Live data from Hacker News

Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

nullpt.rs

221–230 of 378 posts

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#221
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you do this? While I can appreciate the technical achievement, you know most users of forums and imageboards don’t want any AI content at all.

> Why do you do this? Money, obviously. I'd also do it for $30-150k/year > you know most users of forums and imageboards don’t want any AI content at all. He's not creating or posting any "AI content"?

Okay, but you know his actions are enabling more AI content and spam to proliferate? I hardly think he is making that much money just because legitimate users don't want to fill in a captcha.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#222
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you do this? Money, obviously. I'd also do it for $30-150k/year > you know most users of forums and imageboards don’t want any AI content at all. He's not creating or posting any "AI content"?

Okay, but you know his actions are enabling more AI content and spam to proliferate? I hardly think he is making that much money just because legitimate users don't want to fill in a captcha.

[deleted]

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#223
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you do this? Money, obviously. I'd also do it for $30-150k/year > you know most users of forums and imageboards don’t want any AI content at all. He's not creating or posting any "AI content"?

Okay, but you know his actions are enabling more AI content and spam to proliferate? I hardly think he is making that much money just because legitimate users don't want to fill in a captcha.

It’s very easy to opine about the ethics others should have. Different when it’s you and your family and a comparatively easy effort will make a material difference in quality of life. And especially when you know ghe market need will be met by someone else anyway.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#224

Earlier 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…

Captchas are now useful to distinguish well-intentioned bots (they stop whenever they see captcha) from malicious ones, which solve them, but still behave a lot like bots. Well-intentional bots are first-class citizens

Wouldn’t a well-intentioned bot follow robots.txt anyway?

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#225

That’s like spending a few hours, learning to take the lid off your septic tank.

Oddly enough, I find most of 4chan less brainrot inducing than Twitter, even pre-Musk.

It's still brainrot, it's just on the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#226

Semi-related but I needed a CAPTCHA on my site[0] mainly to block comment form spam and settled on repurposing a fun method I’d seen before. Is definitely not foolproof (or hard at all), but I really liked making it. [0] https://www.hybridlogic.co.uk/contact

No way, that is a cool fucking captcha!!

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#227

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

Nearly a full minute of disclaimers and warnings about 4chan. That's got to be a record.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but you know his actions are enabling more AI content and spam to proliferate? I hardly think he is making that much money just because legitimate users don't want to fill in a captcha.

It’s very easy to opine about the ethics others should have. Different when it’s you and your family and a comparatively easy effort will make a material difference in quality of life. And especially when you know ghe market need will be met by someone else anyway.

If someone is making a brazen statement of being "a bad guy because 80K is not enough, and could not find anything decent for those extra $30K" what kind of treatment would they expect?

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but you know his actions are enabling more AI content and spam to proliferate? I hardly think he is making that much money just because legitimate users don't want to fill in a captcha.

It’s very easy to opine about the ethics others should have. Different when it’s you and your family and a comparatively easy effort will make a material difference in quality of life. And especially when you know ghe market need will be met by someone else anyway.

So you get a bit richer for less effort... but how do you think moderating legions of spam posts affects the lives of independent website owners, who just want to create communities around the things they love?

Or indeed the users, who have to wade through trash invading their threads?

Or other legitimate users, who now have to answer captchas from CloudFlare just to access their favourite websites?

Ultimately this is a parasitical element, choking the internet. It will kill the things it profits from. Many will give up running these sites, you walk away with your $100k, and no one can ever do it again... you've not created anything of value, but destroyed it.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's completely unclear what a "proof of work" captchas is supposed to be.

Brave search uses it. From my limited understanding, it sends a time-consuming javascript function and its input to your browser, and has your browser calculate the output and send it back. The server matches your output with the expected output. I assume the server would pre-compute in some way? On the spectrum, it leans more towards being a spam-alleviating thing rather than a human-distinguishing thing.
Post reply on HN