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reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

arstechnica.com

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Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#3

Does this mean that digitizing of books through reCAPTCHAs will be done at a much slower rate or not at all?

Are they even digitizing books anymore? I seem to always get a house number. The house numbers make it really easy to know I don't actually have to type that part

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#4

Does this mean that digitizing of books through reCAPTCHAs will be done at a much slower rate or not at all?

I find it difficult to believe the captcha served over the last year or so were actually scanned from books: they were so completely illegible and nonsensical. I usually had to click refresh about half a dozen times before I could even find a sample that I could read correctly.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#5
post #3

Does this mean that digitizing of books through reCAPTCHAs will be done at a much slower rate or not at all?

Are they even digitizing books anymore? I seem to always get a house number. The house numbers make it really easy to know I don't actually have to type that part

I figured out a while ago that you only ever need to type the nonsensical string.

I think its pretty clear the reading books bit was abandoned long ago. I never get non-test words that are in any way a struggle for a competent OCR system. And on the occasion that I do, its impossible for me to read either. If they provided context it would be much more helpful.

As an aside, if you've ever had to solve one of these through TOR and you happen to be running through some eastern european countries... good god those are the most frustrating captchas I've ever seen. Long strings of "mnnmrnrmnm" with contrasting colors and jpeg artifacts... a few attempts at solving those makes me want to kill someone. I feel bad for people trying to do anything on the internet from those countries. I wonder what the rationale is for making captchas nearly impossible to solve in specific regions.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#6
I have a feeling this won't last very long now that they've publicized the fact that they profile a users interaction with the system. Things like rate of hitting captchas, mouse movements, characters typed before pressing send, etc are all easy to mimic and control if you know they're analyzing that info.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#7

I have a feeling this won't last very long now that they've publicized the fact that they profile a users interaction with the system. Things like rate of hitting captchas, mouse movements, characters typed before pressing send, etc are all easy to mimic and control if you know they're analyzing that info.

Well, since all this information has to be collected client-side, I'm sure people working on captcha solvers would have figured it out anyway.

Plus, there's a huge difference between them publishing what information they're collecting and actually knowing how they're using that data, IMO.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they even digitizing books anymore? I seem to always get a house number. The house numbers make it really easy to know I don't actually have to type that part

I figured out a while ago that you only ever need to type the nonsensical string. I think its pretty clear the reading books bit was abandoned long ago. I never get non-test words that are in any way a struggle for a competent OCR system. And on the occasion that I do, its impossible for me to read either. If they provided context it would be much more helpful. As an aside, if you've ever had to solve one of these th…

> I wonder what the rationale is for making captchas nearly impossible to solve in specific regions.

Google will captcha-block IP addresses (not just Tor) if they get too many queries from them in a short period of time, so that bots can't crawl the search results.[1]

1: https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#GoogleCAPTCHA

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#9
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they even digitizing books anymore? I seem to always get a house number. The house numbers make it really easy to know I don't actually have to type that part

I figured out a while ago that you only ever need to type the nonsensical string. I think its pretty clear the reading books bit was abandoned long ago. I never get non-test words that are in any way a struggle for a competent OCR system. And on the occasion that I do, its impossible for me to read either. If they provided context it would be much more helpful. As an aside, if you've ever had to solve one of these th…

TOR+Eastern Europe has probably triggered the heuristic that you're a probable bot, and it's giving you a test that will further amplify its confirmation bias.

Welcome to the preview of the day where all the networked, statistically self-optimizing IDSes simultaneously turn on us and clean the messy humans out of their technological world.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#10
post #3

Does this mean that digitizing of books through reCAPTCHAs will be done at a much slower rate or not at all?

Are they even digitizing books anymore? I seem to always get a house number. The house numbers make it really easy to know I don't actually have to type that part

It's likely the case that the house numbers are from Google Street View, and they are using them to improve the addressing for Google Maps.

I'm a bit puzzled by this update, though. I have reCAPTCHA on a wiki that I maintain, and I still see the traditional text based ones, not anything like these new number based ones. Are they rolling this out slowly?

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