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Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

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181–190 of 218 posts

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#181

Every time a CAPTCHA thread comes up I have to point this out. By using one you’re externalising your business costs onto your users. You can make that choice, but if you do you’re far more likely to negatively impact the section of society that already has problems online: those who need to use assistive technologies.

not to mention that somewhere in the back of your head there is a calculation going as a user that this is an expensive website to you, in terms of effort.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#182
post #178
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…

its because google no longer just tests if you are a human- they also train their model- try this- and I've tried it successfully far too many times- Enter your first captcha wrong and then half the times, on the second one it won't say you did first wrong. (it's because first was a learning set). do the second one right and then you're good. I deliberately mark the exact opposite of right boxes in the first captcha…

[deleted]

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#183
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…

It's using you as human labor to label data. That's why you have to solve multiple. It's annoying but greatly helps accelerate research and development since data is king.

>It's using you as human labor to label data. That's why you have to solve multiple.

That's actually not cool: recruiting your time under false pretenses to create value for themselves.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#184
It seems they are difficult because they're intentionally designed to de-anonymize users coming in over VPN/Tor, using the small variation in click timing. If you see one of these and want to stay anonymous, close the tab and walk away.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#185
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a pain for anybody using tracking blocking. I get captchas all day on all kinds of sites and I'm always logged into anywhere from 3-12 google accounts.

We do put a clickable mailto: url on the page as well. Unfortunately, unprotected forms get tons of automated spam. Emailing a verification doesn't work well...customers just don't pay attention to instructions :)

I just base64 encode my email address and decode it in an onload event handler. Most bots don't seem to execute JS because I haven't received a spam email yet.

Sucks for users with JS disabled though.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#186
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first reaction to your comment was that I would be pretty shocked if anyone here didn’t realize that, and wouldn’t you know I have now read more of the comments and here I am shocked. The idea that this problem results from heightened security measures is wrong, but it’s not laughable; it’s just sad.

Whenever I browse with the TOR browser, it's been 100% impossible for me to verify myself as a human even if all my answers are correct. I think they need to fix this bug, or at least give a message that the CAPTCHA won't be solved so we no longer waste our time. Their No CAPTCHA's are very rare for me when I'm browsing logged in to my personal google account under the same session, on a normal browser. They can be c…

> Whenever I browse with the TOR browser, it's been 100% impossible for me to verify myself as a human even if all my answers are correct

Consider this a canary that Tor is working as intended. If you get past Captcha on Tor, to me that is a sign something is terribly amiss.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#187

I find it strange how all the comments here are blaming Google. Isn't it obvious that CAPTCHAs have gotten difficult because AI got better at solving them? Soon bots will be better than humans at solving CAPTCHAs, and the system will fail completely. I predict that then Google and Facebook will completely block new user signup from Tor, VPNs or browsers without cookines. Everyone else will require an existing Google,…

It's not that, it's the fact that Google asks you almost never if you're using a Google account. That pretty much gives Google-account-havers a fast pass to the Internet, which gives Google even more power that it really shouldn't have. Also, they're using the captchas to train their AIs, which is unfair extraction of labor.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#188
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I manage to get rid of line 99.99% of spam with a hidden checkbox. Bots tend to check them, so I just ignore it if it's checked.

I remember reading about a blog that used this method something like 10 years ago, and wondered why I don't hear about it more often. Glad to know it still works just as well as back then.

I made a contact form that sends the data URL encoded if JS is disabled, or JSON if JS is enabled. If the back end gets url-encoded data, it's spam.

I also use the hidden field trick, but I label it phone number and fill it with zeros. Then I hide it with an external stylesheet. I don't actually want a phone field, its a decoy. If it is changed from zeros, it is spam. Most spam bots don't seem to parse external stylesheets.

I've had zero contact form spam with this method. Mind you it is a very low volume site.

I was just having fun with it, making a php-style contact form backend but using node.js. I read lots of those old blog posts you mention.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#189

What many commentors here don't realise is that Google also uses reCaptcha to make you do free work for them.

I think people realize that, but is it much worse than proof of work that is helpful to nobody? It's easy to take a position against Google and Recaptcha. It's easy to take a position against something that inconveniences you. What people actually don't seem to realize ITT is that abuse is becoming so easy and such a problem that we are becoming increasingly reliant on centralized services like Cloudflare and Google.…

If Google created captcha service for dataset, Uber, Facebook, Toyota, etc, could also create one too.

Uber business case: driverless cars. Users who are already uber users can bypass it.

Facebook: can sell datasets. Can authenticate users. I wonder if fb is used on more sites than Google?

Toyota: Aside from driveless, they would have a weak case but case nonetheless for starting a captcha service.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#190
This [captcha] thing is exactly how you make people stay away in droves.

If people are too inconveinienced by an extra click or two, or by password and login, why would any one stick around for waves of recaptcha? my response to captcha is very simple. "ill find the info later, likely on a competitors site"

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