8 ms·
That feel when you can't captcha [video]
- caspervonb 9y agoHard on humans, easy on bots.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tziki 9y agoSomeone should create a neural net that does this for you.
- crispinb 9y agoHigh-tech isn’t always the best approach. Someone should just bash the dozy fuckers who force these idiotic things on us.
- YaxelPerez 9y agoAnd train it by making people identify the correct solutions to get access to a website
- digi_owl 9y agoHeh, i recall claims that hackers where using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service as a means of defeating captchas their botnets encountered.
- amelius 9y agoI recall that hackers were sending captchas to porn sites. "Want to see this picture, then solve this captcha." And then the answers were redirected back to the original, legitimate site.
- droidist2 9y agoTrue, sexual drive can be a great motivator. Porn users are tolerant of a lot (popup ads, etc.)
- AndrewOMartin 9y agoAnd what do you think Amazon were doing with their ever growing corpus of tasks and verified-correct answers? :)
- drewg123 9y agoI miss the days when you just had to help them digitally encode writing. Now I'm in the same "is the pole part of the sign" situation as this guy all the time. Does anybody know if captcha's are triggered or are made harder by ublock? It seems to me like captchas are easier on my work chrome profile, which does not have any extensions since I only use it for internal sites.
- rushsteve1 9y agoNot only that but I am almost certain that they are intentionally more difficult on "shady" or lower traffic websites.
- rcthompson 9y agoI think they are made more difficult by when Google observes "bot-like" activity coming from you. When they started the "I'm not a robot" checkbox, I used to be able to just check the box and it would let me through, every time. Then, one day I had to download several dozen files, and each download had one of these checkboxes. The first 10 or so files, it let me through like it always did. Then it started giving me one CAPCHA screen for the next 10 files. Then 2 screens. Then 3, and so on. That was several years ago, and ever since then it always gives me a long series of difficult CAPCHAs every single time. I guess Google still thinks I'm a bot even after several years of solving these things pretty consistently (I'd say I have about 90% success rate). For the record, I do tag boxes containing only sign posts, or only tiny slivers of signs.
- xirdstl 9y agoI find myself intentionally slowing down when completing forms in order to not appear too bot-like and be forced to complete a captcha.
- extralego 9y agoThese Google captchas were much easier about 1 year ago. These days, I stop and ask myself “Do I really need to get past this guard?”.
- baxtr 9y agoOh I hate these so much.
- rajeshpant 9y agoHopefully more sites will upgrade to the new Invisible reCaptcha by Google. I am using them on my sites and it is certainly less annoying and the user experience is better.
- philo23 9y agoInteresting side note, when Google isn't completely convinced you're not a robot, it'll actually swap the invisible captcha out for these photo picker ones.
- beardog 9y agoPart of the reason these are so difficult is that it will intentionally fail you sometimes even when you're right to prevent malicious bots from learning off of it, also a decent number of them are not fully solved by Google (they show you both ones they know and ones they don't). Basically its meant to be somewhat confusing.
- bradknowles 9y agoMany sites do a canvas fingerprint, and send you to the captcha if the fingerprint fails. And then it’s captcha hell.
- droidist2 9y agoA fingerprint? Like this thing? https://panopticlick.eff.org https://panopticlick.eff.org
- jstanley 9y agoIt used to be some benign OCR task, now it's "please identify street signs from photographs we've taken". Once they can correctly classify street signs, what else will they want? "please click on the faces you recognise?"? "please click on the faces of your friends that are labelled with the correct names?"? I've started opting out of Google Captcha's wherever doing so isn't too burdensome. If I see a Google Captcha and I don't really want to get to the other side, I just close the tab and forget about it, rather than subject myself to their capricious gatekeeping.
- userbinator 9y agoSome people I know online have basically started buying "captcha tokens" --- the same ones that spammers use when they want to bypass them in bulk. Depending on your morals (keeping in mind these services are mainly third-world-country sweatshop labour), it might be a better choice than spending your own brainpower on such things, and a way of giving Google a virtual middle finger.
- mikeash 9y agoDoesn’t Google get what they want either way?
- userbinator 9y agoThey get solved captchas, but they're not using the user's brainpower and time to do it.
- andrewchambers 9y agoAll google cares about is getting the captchas solved to train their AI.
- NullPrefix 9y agoCut the middle man out, they could hire the sweatshop directly.
- EtDybNuvCu 9y agoI feel like users should be compensated for giving Google their time and mental energy since this is literally making users manually tag their machine-learning corpus for free.
- gsich 9y agothis
- IIAOPSW 9y agoyour being paid with website content. Take your pick. Do you want to pay with: 1) a few seconds of your mental energy 2) your privacy 3) background cryptocurrency mining Thats just how the internet work. Content must be paid for somehow.
- EtDybNuvCu 9y agoLet us analyze this further. Suppose that Alice browses 4chan. 4chan uses a Google image-classifying captcha. Alice is viewing user-generated content posted for free, including 4chan advertisements. When Alice chooses to post, she completes a captcha for Google and her post is sent to 4chan. Who gets paid for 4chan's content? Alice does not profit. 4chan's users do not profit. 4chan 'profits' via advertising revenue but they actually operate at a loss. Who is left to get paid? Google. Google gets a human-completed captcha for its machine-learning projects. I look forward to the demise of the Web and its replacement with a content-addressed alternative where your views will be technologically obsolete.
- yorwba 9y agoAlice profits by not having her post be drowned out by a flood of automated spam. 4chan's users benefit by not having to look for interesting content among a flood of automated spam. 4chan's operators benefit by not having to moderate a flood of automated spam. If captchas weren't useful to 4chan, they wouldn't make use of it. When you see a system that's obviously not beneficial to anyone, it's useful to take a step back and think about the incentives that keep things as they are. Because if it's so obviously wrong, why hasn't it been changed yet? I'm not sure how a content-addressed web would handle these problems, but there'll need to be some hoops to jump through before a significant number of other people become willing to look at your content.
- mcochrane 9y agoI think it depends a lot on your IP too. I tried to do some google captchas in TOR browser once and it took forever! Just like this video, even when you got it right it still kept asking for more..
- Baeocystin 9y agoHappens relatively frequently when using a VPN. If, for whatever reason, the IP I'm using is currently getting the captcha-hell treatment, shifting to a different exit address clears it up 95%+ of the time.
- 21 9y agoSo, are you supposed to click on the sign support sticks? What about squares which have just a sliver of the sign?
- ggm 9y agoYes. This. And, is it a storefront when it's a lemonade stand outside a house? Is it a road sign if it's a for sale sign? Is it a road when it's the road into a carpark? Epistemology robot!!!
- lstamour 9y agoTechnically the sign support sticks aren’t signs. And some of the signs clicked on weren’t street signs, if you identify street signs as those put up by a government agency to regulate or assist with driving on a street. Also, he clicked a hotel, which isn’t a storefront. When Google says storefront they mean a multi-tenant store facing a street with a big sign indicating the store’s name or purpose. Sometimes these locations are closed, but they rarely look like hotels, houses or apartments. I have also had to pass, twice, by saying nothing was relevant and not clicking anything. I’ve also had it show me streets with cars and had it ask me to select storefronts... (Trick questions, maybe to see if I click wrong then change my mind?) And I’m much more likely to get it wrong on my iPhone than on a computer, perhaps Google doesn’t have as much mouse movement data that way, and can’t fingerprint an iPhone as uniquely?
- gustavmarwin 9y agoThe Chrome plugin Privacy Badger (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-pass/ajhmfdgkijocedmfjonnpjfojldioehi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-pass/ajhmf...) is supposed to be useful to avoid those. I haven't been able to reach a conclusion on whether it is effective, anyone uses this?
- ggm 9y agoI suspect the bad guys using captcha won't go to the good low barrier captcha because there's no microcent transaction in it. It's a Gresham's law case: bad captcha with revenue drives out good captcha with low overhead
- DINKDINK 9y agoMy hope is that in the future lightning network micro payments will be a better alternative than captchas for rate limiting page access.
- candiodari 9y agoI remember 15 years ago making a neural net captcha OCR cracker (for DNS registrations). And after about 3 hours I have my accuracy, recall and confusion numbers and I'm not really getting them any better. This was a captcha like from those old PHP libraries. Many colors (sometimes bright yellow on white GRMBL), varying background color, a few things on the background that were clearly not letters (like large circles). Now in order to train this network I had to download 1000 or so captchas and solve them manually, so I had written a quick program that allows a person to solve captchas. So I figured "let's see how good it is", and used the program to test myself (I figured, worst case I have some more raw data). Turns out the neural net was 2% better than I was. It actually scored 2% better on captcha solving than I did, and this was when I was trying really hard, pausing when there's doubt and giving it 5 seconds thought. I was a bit surprised that trying really hard or just going with my first guess didn't make more than a percent difference. Then I got someone who had nothing to do with IT to solve 50 captchas and calculated ... precision was 8% below the neural net (also known as she'd do about 1 in 6 wrong, whereas I only had one in 10-12 or so. The neural only had one in 14-15 wrong. It was a pretty sizable difference). And lastly I figured, this is not possible. I'm somehow messing this up. After all, I should have made that same 8%+ errors on the original set of 1000 captchas I downloaded, did the network really learn to read better than I can, while being fed close to 10% falsehoods* ? So I generated the set where it consistently errors. And ... Yep. It did. About 40% of those was just me doing the ground truth wrong. I fixed them, but it only improved the CNNs performance slightly. * of course of those 10% wrong would still almost always have 4 out of 5 letters correct
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- akkat 9y agoWait until you go abroad and instead of saying "find the street signs" it says something in Japanese with no way of changing the language.
- hippich 9y agoWe are working on hashcash.io - replacement for captcha. no more frustration to guess what google meant, just computer proof of work and you are good to go
- fractallyte 9y agoLooks interesting, and fairly attractive presentation... but how does it work? This is essential to describe, but are no details about that on your front page! Also, your text needs some work; there are grammatical errors and some phrases could be improved. (I can help with this, if you want.)
- jraph 9y agoPlease, do not drain my batteries, waste resources of my planet and make me (or my employer, or my coffee shop, or my train company, or my library) pay electricity to prove I'm not a robot. Please, do not make Internet an energy hog more than it already is.
- lomereiter 9y agoYour last statement theoretically could be addressed by tweaking the algorithm settings such that it consumes at most [the time it takes for a human to solve reCaptcha] x [average power consumption of a smartphone]. Not sure if it would still hold its purpose, though.
- hippich 9y agoEventually you will have full control over it (we haven't build it out,) and if you dislike it for any reason - you just do not participate.
- Spivak 9y agoI use the Tor browser pretty frequently so I've gotten pretty good at these. It's much easier once you realize that there are three sources of data that determine correctness: basic computer vision, hurried/lazy humans, and a lot of bots. It's not about truth it's about following the crowd. - Forget the slivers. If it's not more that 75% of the square forget about it. - Anything not in the foreground might as well not exist. - Poles != Signs If you saw pole sticking out of the ground you wouldn't call it a sign would you? - It's not about whether it's a storefront, it's about whether it obviously looks like one. If you spend literally any time thinking about it it's a no. - Mark the most prominent vehicle and skip everything else. Only mark a second vehicle if they're equally sized.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- birksherty 9y agoSo that means we have to think like bots not humans. Otherwise it wouldn't have these rules and people would easily solve these. What's the point of captcha?
- Izkata 9y agoAside from that, I'm pretty sure his very first sentence, "Apparently I am incapable of identifying street signs", is correct. He keeps clicking on traffic signs, not street signs.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sbov 9y agoI used to never get these back when I used Chrome. I started getting them once I switched to Firefox. Is this a thing? or was it coincidence?
- nmridul 9y agoWhenever I see this, I intentionally select incorrect boxes. Let the AI eat those incorrect data. If sufficient people do this, these AI free loading stuff will stop.
- birksherty 9y agoI get these all the time when using VPN/proxy. These are basically harassment for users. They replaced the text captcha with these. Google knows that these stops humans from going in. But, they don't fix it because they need to harvest data. So, Google is evil. There is no doubt on that.
- fractallyte 9y agoSo at the end, when he says despondently, "I'm not a robot!"... Paranoid fantasy: it's a PhilipKDick/BladeRunner thing. You see, actually he is a robot (as, apparently, are most of us), and this test is designed to prove it. It's a precursor to the Voight-Kampff machine...
- milankragujevic 9y agocool seeing taran from ltt on hn...