chris_va wrote: post #107
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. It's already happening. It turns out humans come quite cheaply, and you can actually solve captchas using humans at very high QPS for very low cost. And people do! Site owners will have to come up with alternate means of "bot" enforcement that does not rely on human vs computer detection.

Agreed, cheap labor isn't hard to find, and there are countless people that would answer captchas all day long for a few dollars. How many captchas could you answer in a day? Let's say you work 8 hours, and answer one every 20 seconds. That's 1,440 captchas answered for $3/day. You get 5 captchas for a penny. If you can make more than a penny off 5 captchas and whatever you're trying to post or accomplish, you have a business.

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

#127

Post by frik »

Google's reCAPTCHA showed street numbers as one of the two catcha-"words" for more than two years.

For me this was quiet annoying to input street numbers of others. It's a privacy issue, it was like helping the NSA spying and one feels bad entering Google's captcha.

What is even more astouning is that Google does not even mention all the croud sourced "volunteers" that trained their OCR database. As Google use an open OCR software (former HP OCR app from '95) it would be a good choice to publish their data back to the community.

I removed Google captcha on my own sites and implemented my own traditional captcha (on the first sight of it about two years ago).

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

#130

Post by sugarfactory »

BoppreH wrote: post #122
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…

All captchas I have seen were used to stop spam. The problem with spam is that 1) it's noise and 2) appears in large amounts. Captchas approach the problem 1), by assuring only people can post and then hopefully increase the signal quality. It sucks because it requires mental effort, is hard on people with disabilities, blocks potentially useful bots (see reddit bots) and leads to an arms race. What if we tried to so…

A few seconds of googling gave me this WordPress plugin that requres a proof-of-work when posting a comment: http://wordpress-plugins.feifei.us/hashcash/
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