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Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

nullpt.rs

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Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#61

Post by echelon »

OmarShehata wrote: post #20
tumsfestival wrote: post #8

I can only imagine how much worse they'll make the captcha after stuff like this picks up speed with the users all the while being ineffective against the bots.

captchas are broken, forever. There is no way to prevent bots without also preventing a bottom tier of human users (visually impaired people, old people, or just impatient people). Like this xkcd [1] comic suggests, we need to just focus on rewarding and punishing specific behavior, regardless of whether the agent is human or not [1] https://xkcd.com/810/

I think a better approach is to make account creation frictionful (eg. charge money, set karma thresholds, require an invite, etc.), score each account, and ban or time out accounts when they break community rules.

But an even better approach would be to go fully P2P and leave the scoring and ranking and filtering at the end nodes, with the possibility of friendly networks of interest group peers assisting with the task. BitTorrent for social media, pgp signed accounts, fully flexible annotation and ingestion. It's also less subject to cabal-based censorship.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#62

Post by noprocrasted »

bawolff wrote: post #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 an…

Just because you can technically crack them doesn't mean they're useless.

There's a significant amount of time, skill and effort that went into the solution from this post, and the end result doesn't generalize well (you'd have to start all over for a different kind of captcha).

The vast majority of spammers would not be able to replicate this; those who do would either make money legitimately, or focus their skills on juicier targets (if you have AI/ML skills and want to do nefarious things there are other options that pay much better than spamming).

Such captchas still work well at raising the cost of successful spamming above the expected payoff from said spam.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#63

Post by shortrounddev2 »

fresh_broccoli wrote: post #48

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…

They had a gigantic spam problem, captcha saved the site

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#64

Post by paulpauper »

fresh_broccoli wrote: post #48

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…

Same here. the captcha is the tip of the iceberg. VPNs , proxies...all blocked. Tons of ghosting and censoring of posts too. Also crawling with feds and people trying to get you to incriminate yourself. I love the option to bypass it with crypto. Yeah, like I am going to give them btc, which will be traced by every agency and coin analysis firm and also get my wallet/exchange account restricted by being linked to 4chan. The owners more than happy to comply with every 3-letter agency request for info.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#65

Post by shortrounddev2 »

OmarShehata wrote: post #20
tumsfestival wrote: post #8

I can only imagine how much worse they'll make the captcha after stuff like this picks up speed with the users all the while being ineffective against the bots.

captchas are broken, forever. There is no way to prevent bots without also preventing a bottom tier of human users (visually impaired people, old people, or just impatient people). Like this xkcd [1] comic suggests, we need to just focus on rewarding and punishing specific behavior, regardless of whether the agent is human or not [1] https://xkcd.com/810/

Jokes aside, we don't want any bots at all. Even if they're posting constructive comments, we should interact with humans, not machines

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#67

Post by paulpauper »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #63
fresh_broccoli wrote: post #48

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…

They had a gigantic spam problem, captcha saved the site

then how does Reddit and Twitter work without such an obnoxious captcha? I find it hard to believe those sites get less spam. Or any other community.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#68

Post by jorvi »

Hamuko wrote: post #43
gruez wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about users behind CGNAT, like mobile users?

Some mobile users can post but I think they've gone so far as to ban entire ISP mobile IP ranges to prevent people from constantly rolling new IPs on their phone.

Nice callback to Moot banning an entire Australian region (Queensland or Victoria, if memory serves) because Aussies did an outsized share of shitposting, and of Aussies those particular ones were the worst.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#69

Post by mikeyouse »

paulpauper wrote: post #67
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a gigantic spam problem, captcha saved the site

then how does Reddit and Twitter work without such an obnoxious captcha? I find it hard to believe those sites get less spam. Or any other community.

You need accounts with unique emails to post everywhere else, and those sites are massive with hundreds/thousands of devs, some of whom work exclusively on anti-spam. If you make a site immune to advertising revenue and any other source of profit, you’re going to struggle to pay for “internet-scale” efforts.

Re: Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA

#70

Post by blackjackfoe »

paulpauper wrote: post #67
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a gigantic spam problem, captcha saved the site

then how does Reddit and Twitter work without such an obnoxious captcha? I find it hard to believe those sites get less spam. Or any other community.

Reddit and Twitter both have huge bot problems. On Reddit it's a bit less obvious due to the upvote/downvote system, and on Twitter it's a bit less obvious because you usually only follow people you want to see. Make a post on Twitter that mentions something like cryptocurrency, and you'll get a dozen bot replies immediately.
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