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I'm... actually struggling to see what this dark side is. The data is collected under a non-reuse agreement. It's specifically there to make a good captcha. The

I'm... actually struggling to see what this dark side is. The data is collected under a non-reuse agreement. It's specifically there to make a good captcha. There are other captcha vendors, and they don't make that promise (and I can think of at least one who admits they collect and resell data via captcha). So the downside here is that no one has a credible way to compete with Google? Maybe because their Google cookie actually is a pretty good indicator of humanity? That's nonsense. Tons of people do. There's LOADS of great research on captcha that isn't implemented by any vendor. The roadblock is that NO ONE WANTS TO, because it's a thankless, unprofitable task that puts you dead in the crosshairs of a ton of very organized people who will devote huge resources to circumventing or breaking your offering. "A land grab," sure. Of a nuclear wasteland covered in small arms battles.

kabacha 7y ago
> The data is collected under a non-reuse agreement Oh you sweet summer child. Would you by any chance be interested in buying a bridge? Despite that, even assuming if it's true and we'll have a lovely accurate AI captcha system. The big down-side is that captcha is breaking programmable web. I maintain a lot of small software crawlers from simple notification applets to bigger analytic crawlers and the web in the past few years has been increasingly hostile towards this. API endpoints are disappearing and in general make distributing free apps very difficult. The web-crawlers are super simple to write and even maintain but services like cloudflare, distils, captcha break them and while there's always solutions to these systems they are very hard to distribute to users (you can't really pack in pupeteer, selenium or some other webengine automation stack with your app). Public data should be public. These sort of idiotic measures are not compatible with web protocol. The web only know one thing - 1 IP address == 1 person and it should be encouraged not dismissed.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  > Despite that, even assuming if it's true and we'll have a lovely accurate AI captcha system. The big down-side is that captcha is breaking programmable web. I actually find this argument to be a bit compelling, if I'm being selfishly honest. It's super annoying that crawlers are so awkward to write these days, and I miss the days when they worked better. > but services like cloudflare, distils, captcha break them and while there's always solutions to these systems they are very hard to distribute to users (you can't really pack in pupeteer, selenium or some other webengine automation stack with your app). I don't disagree, but I also think we may be asking to keep model T's or gasoline driven 1-person bikes around. These technologies made more sense once, but make much less sense now. > Public data should be public. Sure, but what you don't get to mandate is how their public. If someone wants to make public information available in a specific way and you don't like that way, the burden is on you to republish it. Outside of a very narrow accessibility scope, I'm neither legally nor morally obligated to cater to your specific needs. And indeed, as a service or data provider I have my own problems. It's by no means an imaginary threat CAPTCHAs are solving. This is not a classical phantom security issue that statism uses to justify authoritarianism. It's equivalent to locking my doors when I leave a shop or making sure that my wares are properly labeled and not spoiled. > These sort of idiotic measures are not compatible with web protocol. The web protocol as you envision it hasn't been compatible with reality for a long time now. Hell, your crawlers are themselves a violation of the spirit of the original web. You are part of the very problem you're railing against! > The web only know one thing - 1 IP address == 1 person and it should be encouraged not dismissed. I suspect this statement is why you got downvoted, for what it's worth.
  - kabacha 7y ago
    No I'm getting down-voted because hackners is notoriously pro corporate medium - of course people don't care about public data and data freedom here. > It's super annoying that crawlers are so awkward to write these days, and I miss the days when they worked better. It has never been easier to write crawlers witht he exception of purposfully built in barriers. Just check youtube-dl > I don't disagree, but I also think we may be asking to keep model T's or gasoline driven 1-person bikes around. These technologies made more sense once, but make much less sense now. What are you on about? For example to get around some crawler protections you need to execute js with some specific stack of libs. Distributing crawler.py vs distributing a whole stack is much more difficult. Your logic makes absolutely no sense. In the web there is no distinction between who is behind the ip address. It's a net of ip addresses and headers, right? If I'm asking for your resource that you choose to serve publicly I only need to give you my IP and some http cruft, right? So now it turns out you don't want to serve _some_ ip addresses. Now you have to introduce an extra layer that is not part of the web - a layer that is incompatible with your goal. You need to use javascript to fingerprint your client - except you know what? client is the one executing your fingerprint code so they can send whatever they want to you. I've never seen more idiotic medium. On one hand I get job security on the other the web is absolutely broken by complete bafoons who have zero logical capabilities.
feanaro 7y ago
It's a land grab of the general web and browser market, not of the captcha market. They're using the captcha to disincentivize users from using browsers other than Chrome or from not having a Google account. And now with v3, it's supposed to happen on every page of the web? It shouldn't be too hard to see it's a disaster.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  > They're using the captcha to disincentivize users from using browsers other than Chrome or from not having a Google account. It has absolutely nothing to do with Chrome. And anyone who is sane has switched to Firefox and is now patiently enduring how lousy it is by comparison because ad blockers are sacrosanct. > And now with v3, it's supposed to happen on every page of the web? It shouldn't be too hard to see it's a disaster. Yes, site owners gotta opt in to captchas. Most sites already have enough connections to Google on every page they could already do most of this work. But that's unethical. Ultimately, a increasingly sophisticated statistical analysis of users is the only reliable way to get robots out of spaces meant for humans. Our social media is crippled by robots masquerading as humans for the profits of various agencies who's names you aren't even privileged to know, but you're concerned about opt-in countermeasures because... Why again? That in a dark future every mom and pop web shop is gonna have sophisticated log analytics at their disposal, either because free software finally gets off its ass or because state capitalism does what it does and awards all the business to 1-2 competitors? To me, you're arguing about the color of the insulin bottle rather than pointing out how absurd the system that can cheerfully jack it's price 10x is.

kabacha 7y ago

> The data is collected under a non-reuse agreement Oh you sweet summer child. Would you by any chance be interested in buying a bridge? Despite that, even assuming if it's true and we'll have a lovely accurate AI captcha system. The big down-side is that captcha is breaking programmable web. I maintain a lot of small software crawlers from simple notification applets to bigger analytic crawlers and the web in the past few years has been increasingly hostile towards this. API endpoints are disappearing and in general make distributing free apps very difficult. The web-crawlers are super simple to write and even maintain but services like cloudflare, distils, captcha break them and while there's always solutions to these systems they are very hard to distribute to users (you can't really pack in pupeteer, selenium or some other webengine automation stack with your app). Public data should be public. These sort of idiotic measures are not compatible with web protocol. The web only know one thing - 1 IP address == 1 person and it should be encouraged not dismissed.

KirinDave 7y ago
> Despite that, even assuming if it's true and we'll have a lovely accurate AI captcha system. The big down-side is that captcha is breaking programmable web. I actually find this argument to be a bit compelling, if I'm being selfishly honest. It's super annoying that crawlers are so awkward to write these days, and I miss the days when they worked better. > but services like cloudflare, distils, captcha break them and while there's always solutions to these systems they are very hard to distribute to users (you can't really pack in pupeteer, selenium or some other webengine automation stack with your app). I don't disagree, but I also think we may be asking to keep model T's or gasoline driven 1-person bikes around. These technologies made more sense once, but make much less sense now. > Public data should be public. Sure, but what you don't get to mandate is how their public. If someone wants to make public information available in a specific way and you don't like that way, the burden is on you to republish it. Outside of a very narrow accessibility scope, I'm neither legally nor morally obligated to cater to your specific needs. And indeed, as a service or data provider I have my own problems. It's by no means an imaginary threat CAPTCHAs are solving. This is not a classical phantom security issue that statism uses to justify authoritarianism. It's equivalent to locking my doors when I leave a shop or making sure that my wares are properly labeled and not spoiled. > These sort of idiotic measures are not compatible with web protocol. The web protocol as you envision it hasn't been compatible with reality for a long time now. Hell, your crawlers are themselves a violation of the spirit of the original web. You are part of the very problem you're railing against! > The web only know one thing - 1 IP address == 1 person and it should be encouraged not dismissed. I suspect this statement is why you got downvoted, for what it's worth.
- kabacha 7y ago
  No I'm getting down-voted because hackners is notoriously pro corporate medium - of course people don't care about public data and data freedom here. > It's super annoying that crawlers are so awkward to write these days, and I miss the days when they worked better. It has never been easier to write crawlers witht he exception of purposfully built in barriers. Just check youtube-dl > I don't disagree, but I also think we may be asking to keep model T's or gasoline driven 1-person bikes around. These technologies made more sense once, but make much less sense now. What are you on about? For example to get around some crawler protections you need to execute js with some specific stack of libs. Distributing crawler.py vs distributing a whole stack is much more difficult. Your logic makes absolutely no sense. In the web there is no distinction between who is behind the ip address. It's a net of ip addresses and headers, right? If I'm asking for your resource that you choose to serve publicly I only need to give you my IP and some http cruft, right? So now it turns out you don't want to serve _some_ ip addresses. Now you have to introduce an extra layer that is not part of the web - a layer that is incompatible with your goal. You need to use javascript to fingerprint your client - except you know what? client is the one executing your fingerprint code so they can send whatever they want to you. I've never seen more idiotic medium. On one hand I get job security on the other the web is absolutely broken by complete bafoons who have zero logical capabilities.

feanaro 7y ago

It's a land grab of the general web and browser market, not of the captcha market. They're using the captcha to disincentivize users from using browsers other than Chrome or from not having a Google account. And now with v3, it's supposed to happen on every page of the web? It shouldn't be too hard to see it's a disaster.

KirinDave 7y ago
> They're using the captcha to disincentivize users from using browsers other than Chrome or from not having a Google account. It has absolutely nothing to do with Chrome. And anyone who is sane has switched to Firefox and is now patiently enduring how lousy it is by comparison because ad blockers are sacrosanct. > And now with v3, it's supposed to happen on every page of the web? It shouldn't be too hard to see it's a disaster. Yes, site owners gotta opt in to captchas. Most sites already have enough connections to Google on every page they could already do most of this work. But that's unethical. Ultimately, a increasingly sophisticated statistical analysis of users is the only reliable way to get robots out of spaces meant for humans. Our social media is crippled by robots masquerading as humans for the profits of various agencies who's names you aren't even privileged to know, but you're concerned about opt-in countermeasures because... Why again? That in a dark future every mom and pop web shop is gonna have sophisticated log analytics at their disposal, either because free software finally gets off its ass or because state capitalism does what it does and awards all the business to 1-2 competitors? To me, you're arguing about the color of the insulin bottle rather than pointing out how absurd the system that can cheerfully jack it's price 10x is.