4 ms·

you may be right about the fade-out and delay but the time spent fading in only hampers humans not bots. As soon as it starts fading in the image is present in

you may be right about the fade-out and delay but the time spent fading in only hampers humans not bots. As soon as it starts fading in the image is present in non-faded form and the bots can start processing it.

dredmorbius 7y ago
You realise you've just described why this would distinguish between bots and humans. (And yes, I'm also driven to rage by slow-fade animations. A practice I can date back to Microsoft's Clippy, which, when you punched it in the fact to go away, had just one more gratuitous animation just to twist the knife that just more.)
- Cyph0n 7y ago
  No, it doesn't help distinguish the two, because this check can be easily circumvented by adding a small, random delay. To reiterate: the primary goal seems to be slowing down bots.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    But does it slow the bot down in a meaningful way? If you have one IP, there's a limit on captchas solved that you're going to blow through with or without the delay. If you have a bunch of IPs, you can multithread the solving.
bad_user 7y ago
> the time spent fading in only hampers humans not bots Not necessarily, contrast adds detail and mistakes are expensive, so bots too are incentivized to wait for the final picture (this assuming that network communications aren't monitored to get the incoming image out of the request). Also clicking on that image too early is a good signal that it's a bot.
- penagwin 7y ago
  The bot presumably is running in something like chrome headless or selenium (if you're processing JS), so it would have access to the image the moment the response is received. Unless Google is literally streaming in the image frame-by-frame, I'll admit I haven't looked into the details but this doesn't seem likely as it's pretty complicated compared to just using an image.
- ClassyJacket 7y ago
  The bot would just read the unfaded image from the DOM.
  - aoeusnth1 7y ago
    > Clicking the image too early is a good signal that it’s a bot. The fade in is actually a nice gesture to the human to show them that an image will be there soon, while still slowing them down to rate limit the bots.

dredmorbius 7y ago

You realise you've just described why this would distinguish between bots and humans. (And yes, I'm also driven to rage by slow-fade animations. A practice I can date back to Microsoft's Clippy, which, when you punched it in the fact to go away, had just one more gratuitous animation just to twist the knife that just more.)

Cyph0n 7y ago
No, it doesn't help distinguish the two, because this check can be easily circumvented by adding a small, random delay. To reiterate: the primary goal seems to be slowing down bots.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  But does it slow the bot down in a meaningful way? If you have one IP, there's a limit on captchas solved that you're going to blow through with or without the delay. If you have a bunch of IPs, you can multithread the solving.

bad_user 7y ago

> the time spent fading in only hampers humans not bots Not necessarily, contrast adds detail and mistakes are expensive, so bots too are incentivized to wait for the final picture (this assuming that network communications aren't monitored to get the incoming image out of the request). Also clicking on that image too early is a good signal that it's a bot.

penagwin 7y ago
The bot presumably is running in something like chrome headless or selenium (if you're processing JS), so it would have access to the image the moment the response is received. Unless Google is literally streaming in the image frame-by-frame, I'll admit I haven't looked into the details but this doesn't seem likely as it's pretty complicated compared to just using an image.
ClassyJacket 7y ago
The bot would just read the unfaded image from the DOM.
- aoeusnth1 7y ago
  > Clicking the image too early is a good signal that it’s a bot. The fade in is actually a nice gesture to the human to show them that an image will be there soon, while still slowing them down to rate limit the bots.