Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA” • Hacker News Board

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#301

Post by willlma » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:10 PM UTC

Argorak wrote: post #81

jackalope wrote: post #75

I always assumed Google's use of reCAPTCHA was to augment the OCR used to digitize Google Books, particularly in results the software couldn't confidently match to a word. Is this true? It's interesting that it's still the fallback for the new method.

That was the original goal of the project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA "By presenting two words it both protects websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas[2] and helps digitize the text of books." For some time, you could pass a reCAPTCHA test by just entering the more distorted word correctly.

This should be the top thread. I find the whole topic of crowdsourcing to compensate for the inadequacies of computer vision (and other inadequacies) fascinating. OCR was the first problem. We've been helping Google Maps identify house addresses for a while now with reCaptcha, and with this announcement it looks like Google is finally tackling the problem of image association. Computers suck at determining which pictures contain birds. By making users tag all of the images on the web, they're making image search much more powerful and will hopefully improve the entire field of computer vision.

When I tell my future robot to go get my coffee mug, I don't want it coming back with the PS5 controller.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#302

Post by jameshart » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:16 PM UTC

cJ0th wrote: post #94

It says that they do take mouse movement into account but the cookie part makes me feel a little uneasy: > IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web. If this becomes a trend then major commercial websites will become unusable for people who are not accepting (third-party) cookies. "Because those damn bots" is a straw man argument to m…

It also makes your cookies valuable to spammers.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#303

Post by photorized » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:24 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #170

"If we can collect behavioural data from you, and it matches closely the behaviour of other humans, you are a human. Otherwise you're not a human." Does anyone else get that feeling from the description of what Google is doing? I've tripped their "we think you are a bot" detection filter and been presented with a captcha countless times while using complex search queries and searching for relatively obscure things, a…

Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#304

Post by freshhawk » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:33 PM UTC

forgottenpass wrote: post #246

xtracto wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it's frankly very insulting and rather disturbing that they think someone who inputs "unusual" search queries, according to their measure, is not human. Insulting? how is that insulting? You are entitled. You are entitled you block scripts, use Google's FREE service to perform any search query to search the web while blocking any program that attempts to identify you as not a bot. But if while using their free…

You are entitled. Has calling someone entitled ever been useful? For the last few years it's felt like nothing more than a petty "you're wrong" remark with bonus condensation built right in.

Been useful at changing their behaviour/beliefs? No, for the same psychological reasons any direct contradiction isn't.

Been useful at communicating that they feel someone is confusing expectations with rights? Yes, that's why there is a word for it.

Also, I get it's annoying to hear entitled, ad hominem, logical fallacy, privilege, and other currently trendy words being over used and often misused. But I'll take it over what there was before that, which was no discussion at all at that level of abstraction most of the time. The places where these words are overused are places where the community is learning these concepts.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#305

Post by greyone » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:34 PM UTC

mjt0229 wrote: post #245

robertfw wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://duckduckgo.com/

DDG is excellent most of the time, but way behind when doing video or map searches. I have it as my default in most places, but sometimes I just have to fall back to Google.

You can use Disconnect Search that make your google searches anonymous: https://search.disconnect.me/

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#306

Post by freshhawk » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:38 PM UTC

cJ0th wrote: post #94

It says that they do take mouse movement into account but the cookie part makes me feel a little uneasy: > IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web. If this becomes a trend then major commercial websites will become unusable for people who are not accepting (third-party) cookies. "Because those damn bots" is a straw man argument to m…

For now I'm you'll just get a captcha if you don't match the standard behaviour. But it's that little bit easier to just use Chrome and stay signed in to Google all the time now. That's good enough for now surely.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#307

Post by uptown » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:40 PM UTC

1Hz wrote: post #103

ricg wrote: post #95

It's definitely not only relying on cursor movements. A simple $('iframe').contents().find('.recaptcha-checkbox-checkmark').click() proved that I'm not a robot, without me touching the mouse.

The cursor movement story seems to be a smokescreen to dilute the fact they're actually running an internet wide monitoring network, tracking users from site to site and building profiles on them.

Which is why Google Analytics is free for site operators.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#308

Post by Houshalter » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:43 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #285

Houshalter wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one should complain about anything, ever.

Including about other people's complaining.

It was sarcasm.

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#309

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:53 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #290

001sky wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just the cost of having a "free" product? Bots are not really a problem. Its just that their traffic cannot be monetized. If you could monetize-bot traffic your problem would be solved. Or put another way, if you framed the issue as a business model one, not a technical one, it might be a useful exercise.

> if you framed the issue as a business model one, not > a technical one, it might be a useful exercise. That was kind of my point. Clearly most of the bots are trying to scrape my search engine for some specific data. I would (generally) be happy to just sell them that data rather than have them waste time trying to scrape us (that is the business model, which goes something like "Hey we have a copy of the big chunk…

[deleted]

Re: Are You a Robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA”

#310

Post by mbondr » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:55 PM UTC

There's practically no documentation for this. They have "examples" for many languages, but they're so sparse as to be useless. I don't have time to crawl through their code. I'm going to wait a few months before implementing this to see what questions pop up on the blogs.