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It's not even that effective. Spammers just pay people in bangladesh to do them.
by fheilz 6y ago
It's not even that effective. Spammers just pay people in bangladesh to do them.
- Fice 6y agoThe point of captchas is that they cost resources (human time, money, computing power) to solve. Captcha is essentially a proof-of-work scheme, and a very nasty one, because it is designed to torture users instead of relying on computers to do the work. There are computer PoW-based alternatives to captcha, but they are not widely used for some reason (why?).
- roywiggins 6y agoThen it becomes a tax on people with underpowered phones, doesn't it?
- Chirael 6y agoIt also becomes a tax on people who are pro-privacy (e.g., running uBlock Origin), since they don’t look like “normal” users and therefore have to solve captchas. All. The. Damned. Time.
- durovo 6y ago@Chirael have you tried using the Privacy Pass extension? I hate Captchas as well but the extension makes it somewhat easier.
- StavrosK 6y agoDoes it work for all reCAPTCHAs or just CloudFlare's?
- hombre_fatal 6y ago> There are computer PoW-based alternatives to captcha, but they are not widely used for some reason (why?) Because when you're renting a cheap botnet for your spam campaign, you don't care that some poor random person's device has to solve a PoW. Ironically you punish everyone except spammers because they certainly aren't using their own hardware. This is why stuff like hashcash (which had email spam in mind) was dead on arrival. People (like the commenter above) often assert that spammers can just buy human labor thus recaptcha is useless. But you're already in a whole different ballgame with sites like Twitter if you're attracting targeted human attacks.
- TontonNestor 6y agoIf you replace the CAPTCHA with a Hashcash-like PoW system, couldn't the server increase the difficulty when it receives too many connections from an IP? Even with a huge botnet, spammers can only have so many IPs and computing power. The difficulty could easily be adjusted to have a computing time ranging from a few milliseconds on a cheap smartphone (default) to a few minutes/hours on a desktop computer (for abusers).