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CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

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81–90 of 143 posts

Re: CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulate against inaccessible and privacy invasive CAPTCHA (done and done in EU) and regulate against disruptive bot traffic (what's the hold-up there? Oh, I see, it requires actual competent law enforcement... That's a hard one). Me only half-joking while standing on my high EU horse .

Once regulations against disruptive bot traffic are effective enough that you don't need captchas, please ban captchas. But I don't see why you would do it the other way around. (Unless you secretly know that effective regulations against bot traffic are impossible.)

Oh I do believe they are possible. It is just high time that the units fighting against organised crime heavily expanded their scope to illicit online activities that actually cause financial harm by entities to entities smaller than the movie/music/publishing industries.

Re: CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

#82
post #6

What's the alternative?

I've heard about form fields hidden with CSS multiple times. No idea how effective this is though.

Honeypot have gotten less effective as bots have moved to using headless-browser agents vs simple POSTs.

Re: CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

#84
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, bot traffic is killing the open web. What's your point?

Regulate against inaccessible and privacy invasive CAPTCHA (done and done in EU) and regulate against disruptive bot traffic (what's the hold-up there? Oh, I see, it requires actual competent law enforcement... That's a hard one). Me only half-joking while standing on my high EU horse .

Have you seen this: https://trog.qgl.org/20081217/the-why-your-anti-spam-idea-wo... ? You're proposing a legislative change, and bots in the US, Russia, China, whatever can care less about the acts of the EU parliament.

I also don't see how EU solves issues with CAPTCHAs. Anonymous CAPTCHAs are allowed in the EU.

Re: CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem isn’t a bot traffic. I run an Ecommerce site and scammers run python scripts to test 1000s of cards per hour if there is no captcha. I hate it, my customers hate it, scammers hate it, but it is the only thing that keeps my merchant account running. Any advise is welcome!

Logon forms are another whole issue. "Lock out the account" is just a DoS vector. People are quick to talk about systems that can defeat a captcha but if the brute force goes from 50 passwords/sec to one password/10 sec it's mission accomplished.

Can't you just put a 5 second "loading bar" delay instead of a captcha then i wonder?

Re: CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

#86
post #2

That made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google.

Does solving captchas generate $1000/hour? I assume you're conflating amounts here, or messed up an order of magnitude somewhere.

Re: CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

#87
post #57

I get that people are here to hate on Google, but I am just here to say that reCAPTCHA albeit acquired, is an absolutely brilliant idea. The kind that solves two (three? if you count tracking) problems so elegantly

The people who created the initial version that got bought went on to create duolingo, with a similar goal of getting people to produce translations of text.

Re: CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

#88
post #2

That made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google.

Does solving captchas generate $1000/hour? I assume you're conflating amounts here, or messed up an order of magnitude somewhere.

That's just the headline of the article.

The researchers put the vast majority of this value to tracking cookies, and this revenue happens whether or not a manual challenge is completed.

Re: CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulate against inaccessible and privacy invasive CAPTCHA (done and done in EU) and regulate against disruptive bot traffic (what's the hold-up there? Oh, I see, it requires actual competent law enforcement... That's a hard one). Me only half-joking while standing on my high EU horse .

Once regulations against disruptive bot traffic are effective enough that you don't need captchas, please ban captchas. But I don't see why you would do it the other way around. (Unless you secretly know that effective regulations against bot traffic are impossible.)

> (Unless you secretly know that effective regulations against bot traffic are impossible.)

Have you tried register your phone number in the DO-NOT-CALL list (or your local equivalent)?

Did it stop anything?

Re: CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

#90
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulate against inaccessible and privacy invasive CAPTCHA (done and done in EU) and regulate against disruptive bot traffic (what's the hold-up there? Oh, I see, it requires actual competent law enforcement... That's a hard one). Me only half-joking while standing on my high EU horse .

Have you seen this: https://trog.qgl.org/20081217/the-why-your-anti-spam-idea-wo... ? You're proposing a legislative change, and bots in the US, Russia, China, whatever can care less about the acts of the EU parliament. I also don't see how EU solves issues with CAPTCHAs. Anonymous CAPTCHAs are allowed in the EU.

Thank you for that, though I'd rather choose 'The police will not put up with it' and either 'The politicians are too incompetent' or 'Underestimate how much money there is in it'

Anonymous CAPTCHAs are fine so long as they're accessible for people with disabilities. I would not venture to say I know of such one as a service...

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