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Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

nullpt.rs

231–240 of 378 posts

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has been working in ML for years, I can only recommend to stay away from anything recent. Grab an old bayesian statistics textbook and learn the fundamentals, then progress to learning the major frameworks like Pytorch. Try to write every part of a CNN, RNN and Transformer architecture and training pipeline yourself the first time (including data loaders, but maybe leave out CUDA matrix kernels). Stay…

Any book you would recommend?

You can try Theodoridis if you can find a first or second edition. It is old enough to not be diluted by the recent craze but still recent enough to cover all the necessary fundamentals. There is also a new edition coming out soon, but that seems to have been heavily tainted by the ChatGPT hype.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#232

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.

It's CPU intensive JS code that must run to get an output that must match something server-side, the idea is that it makes attacks/spam not economically viable to run.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> pre-compute

Or it could be a SAT or something that's easy to verify and hard to solve.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#234

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…

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…

I am a nafri with a PhD and engineering experience (with europeans), I can't make good living going the traditional way either with with remote jobs being impossible and no luck landing a visa.. I have built custom solutions for big name EU companies to keep an eye on the competition through scraping. captcha solving cloudflare bypass is a great part of that. Getting back at companies making the UX bad with captcha does feel good also.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Hard to think anyone who can't solve a captcha is something other than a parasite.

Parasites can solve captchas, people with accessibility issues and the poorest of people are the one being locked out.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Yes, people often do unsavory things for money. Is the point you're making that they shouldn't do bad things. Like, what are we even talking about here?

The lesson here is that systems that rely on humans to do the 'moral' thing and fail otherwise are bad systems.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#237
post #164

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

It says I've been blocked when I try to view that. Not on a VPN.

Are you in a safari browser?

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#238

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…

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…

$30-150k/year is a big range

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#239
Glad to see Blackjack and Jordin. We used to hack on Minecraft together. nullpt.rs and secret.club are full of former video game hackers :)

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Being able to spam and mind control 4chan would be amazing just for personal reasons, let alone how juicy that is to governments around the world!
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