Live data from Hacker News

Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

quora.com

441–450 of 647 posts

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#441

Isn't this a typical Quora answer? Full of filler and shitty hard-to-verify details that provide no value to the answer ("the language is encrypted twice", what the hell), and very little effort on answering the actual question (what is the purpose of CAPTCHA). And the community rules try to block people from writing firm "you're full of shit"-like answers, even though every other answer of Quora is full of lies like…

I had my “wow” this place might not be that good experience with Quora yesterday when I was trying to google evaluate AWS workmail.

Quite a lot of the “extremely good looking” answers on Quora straight up said that you couldn’t do e-mail in AWS. These were answers from after workmail was a thing by the way.

So I started looking at other Quora answers on stuff I wouldn’t normally need an answer for, and it’s frighteningly how often completely wrong answers look correct.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of truly amazing answers as well, and it’s entirely possible that I just suck at it, but I don’t think I can always tell the amazing answer from the completely wrong one.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what ReCaptcha always was... it was originally a known and another unsure text blurb from scanned books/text documents. Now it's street signs etc.

It's actually pretty interesting to see how the captchas have evolved as, presumably, Google decides "OK, we have enough data to consistently identify this thing" and moves on to the next challenge. I recall the modern (non-text) captchas used to be cars pretty much every time. Then, the images started getting grainier as they apparently wanted to improve their recognition in different conditions. Then crosswalks and…

Eventually you will have to park a self driving car in a tight spot for captcha.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Where is our compensation? It's our time and brain power training Google's AI that will one day be sold back to us. I'm really not into this.

Because Google can extract value from captchas, it makes world-class captchas and bot detection AI available to every webmaster for free. I don't know what that level of service would otherwise cost, but it almost certainly wouldn't be affordable for low-traffic blogs and the like, which would end up vulnerable using weaker captchas or trying to roll their own. Everywhere else the cost would just get passed on to use…

It's the same with email for example. I've helped a friend roll out his own server because he doesn't want Google reading his emails.

Fair enough, but you won't get Google's spam filter or availability either, which your privacy was paying for.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#444
post #441

Isn't this a typical Quora answer? Full of filler and shitty hard-to-verify details that provide no value to the answer ("the language is encrypted twice", what the hell), and very little effort on answering the actual question (what is the purpose of CAPTCHA). And the community rules try to block people from writing firm "you're full of shit"-like answers, even though every other answer of Quora is full of lies like…

I had my “wow” this place might not be that good experience with Quora yesterday when I was trying to google evaluate AWS workmail. Quite a lot of the “extremely good looking” answers on Quora straight up said that you couldn’t do e-mail in AWS. These were answers from after workmail was a thing by the way. So I started looking at other Quora answers on stuff I wouldn’t normally need an answer for, and it’s frighteni…

My experience with Quora has been that more often than not the older the answer, the better it is. I find that answers in history, are often better than in tech. It always seems like the community that initially built Quora, stopped building it further several years ago and now it's floating out in space Wile E. Coyote style.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#445

Isn't this a typical Quora answer? Full of filler and shitty hard-to-verify details that provide no value to the answer ("the language is encrypted twice", what the hell), and very little effort on answering the actual question (what is the purpose of CAPTCHA). And the community rules try to block people from writing firm "you're full of shit"-like answers, even though every other answer of Quora is full of lies like…

The answer is not just fluff. It for example links to https://github.com/neuroradiology/InsideReCaptcha where you can read more.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would've made an awesome SciFi short story. The twist at the end is that she's lying.

Isn't that basically 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'?

More like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_(short_story)

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#447

Isn't this a typical Quora answer? Full of filler and shitty hard-to-verify details that provide no value to the answer ("the language is encrypted twice", what the hell), and very little effort on answering the actual question (what is the purpose of CAPTCHA). And the community rules try to block people from writing firm "you're full of shit"-like answers, even though every other answer of Quora is full of lies like…

The answer is not just fluff. It for example links to https://github.com/neuroradiology/InsideReCaptcha where you can read more.

I looked at that and it’s pretty nifty. It actually looks like google did encrypt the client side code and implement their own JavaScript VM and that the decryption key for the source is based on variables inside the VM during execution (some kind of state) in some way and other properties from the webpage (css is mentioned). It all falls into the realm of obfuscation.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#448

Its getting weird when you have to fill that box in with pen and paper Marci Robin was buying a Fiat 500X from a West Palm Beach, Florida dealership, and was in the final stages of signing all the paperwork, when she was presented with a strange but simple question: was she a robot? This wasn’t online or anything, she was right there, in person, in front of the sales person, who wanted her to check a box, with a pen,…

I had to do this at CarMax on a recent purchase, it felt as silly as you think it is.

Re: Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

#450

Protip: if you click on the headphone icon on recaptcha you get an audio challenge which I find much simpler and less annoying.

And this addon makes it even easier:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captch...

Post reply on HN