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Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

nullpt.rs

51–60 of 378 posts

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#51

It might be worth noting that this, including the harder version the op encountered, are not the hardest captchas that 4chan can serve. There is a still harder version which is sent to less trustworthy IPs. I imagine it would still be tractably solved with computer vision. This in part misses the point though, since 4chan has been continuously altering their captcha since it released, making it difficult to create a…

Datacenter IPs can’t even post at all, nevermind needing to solve a CAPTCHA. That’s why the accusations of “VPN shill” are usually wrong, as is the assumption of anonymity – 4chan is in fact one of the least anonymous sites on the internet. The optional username feature gives it a veneer of anonymity, but the strict IP requirements ensure almost every post is attributable to a residential internet connection, and rel…

4chan tries to make its users anonymous to each other. There's nothing in there about you being anonymous to their servers.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have examples of "just use python 2" still being a thing in 2024?

Yeah, whenever i need to write a quick script and have no time to suffer "$library needs python 3.x, where x must be > $value and 2 is stable and does not change from under you. Which is what you want in a programming langiuage

Python 3.10 seems to work for almost everything, and Python 2 most certainly doesn't. In fact, even latest works for almost everything - there's an alternative to 99.9% of Python 2 stuff in Python 3.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#55
post #13

Appropriate response by 4Chan to this: simplify the human work given that anyway it's simple to solve via NNs. We are at a point where designing very hard captchas has high probabilities to increase the human annoyance without decreasing the machine solvability.

> simplify the human work given that anyway it's simple to solve via NNs. We are at a point where designing very hard captchas has high probabilities to increase the human annoyance without decreasing the machine solvability

Or disallow free users to post at all, and require everyone to buy the 4chan Pass for $20 USD per year if they want to post.

https://4chan.org/pass

This is already available to not have CAPTCHA. So if CAPTCHA is totally ineffective, it follows that they should do away with CAPTCHA and free users being able to post at all and everyone should buy the 4chan Pass if they want to post.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#56

I wasn't a very active 4chan poster to begin with, but when they introduced this awful CAPTCHA, and later the 300s countdown before making the first post, I completely lost interest in using the website. Anonymous boards were supposed to be low-friction, but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around. It takes a special kind of dedication to post there, which I seriously doubt helps the q…

> 300s countdown

I don't get why they added that nasty "feature" to the post form, it really discourages you to post(maybe it's because they want to sell you their 4chan pass), I don't understand why 4chan is still active

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#57

I wasn't a very active 4chan poster to begin with, but when they introduced this awful CAPTCHA, and later the 300s countdown before making the first post, I completely lost interest in using the website. Anonymous boards were supposed to be low-friction, but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around. It takes a special kind of dedication to post there, which I seriously doubt helps the q…

one of the biggest problems that 4chan has to combat is spam. unfortunately, at 4chan's scale, hcaptcha and recaptcha are not free. 4chan is not exactly a font of money, either. the only reason they turned to this awful homebrew captcha was because recaptcha stopped being free. is there any better way to do it with a single developer for a website that serves millions of people a day?

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#58
There is a reason why people moved away from distorted text based captcha. We are basically at the point where computers are better at them then humans.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14... is a paper on the subject i think is really interesting

However a surprising amount of text based captchas can be solved in a few line shell script of, using imagemagik to convert to greyscale, dilate and undilate, then pass to teserract

However there are also sites like https://2captcha.net , so really captchas are more like putting a small min amount of effort.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#60

I wasn't a very active 4chan poster to begin with, but when they introduced this awful CAPTCHA, and later the 300s countdown before making the first post, I completely lost interest in using the website. Anonymous boards were supposed to be low-friction, but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around. It takes a special kind of dedication to post there, which I seriously doubt helps the q…

recaptcha is terrible if you are cursed with an ISP that Google deems icky for some indiscernible reason. at the time, I was getting slowly fading bullshit that invariably gaslit me with "try again" several times. when they've switched to custom captcha, I actually started posting again instead of just lurking.

yeah, the recent 5-15 minute countdown before your first post is a bizarre thing, but I assume the volume of spam and ban-evading schizos they're dealing with is ungodly. a single dedicated shithead can shit up a general or a slow board indefinitely by just resetting their router or switching airplane mode on/off for a few minutes when they get banned.

>but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around.

virtually every single big platform requires your phone number.

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