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Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

nullpt.rs

241–250 of 378 posts

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#241
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of memes and shitposting, I assume. /pol/ was always political, pro-trump, and according to some was even important enough to influence elections. I find that claim dubious, but it's true that many pro-trump memes (and memes in general) were created on 4chan.

/pol/ is 100% a big factor in the rising popularity of MAGA and far-right nationalist sentiment among young men

I’ve never seen such a small group of people have such a big impact on world affairs.

4chan pol has straight up mainstreamed most incel talking points to young boys all accross the world.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#242

I wasn't a very active 4chan poster to begin with, but when they introduced this awful CAPTCHA, and later the 300s countdown before making the first post, I completely lost interest in using the website. Anonymous boards were supposed to be low-friction, but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around. It takes a special kind of dedication to post there, which I seriously doubt helps the q…

Same here. the captcha is the tip of the iceberg. VPNs , proxies...all blocked. Tons of ghosting and censoring of posts too. Also crawling with feds and people trying to get you to incriminate yourself. I love the option to bypass it with crypto. Yeah, like I am going to give them btc, which will be traced by every agency and coin analysis firm and also get my wallet/exchange account restricted by being linked to 4ch…

taps the sign

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

id think its some kind of proof of sequential work, basically an un-parallelizable calculation that is guaranteed to take a certain number of steps, and making solving thousands of them much harder and hopefully not worth it

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#244

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.

I am a liberal and also genuinely find many 4chan boards less politically awful than current Twitter most of the time.

The chronological sorting at least offers some diversity of opinion. The first 50 replies to a 4chan thread about Trump (in the right board) will usually contain many, maybe even mostly, anti-Trump posts. On Twitter you usually need to scroll through the sea of blue checkmark replies for a while to find even one anti-Trump post.

Some 4chan boards are majority neo-Nazis who want all minorities expelled or murdered. But stumble across a particular Twitter thread and it's the same thing but with even more ideological uniformity within the thread, and with 4000 neo-Nazis in the thread instead of 60.

That said, both sites definitely are not great to use if you aren't very right-wing.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#245

I suspect really strongly that the available characters in the 4chan captcha were chose to be able to spell out the most racist/nazi/extreme slurs and slogans imaginable. For instance, not all numerals are ever used, but 1, 4, and 8 are. K is often there, and whatever the algo is, pseudorandom or not, it often doubles/triples characters. I've personally seen "kkk" twice over the years. Mind you, it does seem random.…

4chan was gaming the previous captchas for awhile to label some of the data with racial slurs, as they had discovered the threshold that you’re allowed to be wrong by, and were aggressively abusing it.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#246

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.

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!

It's working for the Russians.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around Stay off /v/, /tv/, /pol/, and /a/ and you’ll have a pretty good time.

certainly won't have a good time on /b/ either

It's mostly porn nowadays but through some chain of events, /b/ actually is ideologically one of the most normal boards on the site now. Not even kidding. Many - probably most - other boards are majority Trumpists or neo-Nazis but /b/ is roughly at least 50% liberal or libertarian.

So politics threads in /b/ are actually better than in a ton of other boards.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that it doesn’t do anything. Maybe you slightly slow down a volumetric spam attack, but you’re just putting a sleep() before letting spam through which might be the worst solution. As for economic viability, it’s still just a sleep(). Even if it somehow did cost extra money to use more of the CPU, botnets don’t even use their own hardware.

And if you make the PoW so hard that it takes very very long to solve then you basically made a captcha that bots have no problem doing (it’s just time) and humans don’t want to do at all especially on their phone.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#250

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

Reminds me of the Doom captcha.

https://vivirenremoto.github.io/doomcaptcha/

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