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Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

clivethompson.medium.com

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Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#351

Post by matheusmoreira »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #201
matheusmoreira wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when captchas were about optical character recognition, it was obvious which words came from actual books. Plenty of people would input offensive words instead of the correct answer. I hope it had an effect but it probably didn't.

Someone who isn't me hung around on 4chan a lot back in the day. Indeed, there was an effort across the boards to disseminate heuristics to determine which one was the already-known word and which one was to be parsed by humans. The agreed-upon procedure was identify the latter as "penis".

> The agreed-upon procedure was identify the latter as "penis".

I remember far worse...

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#352

Post by adrr »

arpa wrote: post #252
adrr wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need a captcha if you’re willing to put some engineering resources at it. Check the IP reputation. Fingerprint the browser, they never bot from mobile devices. It’s always zombie windows boxes. Whitelist all your marketing traffic because that traffic is clean.

> never bot from mobile devices ;] > IP reputation my ISP has, it seems, all of their addresses in a blacklist. The ips are also dynamic.

I guess you could script bots using an emulator but there are probably easier targets for carders.

For IP reputation, looking for IPs associated with proxies and also data center IPs though blacklisting all the big cloud providers will grab innocent users. EG: US military runs outbound proxies on azure.

This all for new traffic. Users that are known to be non fraudulent have a unique persistent cookie that allows them to bypass all the checks. So they could jump on a VPN and stuff would work.

Stuff we built for an online bank was even more advanced and looked at the incoming packets to detect proxies(tcp fingerprinting to determine OS). And we did shady stuff with fingerprinting internal networks with WebRTC. Our adversaries were 100 times better than simple carders running selenium scripts.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#353

Post by notriddle »

the_third_wave wrote: post #298
arpa wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can "JUST don't" (a privilege), it doesn't mean someone else can "JUST don't". You're being an asshole, not "honest". also you probably meant tumblr, not twitter.

Go back to the root cause here: boring images cause someone to become depressed. My advice is to refrain from looking at the things, your approach is to pat the person on the head. You can try to spin it into a long meandering rant about the vicariousness of life and the eternity of suffering which makes it all so much richer but when all that seems to do is cause depression it is clearly not the right path unless yo…

> Go back to the root cause here: boring images cause someone to become depressed. My advice is to refrain from looking at the things

We are talking about reCAPTCHA, a tool that is used to prevent botting the websites that people sometimes have no choice but to use.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#354

Post by lobocinza »

jjoonathan wrote: post #100
Swizec wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A robot would never give up.

I bet the robots know exactly how many failures before they need to cycle IPs/cookies/accounts and when the time comes I bet they know how to do it quickly and at low cost. Humans just have to give up and hope that whatever was behind the captcha wasn't actually important.

Many side projects on Github that aren't updated often seems to know the thresholds for not triggering such methods but as I user I often have to pass those stupid verifications.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#355

Post by lobocinza »

smichel17 wrote: post #50
mediocregopher wrote: post #7

For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

Additionally, ReCAPTCHA is worse than a metal detector, since in addition to being an inconvenience, it's performing unpaid labor for Google. It's more like a bouncer at the door, who won't let you in unless you grease his palm first. Just filthy corruption, plain and simple.

Another hidden fee in those "free" services.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#356

Post by the_third_wave »

notriddle wrote: post #353
the_third_wave wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back to the root cause here: boring images cause someone to become depressed. My advice is to refrain from looking at the things, your approach is to pat the person on the head. You can try to spin it into a long meandering rant about the vicariousness of life and the eternity of suffering which makes it all so much richer but when all that seems to do is cause depression it is clearly not the right path unless yo…

> Go back to the root cause here: boring images cause someone to become depressed. My advice is to refrain from looking at the things We are talking about reCAPTCHA, a tool that is used to prevent botting the websites that people sometimes have no choice but to use.

That is why I suggested to use the audio version instead of the images, this is what I always do - I never look at those pictures.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#357

Post by atom_arranger »

johndough wrote: post #295
bowmessage wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Even falsely claim you failed captchas even if you get them right Do you have a source for this?

You can easily test this yourself. Just install the Tor Browser and visit any website with captchas. Most Tor exit node servers are semi-blacklisted, which means that a Tor user will receive multiple captcha challenges in series, even if they have been answered correctly. If you are especially unlucky, you might even get denied entirely after solving captchas for several minutes.

Can confirm. Had the same experience using a VPN. I “didn’t have anything to hide”, just wanted privacy benefits of using a VPN while browsing the web, but the CAPTCHAs made it totally impractical so I gave up on it. I guess Google got what they wanted.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#358

Post by gwern »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #275
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just that — google wants its own models to be resilient in the face of noisy data. (You’ve probably see examples where a cat is classified as a mountain or something ridiculous due to the addition of precisely crafted noise.) The best way to achieve that resilience is to simply train the models with noisy data; part of the learning process will then be learning to ignore the noise.

But you don't have to show humans the noise when you're getting humans to determine the ground truth, only the neural network. I think the noise exists to trip up CAPTCHA bots.

Yeah, a lot of the discussion here and in OP seems to take the machine learning angle at too much face value. Sometimes a CAPTCHA is just a CAPTCHA.

Guys, do you really think that in 2021, when ImageNet has been solved to hell and back even with unlabeled data, and CNNs/Transformers/MLP eat it for breakfast, and we are doing OCR from CLIP trained on unlabeled untranscribed images, Google really needs you to label images of big green US highway signs written in the standardized highway font with text containing names of highways and words like 'miles'?

"Oh yes, I can distinguish between 100 breeds of dogs and I know what every public figure in the world looks like and can edit images with the 'unreal engine' trick - but gosh, I just can't figure out where in this image a big green blob is! Only humans with a soul can possibly do that!"

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#359

Post by 22c »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #269
22c wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the indignity What's particularly degrading is when it asks you to do something like "select all the bridges" and you as a human see one that is clearly an overpass, not a bridge. You don't select it because it's not what you'd call a bridge. You're inhuman. You're asked to select the motorcycles.. Here's a motorised scooter that looks a lot like a motorcycle. You thought that wasn't a motorcycle? Back to the train…

How is a highway overpass not a bridge? I would classify it as one.

That's the beauty of being human.

We can both look at the same image and have two different opinions about it. An AI simply boils it down to a confidence rating and if they're confident enough that an overpass IS a bridge, then your opinion does not matter to them.

My interpretation of overpass is that it can be a bridge but is not always a bridge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass

However, I would totally accept your point of view if you said an overpass is also a bridge.

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