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I feel a sense of dread whenever I see this box. Is it going to let me through, or am I going to spend the next few minutes futilely clicking signs and lights,

I feel a sense of dread whenever I see this box. Is it going to let me through, or am I going to spend the next few minutes futilely clicking signs and lights, only to give up and leave the site?

sk1pper 8y ago
Glad I’m not the only one. I thought something was wrong with my brain. Or that I might be a robot.
- toxik 8y ago
  Counter anecdote: I was actually never rejected though I’ve been subjected to the picture test multiple times. Most of the time I just get through, though it is hard not to sigh and roll your eyes when presented with one. Annoying as they are, I don’t really see a better alternative. They’re also pretty easily circumvented with cheap labour like mechanical turk and similar services.
- sgolestane 8y ago
  01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01100110 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100
  - snazz 8y ago
    For those of you who don’t get it, this is ASCII text in binary.
benologist 8y ago
Someone is suing Apple for making 2FA too annoying, I only hope Google can be next for the significantly greater time being wasted on their stupid CAPTCHA. Why should any of us even care if someone accesses a website programmatically? It's almost definitely not my problem, and it's not even necessarily a problem it's just a way to access pages, made easier by Google in fact because it's a perfectly legitimate way to navigate the internet and Google themselves depend on it. If anyone wants to discourage it just provide an official API to use instead of pages, which are a defacto API for humans. https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/apple-hit-two-factor-lawsuit-alleging-2fa-disruptive-3657342 https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/apple-hit-two-factor-law...
- tracker1 8y ago
  Apple's 2FA cannot be disabled, beyond that if you ever had two devices connected to your account, good luck getting them to use your verified phone instead... I was trying to get rid of a "your apple account... please sign in" via the app store, and the advice was to sign out then back in again... my only other apple device was in another city... Phone calls to GF, to get her to login, similar issue, it was now signed out, and after another attempt, one of them showed the 2FA window, which got me in. At no point was I able to use the phone number also associated with my account, and it was a huge, long, pain in the ass. It's actually a huge part of why I won't buy an iPhone.
singularity2001 8y ago
The worst thing is that it prevents me from accessing my BANK account. Shame on you FIDOR for blocking my own access to my own finances!
- MiddleEndian 8y ago
  Send them a message. Switch to another bank, close your account, and tell them why.
  - explainplease 8y ago
    Why? My time is valuable. If they want such detailed feedback (i.e. free business advice) from me, they can compensate me for it. I would get nothing in return for spending my time explaining why I'm not going to give them any more of my money.
    - MiddleEndian 8y ago
      Presumably they'll already make you waste time talking to a human when you close your account. Might as well mention the captcha to make public the distaste for recaptcha as we are now on this forum.
- RussianCow 8y ago
  As superficial as it seems, this kind of stuff drives me away from businesses. I almost changed my mind about opening a retirement account with Charles Schwab purely because they block access to their site from the VPN that I used at the time. That said, for services from which I gain a lot of benefit, the annoyance is worth it, so it ultimately doesn't matter.
clairity 8y ago
just preemtively say no and leave the site. this is just another tracking vector for google and it should be discouraged. i'm generally against this type of gating, where the people doing the right thing get punished disproportionately (even small slices of time add up to wasting thousands of human-years over the population) just to combat the tiny number of bad actors. target the bad actors directly. it's the same for tsa security theater. let's put all those humans to work training dogs of all sorts and filtering them through people at the airport. the money for those privacy invading scanners can be put toward training and housing the dogs. our collective time is not wasted on silliness and standing in line, and we'd probably save a lot of tax dollars that way.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Yeah... but I really want to buy that <whatever>, so meh, I'll put up with it. There are only so many hills I'm willing to die on.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    And this feeling right here, is why Google is able to do all of the things that it does. ;)
- xirdstl 8y ago
  I'm getting closer to doing that. Lately, I check the box, and if I'm presented with images, I leave. I have also trained myself to wait a few seconds before clicking the box, which seems to help assert my humanity.
  - afandian 8y ago
    Wait til it's standing between you and your bank account.
    - russh 8y ago
      You mean my Ex-bank account.
flixic 8y ago
I hardly ever get to just check the box. I think uBlock Origin and Safari's intelligent cookie blocking removes a lot of identifying details, and ReCAPTCHA relies a lot on browsing history and cookies.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Clicking the box tells Google that you're a human. Identifying the lights and cars and bicycles is you training Waymo's self-driving AI.
- sigotirandolas 8y ago
  I use Firefox with containers (so ReCaptcha can’t see my Google cookies) and also uBlock Origin + a few more extensions. I don’t use NoScript or similar. I get the manual test for ReCaptcha pretty much 100% of the time.
warent 8y ago
I'm willing to bet if you record how long you spend clicking signs and lights on average, it's going to be more like several seconds than a few minutes. This must be hyperbole. There are the outlier cases where it gets fairly annoying but otherwise, I'm not sure I understand the hostility toward such a benign system that actually does thwart bots very effectively.
- justusthane 8y ago
  Effective or not, I wouldn't exactly call it benign when it's aggressively fingerprinting you based on every bit of data it can access. I disable most scripts using uBlock, but I have to make an exception for reCaptcha if I want to interact with half the web. I'm pretty sure due to that alone Google is able to track where I go.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  > I'm willing to bet if you record how long you spend clicking signs and lights on average, it's going to be more like several seconds than a few minutes. How much, and at what odds? The length of the average Google CATPCHA has been steadily going up for me. I haven't pulled out a stopwatch, but I do count how many image sets I go through. I basically never get through on the checkbox unless I've done one on another site shortly before. I sometimes succeed after one set, but if I don't it's consistently 3+. The worst case I've seen was 10 layers of slow-loading images without success, at which point I gave up and tried on another device. (If it had been a site I didn't need, I'd have given up after 5 - which I do fairly often, so I don't have an average count needed to succeed!) I'm fully aware that average users don't have this much trouble, or people would be furious. But I also see that captcha ramps up to an extremely long process in the face of even modest privacy-protection efforts like not running Javascript or allowing third party trackers by default. (God forbid you're using a VPN for any reason.) It's not assessing your humanity but your familiarity, using the same fingerprinting tools as any site that wants to track you. Spam is a real problem, and a hard one to solve, but I admit I'm hostile to Google's captcha. Partly because it really is a significant time sink for me. Partly because it lacks any progress indicator or fallback option so it's an indefinite hurdle to accessing sites I'm already committed to using. But largely because, despite what I really believe are good intentions, it's yet another force pushing people to give up privacy and even security if they want websites to work tolerably.
JohnFen 8y ago
> only to give up and leave the site? Personally, I've reached the point where this is the first thing that I do. If a site is presenting a CAPTCHA (especially one run by Google) to me, then 90% of the time, that's a site I'm better off avoiding anyway. That last 10% can be infuriating, though, and I certainly won't feel positively about it.
AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
And if you have a vision issue like me and you try to use the audio version you will often get "Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. For more details visit our help page" and be unable to continue.

I feel a sense of dread whenever I see this box. Is it going to let me through, or am I going to spend the next few minutes futilely clicking signs and lights, only to give up and leave the site?

sk1pper 8y ago

Glad I’m not the only one. I thought something was wrong with my brain. Or that I might be a robot.

toxik 8y ago
Counter anecdote: I was actually never rejected though I’ve been subjected to the picture test multiple times. Most of the time I just get through, though it is hard not to sigh and roll your eyes when presented with one. Annoying as they are, I don’t really see a better alternative. They’re also pretty easily circumvented with cheap labour like mechanical turk and similar services.
sgolestane 8y ago
01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01100110 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100
- snazz 8y ago
  For those of you who don’t get it, this is ASCII text in binary.

benologist 8y ago

Someone is suing Apple for making 2FA too annoying, I only hope Google can be next for the significantly greater time being wasted on their stupid CAPTCHA. Why should any of us even care if someone accesses a website programmatically? It's almost definitely not my problem, and it's not even necessarily a problem it's just a way to access pages, made easier by Google in fact because it's a perfectly legitimate way to navigate the internet and Google themselves depend on it. If anyone wants to discourage it just provide an official API to use instead of pages, which are a defacto API for humans. https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/apple-hit-two-factor-lawsuit-alleging-2fa-disruptive-3657342 https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/apple-hit-two-factor-law...

tracker1 8y ago
Apple's 2FA cannot be disabled, beyond that if you ever had two devices connected to your account, good luck getting them to use your verified phone instead... I was trying to get rid of a "your apple account... please sign in" via the app store, and the advice was to sign out then back in again... my only other apple device was in another city... Phone calls to GF, to get her to login, similar issue, it was now signed out, and after another attempt, one of them showed the 2FA window, which got me in. At no point was I able to use the phone number also associated with my account, and it was a huge, long, pain in the ass. It's actually a huge part of why I won't buy an iPhone.

singularity2001 8y ago

The worst thing is that it prevents me from accessing my BANK account. Shame on you FIDOR for blocking my own access to my own finances!

MiddleEndian 8y ago
Send them a message. Switch to another bank, close your account, and tell them why.
- explainplease 8y ago
  Why? My time is valuable. If they want such detailed feedback (i.e. free business advice) from me, they can compensate me for it. I would get nothing in return for spending my time explaining why I'm not going to give them any more of my money.
  - MiddleEndian 8y ago
    Presumably they'll already make you waste time talking to a human when you close your account. Might as well mention the captcha to make public the distaste for recaptcha as we are now on this forum.
RussianCow 8y ago
As superficial as it seems, this kind of stuff drives me away from businesses. I almost changed my mind about opening a retirement account with Charles Schwab purely because they block access to their site from the VPN that I used at the time. That said, for services from which I gain a lot of benefit, the annoyance is worth it, so it ultimately doesn't matter.

clairity 8y ago

just preemtively say no and leave the site. this is just another tracking vector for google and it should be discouraged. i'm generally against this type of gating, where the people doing the right thing get punished disproportionately (even small slices of time add up to wasting thousands of human-years over the population) just to combat the tiny number of bad actors. target the bad actors directly. it's the same for tsa security theater. let's put all those humans to work training dogs of all sorts and filtering them through people at the airport. the money for those privacy invading scanners can be put toward training and housing the dogs. our collective time is not wasted on silliness and standing in line, and we'd probably save a lot of tax dollars that way.

EpicEng 8y ago
Yeah... but I really want to buy that <whatever>, so meh, I'll put up with it. There are only so many hills I'm willing to die on.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  And this feeling right here, is why Google is able to do all of the things that it does. ;)
xirdstl 8y ago
I'm getting closer to doing that. Lately, I check the box, and if I'm presented with images, I leave. I have also trained myself to wait a few seconds before clicking the box, which seems to help assert my humanity.
- afandian 8y ago
  Wait til it's standing between you and your bank account.
  - russh 8y ago
    You mean my Ex-bank account.

flixic 8y ago

I hardly ever get to just check the box. I think uBlock Origin and Safari's intelligent cookie blocking removes a lot of identifying details, and ReCAPTCHA relies a lot on browsing history and cookies.

reaperducer 8y ago
Clicking the box tells Google that you're a human. Identifying the lights and cars and bicycles is you training Waymo's self-driving AI.
sigotirandolas 8y ago
I use Firefox with containers (so ReCaptcha can’t see my Google cookies) and also uBlock Origin + a few more extensions. I don’t use NoScript or similar. I get the manual test for ReCaptcha pretty much 100% of the time.

warent 8y ago

I'm willing to bet if you record how long you spend clicking signs and lights on average, it's going to be more like several seconds than a few minutes. This must be hyperbole. There are the outlier cases where it gets fairly annoying but otherwise, I'm not sure I understand the hostility toward such a benign system that actually does thwart bots very effectively.

justusthane 8y ago
Effective or not, I wouldn't exactly call it benign when it's aggressively fingerprinting you based on every bit of data it can access. I disable most scripts using uBlock, but I have to make an exception for reCaptcha if I want to interact with half the web. I'm pretty sure due to that alone Google is able to track where I go.
Bartweiss 8y ago
> I'm willing to bet if you record how long you spend clicking signs and lights on average, it's going to be more like several seconds than a few minutes. How much, and at what odds? The length of the average Google CATPCHA has been steadily going up for me. I haven't pulled out a stopwatch, but I do count how many image sets I go through. I basically never get through on the checkbox unless I've done one on another site shortly before. I sometimes succeed after one set, but if I don't it's consistently 3+. The worst case I've seen was 10 layers of slow-loading images without success, at which point I gave up and tried on another device. (If it had been a site I didn't need, I'd have given up after 5 - which I do fairly often, so I don't have an average count needed to succeed!) I'm fully aware that average users don't have this much trouble, or people would be furious. But I also see that captcha ramps up to an extremely long process in the face of even modest privacy-protection efforts like not running Javascript or allowing third party trackers by default. (God forbid you're using a VPN for any reason.) It's not assessing your humanity but your familiarity, using the same fingerprinting tools as any site that wants to track you. Spam is a real problem, and a hard one to solve, but I admit I'm hostile to Google's captcha. Partly because it really is a significant time sink for me. Partly because it lacks any progress indicator or fallback option so it's an indefinite hurdle to accessing sites I'm already committed to using. But largely because, despite what I really believe are good intentions, it's yet another force pushing people to give up privacy and even security if they want websites to work tolerably.

JohnFen 8y ago

> only to give up and leave the site? Personally, I've reached the point where this is the first thing that I do. If a site is presenting a CAPTCHA (especially one run by Google) to me, then 90% of the time, that's a site I'm better off avoiding anyway. That last 10% can be infuriating, though, and I certainly won't feel positively about it.

AnaniasAnanas 8y ago

And if you have a vision issue like me and you try to use the audio version you will often get "Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. For more details visit our help page" and be unable to continue.