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Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#41

Post by speedgoose »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #16
kennydude wrote: post #4

hCAPTCHA looks interesting, although it seems they use Blockchain for no real reason compared to just storing the payments as rows (i.e what they gain from being chained on top of another)

The point of a blockchain is that to edit an earlier record, you would need to edit every record that comes after (due to storing a hash of the previous block in the current block). However, it doesn’t make sense when one entity controls the entire system because if a hacker (or even an insider) can change one record, they could change all of them. Hence why a good blockchain would be distributed . Then, if one node…

Yes if do not you want to distribute your data with random people over the internet, you need a Merkle tree. Not a stupid blockchain with all the downsides a blockchain have.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#42

Post by weinzierl »

noad wrote: post #26
zachware wrote: post #21

One of the more insidious elements of ReCAPTCHA is its propensity to challenge users who have robust cookie blocking in place. So as we encourage people to be more privacy-aware, the web gets harder and harder to use. We've seen ReCAPTCHA pop all over ecommerce, all over benign websites with little to no need to challenge use almost completely because of the increase in privacy-aware users. ReCAPTCHA essentially flie…

You're forgetting the main benefit for google, which is getting humans to train all their vision models for free. At one point they were just forcing X% of clicks to fill out a captcha regardless of origin or identity just to get more data. I for one am getting quite tired of trillion dollar corporations getting things for free out of me. Hard pass.

> You're forgetting the main benefit for google, which is getting humans to train all their vision models for free.

Is this still true? I keep seeing the same type of images for years and there might be 7 or 8 different categories but that's it. To me reCaptcha looks like a service well in its maintenance phase. If it was actually in use for training purposes you might expect images to match a wider range of tasks.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#43

Post by greglindahl »

0xff00ffee wrote: post #37
elric wrote: post #14

It's a start. reCAPTCHA is a notorious pain in the arse for anyone whose browser isn't Chrome and for anyone who doesn't keep cookies. I'm not sure if hCaptcha will be better, but it's hard to imagine it being any worse.

How can someone demonstrate this claim? reCaptcha is wildly sophisticated under the hood[1]. I use it on all three major browsers and find the number of challenges varies from 0 to 4: sometimes it says I'm verified without doing anything, other times I need to go through 4 screens. I would love to see someone put some numbers behind this claim, because I think it is false. [1] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/ma…

My heavily adblocked FF has a lot of trouble with recaptcha, while the Chrome instance that I only use for logged-in Google and LinkedIn doesn't. It seems like there are enough moving parts that it would be hard to figure out why our anecdotes are so different.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#44

Post by robin_reala »

oefrha wrote: post #17
blakesterz wrote: post #3

> "Earlier this year, Google informed us that they were going to begin charging for reCAPTCHA. That is entirely within their right. Cloudflare, given our volume, no doubt imposed significant costs on the reCAPTCHA service, even for Google." Even in the article they say... "Google provided reCAPTCHA for free in exchange for data from the service being used to train its visual identification systems." ... I thought thi…

Seeing that reCAPTCHA v3 doesn't use endless streams of images any more, I would guess that Google no longer benefits much from having users tag storefronts, traffic lights, buses or fire hydrants. Maybe their image recognition algorithm is past that stage.

It does as a fallback. But you’re missing the main point of v3, which is that it shifts the legal onus of blocking from Google to the integrating site. No longer can Google be sued for accessibility violations, if it’s the site that’s stopping the user from entering purely on a suggestion from Google.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#45

Post by zelphirkalt »

kevindong wrote: post #33
elric wrote: post #14

It's a start. reCAPTCHA is a notorious pain in the arse for anyone whose browser isn't Chrome and for anyone who doesn't keep cookies. I'm not sure if hCaptcha will be better, but it's hard to imagine it being any worse.

I know this is a common complaint, but I personally have no issues on both macOS and iOS Safari.

Perhaps the privacy problem for you is then one of the following:

- Ad blocking extension not installed or rules too lax - Script blocking not enabled - no VPN used - stores tracking Cookies

If all of those do not apply to you, I would feel discriminated against by Google, even more so, than usual.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#47

Post by rectang »

kevindong wrote: post #33
elric wrote: post #14

It's a start. reCAPTCHA is a notorious pain in the arse for anyone whose browser isn't Chrome and for anyone who doesn't keep cookies. I'm not sure if hCaptcha will be better, but it's hard to imagine it being any worse.

I know this is a common complaint, but I personally have no issues on both macOS and iOS Safari.

You probably browse while logged in to your Google account. Right?

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#48

Post by zelphirkalt »

tcd wrote: post #30
tgv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By now, I almost immediately close a page with a reCAPTCHA, because the stream of buses, traffic lights, and cycles never seems to end when you're using Firefox. And then it says "too many requests from this computer" and refuses to continue.

I'm amazed Mozilla hasn't sued Google for discriminating against their browser - I also use Firefox and suffer endlessly using privacy tools. I can prove there are no more busses and I'm 100% right, but I can predict 100% of the time it'll say "please try again". The pattern seems to be 2/3 'right' guesses. on sites like eBay, the captcha is broke on firefox. I complete it, and it says "you need to resubmit this form…

Well said, could not have expressed it any better. I do the same and refuse to use a website or service, that tries to put me through this garbage.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#49

Post by krut-patel »

weinzierl wrote: post #42
noad wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting the main benefit for google, which is getting humans to train all their vision models for free. At one point they were just forcing X% of clicks to fill out a captcha regardless of origin or identity just to get more data. I for one am getting quite tired of trillion dollar corporations getting things for free out of me. Hard pass.

> You're forgetting the main benefit for google, which is getting humans to train all their vision models for free. Is this still true? I keep seeing the same type of images for years and there might be 7 or 8 different categories but that's it. To me reCaptcha looks like a service well in its maintenance phase. If it was actually in use for training purposes you might expect images to match a wider range of tasks.

I could swear I've seen challenges with night scenes (low light conditions) in the wild. Those were definitely not present earlier.

Re: Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

#50

Post by _nickwhite »

From the article:

"We evaluated a number of CAPTCHA vendors as well as building a system ourselves."

and

"We worked with hCAPTCHA in two ways. First, we are in the process of leveraging our Workers platform to bear much of the technical load of the CAPTCHAs and, in doing so, reduce their costs. And, second, we proposed that rather than them paying us we pay them. This ensured they had the resources to scale their service to meet our needs. While that has imposed some additional costs, those costs were a fraction of what reCAPTCHA would have. And, in exchange, we have a much more flexible CAPTCHA platform and a much more responsive team."

So Cloudflare are basically cloud hosting hCAPTCHA's services. I wonder why Cloudflare didn't just buy them, as it seems like it would be a win-win with getting an excellent CAPTCHA service, and not have to build it themselves?

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