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

Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 218 posts

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#151

Post by yesenadam »

kirion25 wrote: post #145
bogomipz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on this? What work are people actually doing for Google when they complete these awful captchas?

The older captcha with words was for the digitization of books. It helped in the Google Books, and Internet Archive projects notably. https://cogdogblog.com/2013/12/recaptcha-all-the-books/ The current one helps in identifying and navigating streets, useful for maps and autonomous driving. https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha... You'll notice that recaptcha always has a direct effect on curren…

Incidentally, it's a mystery to me why so many of the Gutenberg/Internet Archive books have such ludicrously bad plain-text renderings, utterly unusable/unreadable, with often barely one word correct per page - since neural nets have been getting very high scores on MNIST handwriting recognition (for example) for a long time now, maybe since the 90s? It's a shame.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#152

Post by lucb1e »

tobi1449 wrote: post #133
lucb1e wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proving one is human takes human effort. Given that, I'd rather do something marginally useful than something completely pointless. It would be cool if they released the gained data as open source, but that might compromise the service, and I guess someone has to develop and host this thing, so keeping it to themselves is fair enough. The only issue is the conflict of interest (they benefit from giving me more captch…

The problem is that as soon as you're getting value from users solving captchas, there's an incentive to show them more captchas to solve before accepting that they're human.

From the post:

> The only issue is the conflict of interest (they benefit from giving me more captchas),

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#154

Post by CamperBob2 »

dessant wrote: post #111
robin_reala wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not annoying; blocking. There are a reasonable percentage of people that cannot solve the current set of CAPTCHAs.

Yes, and Google also blocks the audio challenge sometimes, so people with impaired vision or with neurological issues that affect object recognition are effectively denied access to a large portion of the web.

At some point the ADA will come into play. Google has to realize that... don't they?

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#155

Post by umvi »

I'm not convinced OCR is as good as humans. I recent did a project making an unauthorized copy of a rare ($2000) book from a university library. I scanned in every page, but tesseract OCR really struggled with pages that started off straight but curved off. I tried lots of preprocessing techniques with limited success. My options were to type it in by hand or rescan that page so the lines were straight.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#156

Post by ACow_Adonis »

tokai wrote: post #106
outime wrote: post #24

Google reCAPTCHA is the absolute worst. It makes me solve several puzzles very often, usually when I use a mobile network and I’m not logged in with any Google account. It’s so frustrating that most of the times I find a reCAPTCHA I give up before trying and just go elsewhere e.g. when a site uses reCAPTCHA for sign up or after the first failed login, I’ll most likely skip if I don’t absolutely need to access such we…

In my experience if you just press next captcha without solving them, a bunch of times, it will stop with those and give you one of the "pick all storefronts" with multiple pictures, that can actually be solved. Too me it seems that if you take your time and try to answer them properly they will try to get you annotate as much data as possible. While if just click though it fast it'll let you pass.

I got the 'pick all the storefronts' one just this week.

Was mildly infuriating because what constitutes a storefront seems pretty culture specific, and I got shown a bunch of buildings, where half of them i had to go 'well, that MIGHT be a storefront, it looks kind of commercial, but it doesn't appear to have much explicit signage...god dammit..."

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#157

Post by syrrim »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #140
Pharmakon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hate them for the same reason we hate airport security theater; they do not work and have a high burden on the people being subjected to them. Plus, as it’s Google doing it, you can hardly escape the goddamned things. So yeah, we blame Google for using us as data classifiers and adding hoops and hurdles to the open net, while accomplishing precisely dick. I for one hope that AI gets to the point that it can effort…

> We hate them for the same reason we hate airport security theater; they do not work Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it. I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real…

The false negative rate may be very low, this doesn't speak to the false postive rate. Considering the goal was supposed to be "telling humans and computers apart" both kinds of errors are important to consider. Google predicates their captcha primarily on the logged-in user's activity around the web, failing that they use the ip. A human being not logged in and using an open proxy is likely to get shut out completely. It ceases to be a captcha, in the traditional sense, at that point. This may be a good thing, depending on your standpoint.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#158

Post by hombre_fatal »

darkpuma wrote: post #135
hombre_fatal wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's entirely reasonable to show a challenge after a couple of failed login attempts, but they should never be part of the default login flow. Nope, that only works if there weren't botnets that just multiplex millions of requests over thousands of websites. Anyone who has tried IP-blocking bots has run into this where 50k+ IP addresses just need to send you one request per couple minutes. Your posts in this thread…

reCAPTCHA's tile fade-in doesn't punish bots, it punishes real humans. Your argument might be valid if reCAPTCHA were a true CAPTCHA, rather than compliance/recruiting mechanism used by google to abuse people until they relent and adopt google products. But yeah, it's free so you can't resist using it. Have you ever stopped to wonder why google gives this service out for free? When you integrate reCAPTCHA into your w…

Well, it's something that works. HN uses it, too. Try to create an account over Tor.

It sucks that abuse exists, but it's a real problem and it's only getting easier to do and harder to avoid.

After all, what also bones users is having a platform that's trivial to attack because the developer thought abuse wasn't going to be a problem.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#159

Post by hombre_fatal »

Pharmakon wrote: post #147
hombre_fatal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We hate them for the same reason we hate airport security theater; they do not work Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it. I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real…

Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it. I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real reason or for some trivial reason. To me, it suggests a massive misunderstanding that…

Captchas do do that. They can't do everything, but they are an incredibly powerful tool.

Do you run a service that needs to prevent abuse at scale? What exactly is your Recaptcha replacement?

It's very easy to complain about the inconvenience of Recaptcha, but I'd like to see less of that and more constructive conversation about what all these supposed alternatives are, because all I see is "you don't need it" which is merely a reminder that, understandably, most people aren't running sites at a scale that attract abuse.

Even HN uses Recaptcha. Check out the login/register page.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#160

Post by ufo »

outime wrote: post #24

Google reCAPTCHA is the absolute worst. It makes me solve several puzzles very often, usually when I use a mobile network and I’m not logged in with any Google account. It’s so frustrating that most of the times I find a reCAPTCHA I give up before trying and just go elsewhere e.g. when a site uses reCAPTCHA for sign up or after the first failed login, I’ll most likely skip if I don’t absolutely need to access such we…

The most annoying thing for me is that I often encounter them in various websites for the Brazilian government, when I want to get somd official documents.
Post reply on HN