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I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

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Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#131

Post by tombert »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #126
jchw wrote: post #41

I hope we can end the CAPTCHA experiment soon. It didn't work. Phone verification isn't good either, but for as much as I hate phone verification at least it actually raises the cost of spamming somewhat. CAPTCHA does not. Almost all turnkey CAPTCHA services can be solved for pennies. Solving the problems of SPAM and malicious traffic will be challenging... I am worried it will come down to three possible things: - A…

> I hope we can end the CAPTCHA experiment soon. It didn't work. Well it sort of worked before we got modern AI image recognizers, but even then they had to continue making the challenges harder to keep up with the recognizer software. Now the damn things have crossed over into the domain of "easier for a machine to solve than a human" so they're worthless for their original purpose.

Define modern? I worked adjacent to the web-scraping tech at Jet.com and they managed to beat a lot of the CAPTCHAs even in 2016.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#132

Post by jchw »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #126
jchw wrote: post #41

I hope we can end the CAPTCHA experiment soon. It didn't work. Phone verification isn't good either, but for as much as I hate phone verification at least it actually raises the cost of spamming somewhat. CAPTCHA does not. Almost all turnkey CAPTCHA services can be solved for pennies. Solving the problems of SPAM and malicious traffic will be challenging... I am worried it will come down to three possible things: - A…

> I hope we can end the CAPTCHA experiment soon. It didn't work. Well it sort of worked before we got modern AI image recognizers, but even then they had to continue making the challenges harder to keep up with the recognizer software. Now the damn things have crossed over into the domain of "easier for a machine to solve than a human" so they're worthless for their original purpose.

Yeah but filtering out mindless bots is even easier than loading a bloated mess of JS: a simple form question that you believe 100% of the valid users will be able to answer should be good enough to stop almost all of those low-level bots. I use that approach all the time.

Some day this luck will run out, but for larger entities that experience targeted malicious traffic it's never really been a viable approach.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#133

Post by alwayslikethis »

danaris wrote: post #127
mapt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, even understanding these things, on a shared connection it might take you literally two or three minutes of captcha work before Google recognizes your personhood. Am I identifying the boxes wrong? Am I doing it too fast? Where do "Stairs" begin and end? Does a motorcycle include its rider? Or is Google just fucking with me and failing me on purpose? My workplace had a period this year where captcha was…

And while it's not quite the same kind of CAPTCHA, I've not infrequently run into Cloudflare "prove you're human" screens that just...never let me through. I click the box, it loads for a second, turns into a nice checkmark, and then...reloads the "prove you're human" page. Infinite loop (as far as I can tell, anyway, not having infinite time).

Firefox RFP? That sometimes does it

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#134

Post by lagadu »

bluGill wrote: post #20
blindgeek wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, that's a good point, and it hadn't occurred to me. For the overwhelming majority of blind people, language like "looked at" is just metaphorical. I mean, all language is symbolic anyway. The map is not the territory and the menu is not the dinner. Some of us are taught very young to use common terms like look in that kind of a metaphorical way. Partially so that we fit in and are comfortable with the rest o…

Even as a sighted person, "look at" is often metamorphic - you can interview an expert over the phone and say you looked into the subject even though the only looking was around the phone number.

When someone recommends me an album or artist I "take a look" at it: I listen to it. Though now that I think about it, I wouldn't say that in my other languages.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#135

Post by reginald78 »

stanmancan wrote: post #29
isodev wrote: post #21

Why are captchas even a thing still? If folks want to scrape something or build an automation around something, then why not let them do it? They still have to respect the system they're logging in. Not to mention the privacy perk of not exposing your visitors to some captcha service with a dozen or more data subprocessors.

I had to add a captcha to a registration page a couple years ago. Bots were signing up for thousands of fake accounts with other people’s email addresses. The email confirmation we sent would then get reported as spam since the recipient didn’t sign up for our service. Our email provider suspended our account for high spam reports.

What's is the play by the spammers here? Is it a direct attack on your website, perhaps because they were competitors? Or are they hoping that 1% of spammed email addresses will accidentally verify their email?

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#136

Post by not_your_vase »

jchw wrote: post #41

I hope we can end the CAPTCHA experiment soon. It didn't work. Phone verification isn't good either, but for as much as I hate phone verification at least it actually raises the cost of spamming somewhat. CAPTCHA does not. Almost all turnkey CAPTCHA services can be solved for pennies. Solving the problems of SPAM and malicious traffic will be challenging... I am worried it will come down to three possible things: - A…

In the past 3 years, every morning I wake up I open the news, and I hope that I will the following headlines: "Some guy figured out how to use AI to detect bot traffic with 100% accuracy, captchas became obsolete and banned worldwide with immediate effect"

And every morning my day starts with disappointment.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#137

Post by soraminazuki »

Scarblac wrote: post #102
inetknght wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So there are legal standards for what exactly blind is, and certificates. In the USA, people are not yet required to provide identification when signing up for "free" services. There are real concerns around privacy. A certification of blindness is exactly one of those privacy concerns, being a medical issue. You think it would be a good idea to give that private information to the criminal organizations of big tec…

These are already users that want to let the company know that they are blind in order to qualify for special treatment. In that case showing the certificate doesn't seem to be much of an extra privacy issue to me.

Nah, it's the companies that's demanding proof over what's basically sane treatment rather than users wanting to surrender their medical info.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#138

Post by gus_massa »

croes wrote: post #45
Rastonbury wrote: post #14

Some captchas are getting pretty discriminatory, not everyone lives in the West and can identify the objects they are asking you to. Another recent one sticks out where they asked me to pick a shape as the same number of conoids on screen. If you ask people on a street what a conoids I bet a significant amount will give you blank looks Also at least now I know some people call those markings crosswalks

But on the internet the answer to „what is a conoid“ is just a web search away. The bigger problem is when other options of a captcha fit in another cultural context. Taxi colors are an example for that.

I got mathematical surfaces like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conoid To get the correct image I had to search conoid street. Anyway, I guessed they were those red cone shaped things that people put on the street and I'm not sure how they are call even is Spanish (probably conos or balizas).

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#139

Post by KETHERCORTEX »

croisillon wrote: post #62
slater wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please enter your five-digit ZIP code

did you know that the ZIP code for both Paris Texas and Paris France start with 75xxx

Well, France doesn't have Zone Improvement Plan codes. It is somewhat annoying to fill forms on websites with "ZIP code" in them for people outside US. They aren't called this way anywhere else (except for one or two countries).

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#140

Post by thayne »

jchw wrote: post #41

I hope we can end the CAPTCHA experiment soon. It didn't work. Phone verification isn't good either, but for as much as I hate phone verification at least it actually raises the cost of spamming somewhat. CAPTCHA does not. Almost all turnkey CAPTCHA services can be solved for pennies. Solving the problems of SPAM and malicious traffic will be challenging... I am worried it will come down to three possible things: - A…

> Almost all turnkey CAPTCHA services can be solved for pennies.

There is one area where even pennies can be a barrier: DDoS.

Paying a few pennies per captcha can add up to a lot when you want to complete millions of them.

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