Live data from Hacker News

Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

grumpy.website

211–220 of 503 posts

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#211
post #94

Big rant, there are few things I hate more than filling out their endless useless CAPTCHA's when browsing websites that have nothing to do with Google. Google is a hypocritical pile of burning . They use bots right? They scrape websites, they infest everything from my banking website to console emulators with their tracking, and yet we little people are not allowed to scrape or interface with the web programmatically…

I thought you could disallow Googlebot in your robots.txt file?

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#212
post #127

Would it be possible to build a Firefox plugin that creates and isolates the requisite cookies to allow reputation to be built, but at least partially maintains privacy? I was thinking maybe something that has 10 difference Google sessions, and shards them depending on the website, deciding which to send to the Captcha. You'd build reputation at 1/10th the speed, but you'd still potentially build it. Or, one that all…

https://github.com/privacypass/challenge-bypass-extension

I'd love Apple to throw their weight behind this. Maybe this + bundle it seamlessly into iOS Safari.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#213

I've never understood what happened to reCAPTCHA, it was originally so great and is now just so, so toxic. Originally it was an awesome solution based on OCR'ing books that usually worked quickly on the first try, and almost never took more than two. Then it turned into a single checkbox (analyzing mouse movement) so it was even faster... and I remember some simple image-based like "select the images of cats" that we…

Originaly it didn't belong to google, it was an aquisition. I remember seeing a ted talk about it. To me it constantly feels like I'm working for google for free for their AI projects which is very annoying comparing to help a smaller company OCR books.

Trying to convince a robot that you aren’t a robot by teaching a robot how to look at pictures is a pretty absurd state of the world.

When they reboot the Matrix, instead of being used as batteries, the machines will keep humans around for machine learning test sets.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#214
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I believe it is because the Chrome as a browser works in conjunction with Gmail and other google properties' logins to kinda figure out that you're a human. One of the things, if it ever gets there, would be for the anti-trust probe, if any, to look at how Google shares data between its browser, Chrome, and it's other services.

How would the website code communicate with the browser, unless it was some open API you can refer to. As for "in conjunction with Gmail", yes that's called cookies.

Goole websites (and frames in other websites) share information with Chrome browser. That's what the Chrome Login brouhaha was all about.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#215

I've never understood what happened to reCAPTCHA, it was originally so great and is now just so, so toxic. Originally it was an awesome solution based on OCR'ing books that usually worked quickly on the first try, and almost never took more than two. Then it turned into a single checkbox (analyzing mouse movement) so it was even faster... and I remember some simple image-based like "select the images of cats" that we…

I think two things happened:

1) Computer vision got a lot better over the past few years. It's also become way easier for the average Joe bot operator to run cutting-edge stuff. OCR tasks don't cut it for distinguishing people from machines any more. Every time I see a blog post about a new computer vision architecture or how some random developer trained a neural network to get an X% result on benchmark Y, I think to myself CAPTCHAs are going to get more annoying.

2) The frequency at which most people have to solve a CAPTCHA has gone way down. In the beginning, I remember having to solve a CAPTCHA every single time I did anything on some sites. Now, I can't even remember the last time I had to do more than just check the checkbox. So, the amount of annoyance is amortized over a larger number of sessions, and Google probably feels like they can ask the user to complete more tasks as a result.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#216
post #39

I was going through the same ordeal as a Firefox user, so I've made Buster to solve challenges and reclaim some of that lost time: https://github.com/dessant/buster If you're a developer, please consider replacing reCAPTCHA on your site with an alternative. reCAPTCHA discriminates against people with disabilities and those who seek privacy, and it gaslights you into thinking you did not solve the challenge correctly,…

reCaptcha v3 works well for me. There are no challenges anymore and it just gives you a score based on whether it thinks the user is a bot/spammer, then you can do whatever with that. Personally if the score is low enough I just place the user in a restricted user group that needs approval on certain site actions.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#217

When confronted with reCAPTCHA I always switch to the audio-version as that: - is generally easier to solve (download the sound clip using curl or wget, type in the nonsense it says, done) - does not turn me into a mechanical Turk training Google's AI - works in 'any browser' by circumventing the browser (by using wget/curl), thereby not allowing Google to punish me for not using their dragnet/browser.

> does not turn me into a mechanical Turk training Google's AI I’ve been wondering about that. Are you sure you’re not training their speech recognition AI?

No, I'm not sure. It deem it unlikely though as those sound snippets are rather short and uncomplicated, something which I'd think any reasonable STT-system should be able to handle - which makes it vulnerable to those systems as well.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#218
post #204

I've never understood what happened to reCAPTCHA, it was originally so great and is now just so, so toxic. Originally it was an awesome solution based on OCR'ing books that usually worked quickly on the first try, and almost never took more than two. Then it turned into a single checkbox (analyzing mouse movement) so it was even faster... and I remember some simple image-based like "select the images of cats" that we…

> 1) The images are so blurry and ambiguous it's really hard to get right, it feels like a test designed to make you fail On top of that, I think some of the training sets are wrong. Multiple times I've been asked to find traffic signs, but it would only let me pass when including street signs.

There's also the issue that it will lie to you if the alogrithm decides it simply doesn't like you. Which means you'll end up doing at least a couple of rounds before it decides to let you through.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#219
post #39

I was going through the same ordeal as a Firefox user, so I've made Buster to solve challenges and reclaim some of that lost time: https://github.com/dessant/buster If you're a developer, please consider replacing reCAPTCHA on your site with an alternative. reCAPTCHA discriminates against people with disabilities and those who seek privacy, and it gaslights you into thinking you did not solve the challenge correctly,…

Without taking any moral stance, it should be noted that accessibility was (and is) the most successful attack surface of anti-bots measures.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending my data to Google as a condition of using someone else’s site also isn’t secure. Training Google AI also isn’t something I signed up for.

Not saying I like the precedent of Google being inescapable, you're not "signing up" for anything. A web server is 100% in its rights to refuse to send you a page, on their terms.

Not entirely accurate. The GDPR restricts the terms they can use, for example. And anti-discrimination law probably also applies. These don't really apply to captcha, of course, under current interpretations.
Post reply on HN