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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)

#161

Post by BenjiWiebe »

jillyboel wrote: post #76
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

I live in "the West" but English isn't my main language. I have no idea what a conoid is.

I live in the US, English is my only language. I could probably guess what a conoid is, but I don't actually know (until reading these comments).

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

#162

Post by miki123211 »

jerf wrote: post #10
soraminazuki wrote: post #5

The title kind of makes it appear far less of a problem than it actually is, because according to the article, hCaptcha made multiple rude and evidence-free accusations of lying despite the author actually being blind.

Remember that from hCaptcha's point of view, by this point they've probably dealt with hundreds of other people claiming that they are blind when they really aren't, so their bots will work. This isn't a defense, just an explanation... but it is also an explanation of why the entire idea of "we'll not give blind people a way past the CAPTCHA but just give a pass to 'real' blind people so we can pass ADA", which is th…

What is your suggested alternative?

Audio captchas are inherently discriminatory to those with hearing issues or those that don't speak the 5 supported languages. They're also somewhat easy to solve with ASR models now. Text captchas are incredibly easy to solve with LLMs.

The only other alternative I see is some incredible tracking / surveillance machine (think an actual non-browser app that you have to run on your computer), but is that really what we want?

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

#163

Post by miki123211 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #25
jerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that from hCaptcha's point of view, by this point they've probably dealt with hundreds of other people claiming that they are blind when they really aren't, so their bots will work. This isn't a defense, just an explanation... but it is also an explanation of why the entire idea of "we'll not give blind people a way past the CAPTCHA but just give a pass to 'real' blind people so we can pass ADA", which is th…

This is a problem so chronic across so many fields that I wish there was single term to describe it. User POV :"Wow, provider is a really shitty entity and had no respect for my legitimate problem." Provider POV: "We get a huge number of illegitimate claims identical to legitimate ones regularly, the system would collapse if we didn't do heavy triage, the problem is the level of abuse, not a moral bankruptcy on our p…

What users don't see is that a single good actor will make, at most, a dozen such claims in their life, while a malicious one might literally make hundreds of them a day. The scales are different, by orders of magnitude.

It's not unimaginable that just 0.001% of your users (in terms of actual humans / entities physically using your service) are fraudsters, but 99% of your signup or login attempts / interactions with your service / "I'm not a fraudster, pinky swear" support claims are fraudulent.

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

#164

Post by lesuorac »

oniony wrote: post #115
andrepd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you're failing the captchas because you're doing them wrong, think again. Google captcha intentionally fails you a couple times if they don't have enough tracking info to determine that you're legit. So you solve the captcha correctly but are still lied to that "you've failed to solve the captcha, try again". That and the "fading images slowly to pretend like you have bad internet" thing. Disgusting beha…

Maybe they purposely load the images slowly to make it more expensive for the bot owners.

I kinda don't understand why we still have captchas. We've solved the asymmetric problem with proof-of-work; just make somebody solve something trivial so they spend more resources than you do.

Like if a bot requests your page 1/day its not a problem; but if they want to request it 1/ms then the proof-of-work becomes too much for them and its transparent to a person.

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

#165

Post by jabroni_salad »

miki123211 wrote: post #162
jerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that from hCaptcha's point of view, by this point they've probably dealt with hundreds of other people claiming that they are blind when they really aren't, so their bots will work. This isn't a defense, just an explanation... but it is also an explanation of why the entire idea of "we'll not give blind people a way past the CAPTCHA but just give a pass to 'real' blind people so we can pass ADA", which is th…

What is your suggested alternative? Audio captchas are inherently discriminatory to those with hearing issues or those that don't speak the 5 supported languages. They're also somewhat easy to solve with ASR models now. Text captchas are incredibly easy to solve with LLMs. The only other alternative I see is some incredible tracking / surveillance machine (think an actual non-browser app that you have to run on your…

I'm actually pretty okay with the zero click cloudflare dealios and prosopo PoW captchas. You can make websites that simply do not have visual puzzles on them at all.

Every now and then turnstile does get a little borked but I can honestly say that I would rather just do without whatever I was trying to do than click 7 motorcycles. Hcaptcha and recaptcha are becoming my personal brown M&M indicator for additional bad user experiences in a given web property.

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

#166

Post by miki123211 »

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…

> for pennies

"for pennies" is a lot more expensive than 0, and that matters at scale.

Scam isn't about one person performing one request, for that you can indeed just hire a human, it's about thousands of bots constantly interacting with a service.

If you need to scrape 10m records and there's no anti-fraud protection, you pay $0 (excluding typical bandwidth / server costs). If every query requires a captcha, and you have to pay $.01 per captcha, the operation costs you $100k.

Going from 0 to 100k is often "good enough" to make these things uneconomical.

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

#167

Post by nmarinov »

RobMurray wrote: post #74

I am also blind. hCaptcha is the worst. Their stupid cookie expires so I have to go through their getting an email to set the cookie almost every time I encounter one. It's a horrendous UX, especially when using different devices and browsers. I imagine others just give up instead of dealing with the crap. They shouldn't use the word accessibility when their whole service is the exact opposite. The bots can probably…

What's the best captcha regarding accessibility?

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

#168

Post by stanmancan »

Spivak wrote: post #52
stanmancan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hope the other lesson was the good email verification hygiene of making the user take an affirmative action and click a "verify email" button rather then send it unsolicited. You essentially had an open public unauthed form that would send an email to any address you typed in it. Surely that alone raises some eyebrows.

How would adding an extra button change anything? Right now when they register we send a “verify email address” email. Adding an extra step of “click a button” makes no meaningful difference.

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

#169

Post by dizhn »

lesuorac wrote: post #164
oniony wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they purposely load the images slowly to make it more expensive for the bot owners.

I kinda don't understand why we still have captchas. We've solved the asymmetric problem with proof-of-work; just make somebody solve something trivial so they spend more resources than you do. Like if a bot requests your page 1/day its not a problem; but if they want to request it 1/ms then the proof-of-work becomes too much for them and its transparent to a person.

It might be an incentive to make people stay logged into their accounts. This wouldn't be hole reason but I am sure it's part of it. I used another laptop with a VPN for a few days and what used to be smooth experiences turned into a shit ton of "log in to prove you're not a robot". Both Reddit and Youtube did this.

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

#170

Post by rascul »

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…

> 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.

Curious if phone verification would block more or less legitimate users than catchpas.

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