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Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

grumpy.website

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Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think two things happened: 1) Computer vision got a lot better over the past few years. It's also become way easier for the average Joe bot operator to run cutting-edge stuff. OCR tasks don't cut it for distinguishing people from machines any more. Every time I see a blog post about a new computer vision architecture or how some random developer trained a neural network to get an X% result on benchmark Y, I think t…

I've noticed the opposite on #2, especially in the last year or so. I've been solving a lot more captchas than I used to. I run Firefox with a lot of privacy focused add ons and I don't stay logged in to Google, I wonder if those have something to do with it.

Yes, they most likely do have something to do with it. If Google is unable to ID you in some way (e.g. browser fingerprint, cookies, IP, etc) and determine you're a good Internet citizen, they'll assume that you could be a bot and offer challenging Captchas. It's annoying, but on the bright side it proves that your privacy add-ons are working!

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#402
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it can be statistically proven that this is occurring more on Firefox than Chrome then Google has a really, really big problem. The burden to make sure it isn’t is on them, most especially in the EU. Google is facing a very real future where they will have no web browser and possibly no operating system.

It absolutely is happening more on Firefox. I open Chrome almost exclusively to bypass CAPTCHAS, and I doubt they will get in trouble because Chrome gives more detailed data due to its invasive lack of privacy. You can't really blame Google for using its own tech to provide "better" results, but it is high time we started blaming them for the massive privacy violations they use to make their convenience work.

> You can't really blame Google for using its own tech to provide "better" results ...

Sounds like antitrust to me.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#404
Oh wow, I assumed it was just my combination of ublock origin + privacy badger + accelereyes + privacy-first settings in FF (block all 3rd party cookies, containers, resist fingerprinting, etc.) that caused many hits.

I'm not sure whether I'm glad to find out it's (also? only?) because they hate Firefox.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#405

I'm from the UK and often get very American questions. Such as "select all the images with cross-walks". This isn't really a phrase we have over here, so when I first got this I had no idea what I was meant to be looking for in the array of random pictures and actually had to look it up to get past it. If you're going to force me to do a captcha, at least localise the damn questions. Do other non-American's get this…

They're zebra crossings, but I suppose you know that by now.

The captchas are completely non-localised as far as I can tell; as others have pointed out the 'store-fronts' tend to be non-American.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that hard if your taxes are simple (standard deduction, maybe some capital gains). Keep in mind the filing companies have an incentive to make the process complicated.

I don't think the filing companies are actively making the forms harder to fill out by hand, but the problem is that the IRS has no incentive to minimize the time it takes to file taxes.

Actually, big accounting firms and tax automation companies spend a lot of money lobbying congress to keep the tax code complicated. It would save everyone a lot of time and money if the IRS would just tell us what we owe - they already know the answer, it's not like they just blindly accept whatever we say.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#407
post #27

FYI. Title is misleading. This experience has nothing to do Firefox vs Chrome. Result is because of 3rd party cookie and tracker blocking. I had same and even worse (I was not able to get through captcha) experience on chrome itself because I have 3rd party cookies disabled and couple privacy oriented extensions running.

The user is complaining about the slow CSS animations. It's definitely a bug though not something they did on purpose. I remember having the same issue on Chrome as well.

It's not a bug. Its part of a patent Google holds designed at frustrating access for bots.

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a third problem: quite a bit of the stuff they present is (almost) uniquely American and presents a recognition challenge in other cultural contexts. That yellow vehicle? Looks nothing like a bus in most other parts of the world. And so the rest of the world gets to learn what an American Bus looks like... Not, I think, what was intended.

Or it tells you to pick out pictures of cars and shows you a pickup truck. Now you have to figure out if people would call that a car or not. How about a delivery truck? A motorcycle? Or it will ask for pictures of crosswalks, and you have to decide if 3 pixels of a crosswalk in the corner of one of the pictures counts.

My "favorite" is the one where you have to select the boxes with traffic lights. Does that mean just the actual lights, or the entire structure? More importantly, what does Google's AI think the answer is?

Re: Google's Captcha in Firefox vs. in Chrome

#409
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: can we start a class action lawsuit for psychological damages due to this? I've experienced this firsthand when trying to use a service through a VPN. I spent legitimately 5 minutes trying to get through only to get "Please try again" every time even though I selected them meticulously. It is infuriating. I thought I was going crazy

In fact, Google has a patent on blocking users by means of CAPTCHAs that always return failure[1]. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9407661

> In fact, Google has a patent on blocking users by means of CAPTCHAs that always return failure[1].

Erm, unless I'm mistaken, that patent says it's owned by Juniper, not Google. Google is just hosting the patent document.

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