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HBO Max new Captcha system

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Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#311

Post by leetbulb »

engineer_22 wrote: post #292
SecretDreams wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This person has the more believable PhD. One of the requirements to getting a PhD is the knowledge that a PhD is not the proof of intelligence you thought it would be when you started. It is better a proof of resilience, patience, and being dead inside.

Man, you guys are tough. Who cares if he has a PhD. Just about any adult who is on HN has enough math skills to count up dice

Man, you guys are tough. Who cares if he is on HN. Just about any adult...wait never mind.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#312

Post by taskforcegemini »

jacurtis wrote: post #9

I experienced the HBO Max captchas just a few days ago. Everyone did since they launched a new app and made everyone switch to that and re-login. Some of the solutions are clearly just wrong. I have a PhD in Computer Science and if I am failing multiple basic addition problems, I assure you that it isn't me, the answers are wrong. I had to do the same audio puzzles and got the first audio puzzle wrong too, and I even…

how do we know you are actually human and not an AI that is trying to solve the captcha by making it easier again (by causing an outrage on hn etc)

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#313

Post by ccooffee »

ethanbond wrote: post #247
ccooffee wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good, I can't wait for the CAPTCHA to go away. They're accessibility nightmares _by design_.

Uh? The outcome is not “captchas are gone and all our services remain good.” If we don’t have some way to prevent it, services will be increasingly populated by sophisticated bots either selling stuff, attempting security breaches, or pushing political agendas. That’s a bad thing!

I'm not sure I agree that it is "a bad thing".

The current internet culture seems quite happy to slap captchas all over the place. When they first rolled out, captchas were predominantly a barrier for "write access" (e.g. make an account, complete a sale, write a comment). But companies like Cloudflare have been putting captchas everywhere for mere read access.

Because Captchas are designed to be easy for ("normal") people but hard for machines, they often disallow disabled users. I'm a ("mostly normal") 35 year old, but I _really_ struggle with captchas. I despise when Cloudflare tosses a captcha challenge before loading a page, as I'll need to spend 3-5 minutes of effort to figure out which tiny pictures have a stoplight, motorcycle, or crosswalk.

Will someone come up with a less restrictive anti-bot solution? I hope so. But even if not, I'm not sure it matters. According to comments in this thread (and elsewhere on the internet about the HBO Max captcha), many of these captchas are _already_ terrible at excluding robots. We're using captchas to exclude low-sophistication robots and disabled users. Seems wrong.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#314

Post by ryandrake »

pixl97 wrote: post #270
bscphil wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just from that, the government now immediately knows what site you've been to If I understand the idea correctly, this isn't how it works. Your user agent sends a signed request (with proof of identity) to the GOV.UK verification server, saying "please give me a signed certificate that provides no information other than my age". Because GOV.UK knows who you are, they can provide such a certificate. Your user agent…

Heh, until the UK logging requirements ensure some component of the token that can be decoded later gets left in the server logs, then Oops, we know exactly who was on the porn server.

There is no way to argue against this kind of speculation.

Commenter 1: System X is evil!

Commenter 2: Actually, here is how system X works: (Demonstrates it does not work how Commenter 1 thinks it works)

Commenter 3: Well that's fine, until they change X to be evil!

I mean, sure, when X becomes evil, then we can say X is evil. But not until then. If your argument is that all systems eventually become evil, that may be true, but it's a different discussion.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#315

Post by hombre_fatal »

wackget wrote: post #40
Borgz wrote: post #23

This is Arkose MatchKey. Hopefully, they will one day fix the UI covering the images. https://www.arkoselabs.com/arkose-matchkey/

The entire site is an exercise in delusion and marketing bullshit. I am absolutely convinced that the people selling this abomination of a product have either never used it themselves or are abjectly and wilfully misleading people. Some other choice quotes from the page: > Users have a bad association with difficult photo CAPTCHAs. > Instead of type what you hear (or alphanumerics) puzzles, we ask users simple questi…

The claims may be silly, but the captchas seem reasonable to me compared to the increasingly impossible to read "what characters do you see?" captchas and the increasingly hard to decipher images of crosswalks and trucks.

Captchas seem to work best when they reflect the simplest task that AI cannot do rather than a task AI can easily do but with the difficulty ramped up.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#316

Post by ethanbond »

ccooffee wrote: post #313
ethanbond wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh? The outcome is not “captchas are gone and all our services remain good.” If we don’t have some way to prevent it, services will be increasingly populated by sophisticated bots either selling stuff, attempting security breaches, or pushing political agendas. That’s a bad thing!

I'm not sure I agree that it is "a bad thing". The current internet culture seems quite happy to slap captchas all over the place. When they first rolled out, captchas were predominantly a barrier for "write access" (e.g. make an account, complete a sale, write a comment). But companies like Cloudflare have been putting captchas everywhere for mere read access. Because Captchas are designed to be easy for ("normal")…

Because current captchas fail to stop 100% of bots and 0% of humans… it’s “not a bad thing” to move closer to captchas stopping 0% of bots and 100% of humans…?

Are you imagining this would spur people to create a different, bot-free (how?) and disabled-human friendly Internet?

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#317

Post by pcurve »

mypastself wrote: post #195
pcurve wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s all accounted for.

I always get it wrong on the first try, so I guess they're accounting for me being a robot.

It's so random. Sometimes I click submit thinking it would fail because I forgot to select a metal pole of a traffic light, or confuse bike for a motorcycle.

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#319

Post by notfed »

milofeynman wrote: post #294
hughw wrote: post #289

Could somebody please explain to me what bad actors try to do on HBO Max? What is the incentive to create robot accounts?

People use password dumps to try and steal streaming logins. To watch for free, or resell.

Was this captcha triggered by a login attempt?

Re: HBO Max new Captcha system

#320

Post by BearOso »

fetzu wrote: post #301
engineer_22 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, you guys are tough. Who cares if he has a PhD. Just about any adult who is on HN has enough math skills to count up dice

Thank you for the positive reinforcement, engineer_6+5+4+6+2.

An off-by-one error. This proves you're a computer scientist.
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