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I find it strange how all the comments here are blaming Google. Isn't it obvious that CAPTCHAs have gotten difficult because AI got better at solving them? Soon

I find it strange how all the comments here are blaming Google. Isn't it obvious that CAPTCHAs have gotten difficult because AI got better at solving them? Soon bots will be better than humans at solving CAPTCHAs, and the system will fail completely. I predict that then Google and Facebook will completely block new user signup from Tor, VPNs or browsers without cookines. Everyone else will require an existing Google, Facebook or similar account to create an account.

csydas 8y ago
I think the main thrust is that the tool is not fit for purpose, but Google benefits from it anyways. They get the AI training data, but the website owners still get hammered by bots, and privacy conscious users and users who have the audacity to be from a country flagged by RECAPTCHA get to struggle. Living in Russia at the moment, I almost prefer the sites that just outright block me to the stupid RECAPTCHA that cycles me through 3-4 iterations of images only to ask me to try again. RECAPTCHA is no longer doing what it promised, and that's the general thrust of the article; the bots are just getting too good for it.
CM30 8y ago
It's not even bots that are breaking them much of the time. The spammers just get people in third world countries/using mechanical turk type services to break them. Captchas like this cannot stop a human determined to break the rules.
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  Right, but eliminating all attackers except the ones who are willing to spend money on human labor is an incredibly strong filter.
Pharmakon 8y ago
We hate them for the same reason we hate airport security theater; they do not work and have a high burden on the people being subjected to them. Plus, as it’s Google doing it, you can hardly escape the goddamned things. So yeah, we blame Google for using us as data classifiers and adding hoops and hurdles to the open net, while accomplishing precisely dick. I for one hope that AI gets to the point that it can effortlessly beat them, so we can stop dealing with them.
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  > We hate them for the same reason we hate airport security theater; they do not work Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it. I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real reason or for some trivial reason. To me, it suggests a massive misunderstanding that people have about the internet. It's certainly something to worry about, but how about this angle: abuse is getting so cheap and hard to prevent that we're electing the aid of complicated systems engineered by large corporations like Google. That scares me, but not from a Google=bad standpoint. It indicates that the internet has fundamental problems that make abuse trivial, and that's a different discussion worth having, but it's a much harder one than Google=bad. Probably less cathartic, too.
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it. I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real reason or for some trivial reason. To me, it suggests a massive misunderstanding that people have about the internet. Or we’ve just managed to notice that CAPTCHAs don’t seem to keep millions of bots, spammers, dummy accounts, shills, etc off the net. I’m glad you’re having such perceived success, but it’s not a universal phenomenon.
    - hombre_fatal 8y ago
      Captchas do do that. They can't do everything, but they are an incredibly powerful tool. Do you run a service that needs to prevent abuse at scale? What exactly is your Recaptcha replacement? It's very easy to complain about the inconvenience of Recaptcha, but I'd like to see less of that and more constructive conversation about what all these supposed alternatives are, because all I see is "you don't need it" which is merely a reminder that, understandably, most people aren't running sites at a scale that attract abuse. Even HN uses Recaptcha. Check out the login/register page.
grenadier21 8y ago
It's not that, it's the fact that Google asks you almost never if you're using a Google account. That pretty much gives Google-account-havers a fast pass to the Internet, which gives Google even more power that it really shouldn't have. Also, they're using the captchas to train their AIs, which is unfair extraction of labor.

csydas 8y ago

I think the main thrust is that the tool is not fit for purpose, but Google benefits from it anyways. They get the AI training data, but the website owners still get hammered by bots, and privacy conscious users and users who have the audacity to be from a country flagged by RECAPTCHA get to struggle. Living in Russia at the moment, I almost prefer the sites that just outright block me to the stupid RECAPTCHA that cycles me through 3-4 iterations of images only to ask me to try again. RECAPTCHA is no longer doing what it promised, and that's the general thrust of the article; the bots are just getting too good for it.

CM30 8y ago

It's not even bots that are breaking them much of the time. The spammers just get people in third world countries/using mechanical turk type services to break them. Captchas like this cannot stop a human determined to break the rules.

hombre_fatal 8y ago
Right, but eliminating all attackers except the ones who are willing to spend money on human labor is an incredibly strong filter.

Pharmakon 8y ago

We hate them for the same reason we hate airport security theater; they do not work and have a high burden on the people being subjected to them. Plus, as it’s Google doing it, you can hardly escape the goddamned things. So yeah, we blame Google for using us as data classifiers and adding hoops and hurdles to the open net, while accomplishing precisely dick. I for one hope that AI gets to the point that it can effortlessly beat them, so we can stop dealing with them.

hombre_fatal 8y ago
> We hate them for the same reason we hate airport security theater; they do not work Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it. I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real reason or for some trivial reason. To me, it suggests a massive misunderstanding that people have about the internet. It's certainly something to worry about, but how about this angle: abuse is getting so cheap and hard to prevent that we're electing the aid of complicated systems engineered by large corporations like Google. That scares me, but not from a Google=bad standpoint. It indicates that the internet has fundamental problems that make abuse trivial, and that's a different discussion worth having, but it's a much harder one than Google=bad. Probably less cathartic, too.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  Well, they absolutely do work. They work so well that they've reduced bot actions by almost 100% on our sites. We wouldn't use Recaptcha if there wasn't abuse on the internet. But, unfortunately, there is. There is a sobering amount of it. I'm actually curious about all these posts suggesting that websites use Recaptcha for no real reason or for some trivial reason. To me, it suggests a massive misunderstanding that people have about the internet. Or we’ve just managed to notice that CAPTCHAs don’t seem to keep millions of bots, spammers, dummy accounts, shills, etc off the net. I’m glad you’re having such perceived success, but it’s not a universal phenomenon.
  - hombre_fatal 8y ago
    Captchas do do that. They can't do everything, but they are an incredibly powerful tool. Do you run a service that needs to prevent abuse at scale? What exactly is your Recaptcha replacement? It's very easy to complain about the inconvenience of Recaptcha, but I'd like to see less of that and more constructive conversation about what all these supposed alternatives are, because all I see is "you don't need it" which is merely a reminder that, understandably, most people aren't running sites at a scale that attract abuse. Even HN uses Recaptcha. Check out the login/register page.

grenadier21 8y ago

It's not that, it's the fact that Google asks you almost never if you're using a Google account. That pretty much gives Google-account-havers a fast pass to the Internet, which gives Google even more power that it really shouldn't have. Also, they're using the captchas to train their AIs, which is unfair extraction of labor.