In my opinion the granddaddy of all 4chan CAPTCHA busts is still Yannick Kilcher’s GPT-J tune on “Raiders of the Lost Kek” set, and might be the coolest thing an LLM has ever done on video: https://youtu.be/efPrtcLdcdM?si=errY0PrEhnX9ylDw
Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
171–180 of 378 posts
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#172I’ll never forget spending the evening of the 2016 election on /pol/
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because you can technically crack them doesn't mean they're useless. There's a significant amount of time, skill and effort that went into the solution from this post, and the end result doesn't generalize well (you'd have to start all over for a different kind of captcha). The vast majority of spammers would not be able to replicate this; those who do would either make money legitimately, or focus their skills…
So, I do this type of AI development for solving CAPTCHAs. I can't get any real jobs that pay me for my more advanced skills. My primary sins were going to a second/third-tier university and some performance concerns in a portion of my previous roles due to divorce and burn-out. I make $80k/year in government IT, and $30-150k/year as the "AI" guy in a small 2-5 person group that offers a CAPTCHA-breaking API. The spa…
If there were a totally 100% aboveboard way to do this in a net transfer of utility from Tessier-Ashopool SA to the typical web surfer I would be a superfan.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
captchas are broken, forever. There is no way to prevent bots without also preventing a bottom tier of human users (visually impaired people, old people, or just impatient people). Like this xkcd [1] comic suggests, we need to just focus on rewarding and punishing specific behavior, regardless of whether the agent is human or not [1] https://xkcd.com/810/
PoW like hashcash (not a cryptocurrency thing) might be a better solution. Users could even delegate solving the PoW puzzles to a 3rd party for low power devices like phones. But it imposes a cost on spammers that's inescapable.
That assumes spammers are using their own hardware to post. If they're using a botnet, they don't care about CPU cycles. Botnets would probably become even more profitable in that model.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#175I’ll never forget spending the evening of the 2016 election on /pol/
What happened?
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#176There is a reason why people moved away from distorted text based captcha. We are basically at the point where computers are better at them then humans. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14... is a paper on the subject i think is really interesting However a surprising amount of text based captchas can be solved in a few line shell script of, using imagemagik to convert to greyscale, dilate an…
Makes me wonder what comes next. Could we create a forum where every member must do a 15 minute video interview with a moderator? I know this "doesn't scale" but I think it could make for a funny gimmick.
A small signup fee is much easier.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because you can technically crack them doesn't mean they're useless. There's a significant amount of time, skill and effort that went into the solution from this post, and the end result doesn't generalize well (you'd have to start all over for a different kind of captcha). The vast majority of spammers would not be able to replicate this; those who do would either make money legitimately, or focus their skills…
> there are other options that pay much better than spamming Are there? Say you've got a felony record and can't get a legit AI/ML job at eg OpenAI/anywhere. What would you do instead? most of the options I can think of involve getting paid for doing things that are basically spam if you zoom out enough.
I’ve got no criminal charges of any kind and I’d still want to know about any way to work without getting flagged as a known enemy of the Cartel.
I’m lucky that some people still want chops no matter the thought crime, I’m very grateful such excellent employers exist (love you guys).
But you’re never sure you’ll line up two such in a row, this isn’t the IBM until company casket and company funeral days. Makes life “interesting” even for a risk-taker.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#178There is a reason why people moved away from distorted text based captcha. We are basically at the point where computers are better at them then humans. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14... is a paper on the subject i think is really interesting However a surprising amount of text based captchas can be solved in a few line shell script of, using imagemagik to convert to greyscale, dilate an…
> so really captchas are more like putting a small min amount of effort.
At that point a proof of work captcha (mCaptcha.org is one, but there are others), is probably the best option. Especially with how any reasonably effective traditional captcha is an accessibility nightmare.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#179> The official TensorFlow-to-TFJS model converter doesn't work on Python 3.12. This doesn't seem to really be documented.
> TensorFlow.js doesn't support Keras 3.
I tried getting into some casual machine learning stuff a few years ago and more or less gave up because of stuff like this. It was staggering how many recent tutorials were already outdated, how many random pitfalls there were, and how many "getting started" guides assumed you were already an expert.
Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA
#180There is a reason why people moved away from distorted text based captcha. We are basically at the point where computers are better at them then humans. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14... is a paper on the subject i think is really interesting However a surprising amount of text based captchas can be solved in a few line shell script of, using imagemagik to convert to greyscale, dilate an…
I think captchas are just another lind of defense to make it harder for actors abusing the system. It's not a solution, just a little (getting outdated) fortification.