3 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoThe 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.