3 ms·

Is it really hard to make a good alternative to recaptcha?

• hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  Yes. There have been other analyses of recaptcha before, but it is an incredibly detailed, complex piece of software. "Old school" captchas (i.e. have a human do something that is difficult for a computer) are getting more and more useless because there aren't many quick, easy tasks left that almost all humans can do that few computers can do, and they are vulnerable to mechanical turk farms. So Google's approach now is basically they know so much about your average user (especially your average Chrome user) that it is very difficult for a bot to affordably "replicate" this user behavior over time. The downside is, of course, that Google knows so much about you. Any proof-of-work scenario like this is pretty much doomed to fail, because is will be slowest on consumer devices (i.e. phones) and fastest on dedicated bot farms with rows of GPUs/ASICs designed to solve the problems.
  • aabbcc1241 7y ago
    If you have incentive for the hacker to control a farm of bots to send you some coins, it's not too bad hu?