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Google's CAPTCHA is a cancer of the internet. We're all training their AI without any renumeration. I genuinely hope that some government figures out how to sue

• dtech 6y ago
  They provide a service to the website owner in exchange
• zeepzeep 6y ago
  Let Googles AI solve Googles CAPTCHAs for you! "Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans" is one of my top 3 browser extensions.
  • aloisdg 6y ago
    So we have "Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans", "uBlock Origin" and what is the last one?
    • grishka 6y ago
      SponsorBlock?
      • caenn 6y ago
        I had no idea this extension existed, thanks a lot!
    • jgehring 6y ago
      "I don't care about cookies"?
    • superasn 6y ago
      Lastpass for me
    • hnuser123456 6y ago
      Imagus, Bypass Paywalls, and Tampermonkey.
    • quietbritishjim 6y ago
      That is some ingenious bait for HN readers! Of course everyone is going to passionately defend their favourite. (Mine is, of course, tree style tabs - I could never manage without it.)
      • Normille 6y ago
        Go on then. I'll play. My 'must have' half dozen which get installed first, on every browser on every device I use: * Bitwarden * HTTPS everywhere * Privacy Badger/Possum/Other Furry Animal * uBlock Origin * uMatrix * Windscribe
        • zeepzeep 6y ago
          > HTTPS everywhere Not anymore, firefox has it by default now, just gotta turn a setting on. > uMatrix Sadly this is dead, I guess I'll switch to a fork once I have time to figure out who does what.
          • Normille 6y ago
            >Not anymore, firefox has it by default now, just gotta turn a setting on. I don't use Firefox as my main browser. I use Yandex. I do sometimes wonder if HTTPS everywhere is becoming a bit redundant these days anyway. Most sites seem to have moved to HTTPS these days. >Sadly this [uMatrix] is dead Yes, that's a shame. It still works though. Hopefully whoever takes on the task of keeping it alive via a fork will make it a bit more mobile friendly. [The same could be said about uBlock Origin]
    • FeepingCreature 6y ago
      TabMixPlus of course.
    • udia 6y ago
      NoScript would be up there for me, or else Bitwarden.
    • Debug_Overload 6y ago
      For me, it's Dark Reader. I can't browse the web without it.
    • zeepzeep 6y ago
      uMatrix
  • Normille 6y ago
    Buster is a godsend and has probably saved me from having to abandon half the internet sites I visit. Now if only someone could come up with similarly useful extensions that got rid of the other two forms of cancer that are ruining the internet: 1: Cookie consent dialogues* and 2: Those modal overlays that suddenly cover up what you're reading and ask you to subscribe to some poxy newsletter or mailing list. *not "I Don't Care About Cookies". It slowed my browser to a crawl when I installed it.
    • iDemonix 6y ago
      Unfortunately the developers of those particular things (often like ad developers) use obscurity of things like div names to make the task less trivial.
• nbevans 6y ago
  But Google CAPTCHA has been asking the same questions now pretty much since its inception. Are we really still training it? Or is it just running on auto-pilot at this point? I'm guessing it's likely the latter.
  • awalton 6y ago
    I'm old enough to remember when reCAPTCHA was first introduced to help with deciphering text from OCR'd books. At that time, it didn't feel so bad answering those, as we were using our intelligence to genuinely help preserve our cultural history. It then switched to being numbers on buildings and street signs, and it immediately felt worse - we were now doing a job for Google, and an annoying one. Mechanical Turk from Amazon was invented to do this kind of chore. It's now creating training datasets for whatever else Google wants them to - it appears to mostly be for self-driving cars now, to identify landmarks and road signs. It's definitely not on autopilot, and it's definitely a real problem.
    • canofbars 6y ago
      >we were now doing a job for Google And in return you get an internet that is not filled with spam and bots. Or at least less filled with bots.
      • jkepler 6y ago
        Bots that we've trained. And there's also an xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/2228/ https://xkcd.com/2228/.
    • nottorp 6y ago
      Every time I get a captcha with traffic lights I imagine a Google self driving car stopped at an intersection waiting for me to complete the captcha so it can figure out what it sees and move along :)
      • MauranKilom 6y ago
        Naturally, there's an xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/
• ChrisRR 6y ago
  Anything you do on google is training their AI for free. Do you think they're offering you free email out of the kindness of their hearts?
  • grishka 6y ago
    Don't they sell ads in the web UI like many other free email providers do?
    • arp242 6y ago
      And they sell the business accounts; because so many people are used to gmail for their personal accounts, quite a few companies are paying for that.
    • kwhitefoot 6y ago
      I use gmail but I never see ads because I always use a non-Google mail client. (Thunderbird on Windows and Linux), SimpleEmail on Android.
      • viraptor 6y ago
        You're an edge case and a rounding error. Enough people use the web UI and the Gmail app that they likely don't care about other users.
• Rillen 6y ago
  This is really really weird from you comparing it to cancer of the internet. Catpcha was not invented to make the internet worse and solving one is not a real hurdle to you. I'm not sure why you 'sat down for minutes' to solve any of them, you might just be really bad in comparison to a lot of other peoples. Nonetheless, this helps YOU it makes YOUR experience better by making it harder for bots. Have you ever seen a community killed by spam bots? You are probably quite happy that the amount of spam in comments etc. are as low as it is.
  • Rillen 6y ago
    It would be interesting to see why someone would downvote it. Since when are captchas a bigger issue than spam bots and fraud users? and yes i also think that those tasks are actually helping our society. Adding models for self driving cars, for security/emergency breaking systems etc. So whats the issue?
    • idop 6y ago
      I did not downvote you, but I assume it's because you're wrong. Depending on your browser settings, addons, etc. CAPTCHAs may be nearly impossible to solve. That is to say, you ARE solving them correctly, but Google thinks otherwise, and punishes you with ever more pictures that fade in and out ever more slowly. So the fact that they're easy to solve or work well for you means nothing. Other people are having real issues with it, and not because they are unable to solve them.
      • Rillen 6y ago
        They could easily make that point by commenting right?
    • celsoazevedo 6y ago
      > It would be interesting to see why someone would downvote it. If I had to guess: > "solving one is not a real hurdle to you" My experience is that it can be a real hurdle. Sometimes reCaptcha forces me to complete 2 or 3 captchas (or more), some of them with an annoying artificial delay when loading new images. It seems to be worse when using a VPN or a browser like Firefox (or some privacy extension) that blocks Google tracking. I understand why people use reCaptcha and that it works well for some users, but it can be a pain in the butt if you don't use Chrome, aren't logged in to your Google account, or if other devices in the network did something that Google doesn't like. I sometimes get captchas on my phone when using mobile data (on a major provider here in the UK) and Google search because of "unusual traffic from your computer network"...
• croon 6y ago
  I absolutely don't aim to defend Googles captcha here, but the other day I was setting up an Outlook account for my son, and I ran into Arkose Labs bot detection, and I actually got heatedly angry, which is extremely rare for me. I wanted to punch anyone related to that abomination. Upon researching it seems to be used by the Epic launcher and Roblox (among others), which might explain why I've never encountered it before. Someone else's screengrab, which looks larger than what I was presented on my laptop: https://imgur.com/a/jF1HxbN https://imgur.com/a/jF1HxbN So they: * are very small (or I'm old) * use faux 3d walls which further complicates the image * have to be solved 10 in a row correctly * have an unspecified time limit (which in my untempered rage felt like maybe 3 seconds per image tops, no promises) * don't tell you you've failed by answer or time until you're through all 10. I as a full grown human with ~25-30 years on the internet, as well as video games and puzzles for fun, could not get through it in less than 5 (*10) tries. I accept I might be occasionally slow, but this should not be an issue. TL:DR; Can someone at Arkose Labs please just do an rm -rf / Edit: Apparently they have other types as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/gkpz0f/how_to_design_a_bot_detection_system_that_humans/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/gkpz0f/how_to...
  • proto-n 6y ago
    Adding insult to injury, it seems pretty easy to write a quick image filter + path finding algo to solve these... as apparently all the walls have solid borders, while none of the walkable paths have them. So a targeted bot should have a much easier time solving these than a human.
    • croon 6y ago
      Absolutely, they've produced something fairly consistent making it easy for bots, yet by design made it harder for humans to see (small, image noise), and solve (10 consecutive, short time limit, no user feedback). I recognize that by looking at just the screengrab it's an extremely simple concept to solve, it's just that at every implementation turn they made the worst choices, and it just infuriates me.
    • steerablesafe 6y ago
• jkepler 6y ago
  Yup, exactly. My thoughts on CAPTCHAs expressed well by https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/2228/ https://xkcd.com/2228/.
• gulbrandr 6y ago
  > We're all training their AI without any renumeration. This. This is not said enough. Everything you do with a Google service is used to train their AI. I don't want to train their AI.
  • danielscrubs 6y ago
    It’s almost like a bad sci fi flick: - how much data do we need to train an AGI? - a googol. - let that be the company name.
• thinkharderdev 6y ago
  No, the owner of the site is getting a free service from Google to try and prevent bots from using their site. If you don't like CAPTCHAs then your problem is with the site owner, not google.
  • jorvi 6y ago
    Google's CAPTCHA is specifically engineered to gaslight you though. Often it will ask you to identify fire hydrants or bicycles, and despite selecting all of them (and it being easy to recognise them as they are fairly unique objects), it will still give you an error, and give you a new set of images to try again. If it is feeling really malevolent it will even give you a third round. Hell, it happens regularly on the second and especially the third try it will give you excruciatingly slowly crossfading images, and the last image routinely seems to need 2-4 clicks to finally make the object it wants you to identify go away. Hcaptcha (Cloudflare's alternative) is an absolutely breeze by comparison, and it even allows you to pre-generate a bunch of tokens via an extension (PrivacyPass).
    • pmachinery 6y ago
      The only good thing about hcaptcha - what's better than one page of images? - is it doesn't seem to care what you click, but then neither does Google if you're using Chrome.
    • thinkharderdev 6y ago
      I hate CAPTCHAs as much as the next person, just pointing out the it is a service that Google provides and no site is required to implement it. So if you don't like CAPTCHAs then your beef is with site owners.
    • guest12333555 6y ago
      Ok, apart of the fact hackernews just made me fill in a captcha to register this one-time account (neverthelss, cudos HN, you are still better than the rest): I do not understand Hcaptcha hype here. Since CloudFlare switched to Hcaptcha, as a VPN user, every time I run into a site that has CloudFlare / Hcaptcha, I can forget to pass that test. No matter how many times I try, CloudFlare still shows it all the time. It is so bad, so that now every time I see now Hcaptcha shown, I just close the site without even trying anymore. PrivacyPass :) - the biggest joke I seen on privacy - they that endorse it are either naive or have some other agenda. These "free" zero-cost captchas for site owners are now in all places where a captca is not really needed. If CloudFlare, supper-dupper DOS solution relies on captchas, or if Google super-dupper search relies on captchas to get results, that demostrated how bad these companties really are at the main thing they do, and only want more data. Even pirate stream sites ask now for captchas. It is so easy to integrate them, why not. captchas, followed by 2-factor authentication with phone SMSs that we are forced to accept in all main life services slowly, combined with and laws to register phone SIM cards so they really know who we are, killed the web we know - people are being identified with hight quality. We all rant about this here. It comes same in waves in HN all the time, but what can you do? At least, if you own or manage a site or blog do not use: CloudFlare, Google, etc - no CDNs, no shared fonts.
• GuB-42 6y ago
  It is not without remuneration. We use CAPTCHA to accessing a service. Imagine the "worst case scenario": you don't use Google services but a paid service has Google's CAPTCHA. It may seem like you are paying for training Google's AIs and you get nothing in return... but: - Bots cause trouble to the service - The service has to find some mitigation - Mitigations cost money, and that cost will be passed down to the customer in some way - Google offers a free solution, maybe not the best, but it will not cost the service anything (or close) - So you are training Google's AI in exchange for cheaper service Of course, you may disagree with it, you may think that a paid service shouldn't use Google's CAPTCHA, that you already pay too much, etc... But you are free to go elsewhere, and the rest is just market considerations, not something governments generally mess with, at least not governments that support free markets. You could do lawsuits based on specific terms and conditions, but I guess large companies, Google first, have lawyers who know they stuff and get the company covered.
  • selfhoster11 6y ago
    > It is not without remuneration. We use CAPTCHA to accessing a service. I don't have a sufficient capacity for sarcasm to faithfully reproduce the emotions I feel when reading this.