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

191–200 of 218 posts

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#191

Post by MASM32_COM »

computerex wrote: post #162
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…

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.

so if we want to screw google write a bot that scrapes for captchas and gets them all egregiously wrong, all the time.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#192

Post by MASM32_COM »

pmoriarty wrote: post #84
userbinator wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I definitely am not happy with how much control Google has over the Internet in general. Everything from how they present and rank search results, Google Analytics scripts everywhere, the sometimes vaguely-political messages on their homepage, the ostensibly-anti-bot checks including CAPTCHAs and just plain banning you if you want to do more "advanced" searches (like the ones Fravia would've taught...), etc.

There's other (mysterious to me) stuff that sites call to Google for, apart from captchas and analytics. As a uMatrix (and former NoScript) user, I've long noticed that many sites make calls to ajax.googleapis.com for I have no idea what. Quite often the site will refuse to work without that. To be fair, a lot of sites make use of javascript from a lot of other sites as well: cloudfront and amazon are common.

these are the kind of sites i just dump and move on. if they dont want me to go to thier site i can get the info i want somewhere else, with a tiny bit of patience. if someone whants to torpedo thier own sites with mandatory java, or other such security compromises, sianara dude

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#194

Post by nvrspyx »

chrisparton1991 wrote: post #126
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…

reCAPTCHA pushed me over to DuckDuckGo. I use a VPN, and a fair number of my Google searches are blocked by a reCAPTCHA with 5 or more challenges. Now, I use DDG and fall back to Google search with !g if I can't find what I'm looking for.

You can fall back to Startpage with !s, which should give you the same results as Google.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#195

Post by mcv »

I fear any test where a machine has to decide whether you're human enough, is always going to be easy to game for a machine. You can't replace humans with machines and then not expect machines to replace humans.

When you look at it that way, the whole captcha approach, no matter how clever, seems doomed to fail.

Why not simply allow bots? If it is because bots exhibit behaviour you don't want (like spamming), why not filter them based on the behaviour you don't want? Learn to recognise spam rather than fabricating some test. And when bots are truly indistinguishable from people, is it really a problem that they're not real people?

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#196

Post by mcv »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #61
webmobdev wrote: post #46

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.…

> I think people realize that, but is it much worse than proof of work that is helpful to nobody?

It pollutes the original intention with a different goal. Is the goal to easily distinguish between bots and humans, or is the goal to trick people into doing free classification work for Google? Different intentions lead to different incentives which may lead to different results.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#197

Post by anewguy9000 »

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…

indeed. it needs to bloody stop. its no different than a whites only washroom in 1929. im not logged into google tracking. so im not allowed to participant in a huge swath of the internet unless i spent 15 minutes a day training AI. when will UX be taken seriously? when will users (aka humans) be respected?

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#199

Post by chopin »

chocolatkey wrote: post #139
pmoriarty wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's other (mysterious to me) stuff that sites call to Google for, apart from captchas and analytics. As a uMatrix (and former NoScript) user, I've long noticed that many sites make calls to ajax.googleapis.com for I have no idea what. Quite often the site will refuse to work without that. To be fair, a lot of sites make use of javascript from a lot of other sites as well: cloudfront and amazon are common.

As a uMatrix user as well, I have manually whitelisted ajax.googleapis.com. It is actually not tracking scripts, but hosted libs like jQuery, which many many sites use and will not function without. See here: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/

But Google gets your request nonetheless. Which I'd like to avoid.

Re: Why Captchas have gotten so difficult

#200

Post by darkpuma »

PSZD wrote: post #172
darkpuma wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Humans are the problem, not some mythical AI powering the bots. It costs a fraction of a cent to get a CAPTCHA solved. The only real counter being used is making it take longer to solve a CAPTCHA - which is exactly what the services like reCAPTCHA do, while minimizing the impact on heuristically 'good' users. Making CAPTCHA solves take 30 seconds or a minute instead of 5 seconds is the state of the art.

The heuristic google uses for 'good' is 'compliance with the google surveillance system.'

And if throttling attempts is in fact the state of the art as you claim, you can do that without pulling in google code at all. I trust you are that competent at least. However the fact that the noscript version doesn't make you wait at all leads me to conclude your excuse for google's behavior is bullshit.

Post reply on HN