25 ms·

Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

• joeberon 5y ago
  I remember when Google's new CAPTCHA system was introduced and you just had one click and could get through, now you have to spend ages clicking photos of american busses.
• ehnto 5y ago
  I don't see why if I got my credentials right, I have to prove I am not a robot. What if I wanted a robot to access my account on my behalf?
  • dannyw 5y ago
    Because they can't distinguish that from a robot ran by a malicious hacker trying to access other people's accounts using stolen credentials. Particularly for Airbnb, who deals with travelers (visits from international locations; shared IP ranges like airport wifi and cgNAT, etc).
    • throwaway2037 5y ago
      Your last sentence is interesting. I never considered that AirBnB needs to battle more of this hard-to-distinguish traffic. In another thread on this page, someone else mentioned that -- when logged in with your Google account -- various Google sites/assets never show CAPTCHAS, because it has so much information about your account that they can reliably predict if you are human or robot. I'm surprised they don't offer this as a feature to 3rd party commercial websites. "Add Google login and we can remove 99% of your CAPTCHAS (but you have to be X cents per login)."
  • kashnote 5y ago
    I assume they’re trying to fight against bots buying up “hot” Airbnbs that sell out quickly. It’s a weird captcha for sure, but understandable why they wouldn’t want bots accessing the site.
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      Wait, what does a robot do once it rents a house?
      • cillian64 5y ago
        Dream of electric sheep?
      • yreg 5y ago
        It sets up a workshop inside to build more robots.
      • birdyrooster 5y ago
        Depends if its a member of the Church of Appliantology, let alone those miniature rubberized homo replicas.
      • pjc50 5y ago
        Sublet it to a human. It's a market, so it's potentially susceptible to HFT and arbitrage bots like anything else.
      • smcl 5y ago
        Sublet it? I mean it's possible that someone really dedicated writes a bot to reserve a room for themselves, but more likely it'd be done by someone who will list it somewhere else for an even higher fee.
        • aembleton 5y ago
          Airbnb could just raise their prices by 10% if they detect a bot; that would be a way to take a cut of someone doing that. It would be really subtle too, so they wouldn't know that they'd been detected.
  • Rygian 5y ago
    No can do. You would be in breach of the AirBNB terms of service: "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform. "
    • Brian_K_White 5y ago
      A browser is a bot that interacts with the platform. It's not physically possible to use any website except by directing a tool to do it for you.
      • rnhmjoj 5y ago
        Yes, it seems everybody has forgotten the meaning of User Agent.
      • Rygian 5y ago
        Probably the nuance that is not spelled out (and certainly should be) is that AirBNB expects only interactive user agents, and not automated/batch user agents.
        • Brian_K_White 5y ago
          All those lines of code in a browser are automation.
          • withinboredom 5y ago
            Not to mention screen readers.
          • fredoliveira 5y ago
            Do you always go for the technicality and the gotcha? Isn't that best applied elsewhere rather than here? Because sure, lines of code in a browser are technically automation, but they don't automate your actions so your whole point is moot. And you know this, I'm sure, so you're wasting your (and everybody else's) time.
  • lbriner 5y ago
    Because their site is valuable data and if you automate access to it, you can re-sell their services without having to use their site with all its tracking/ads/metrics etc. They want people to hit their site and get cross-sold, not order through some aggregator.
  • throwaway2037 5y ago
    If I recall correctly, GitLab has a concept of "keys" (akin to SSH keys) that you can grant for your account. On of the categories is API -- which is specifically for this use case. If I ran my own commercial website, I would probably also disallow robot logins for the UI. It seems like too much trouble with no commecial upside. However, I could imagine allowing robot accounts to access tiny sliver of the API.
• speedgoose 5y ago
  Maybe someone should do a solver for this CAPTCHA and put the code on GitHub. It does look really easy to solve using Machine Learning.
  • sailorganymede 5y ago
    If I was a betting man, I’d wager the reason why they give these weirder types of challenges is because solving CAPTCHAs means you’re labelling them, which gives who ever is hosting it labelled data to train their own models against. that’s why CAPTCHAs sometimes ask ppl to spot all the zebra crossings and stuff etc - no machine can solve it yet, so ppl can do it, and by doing it and solving it, you produce a labelled dataset for autonomous cars.
    • jamesy0ung 5y ago
      That's how hCaptcha does it https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling You play to get a dataset labelled and trained.
      • londons_explore 5y ago
        Except there are now enough labelled datasets of those things, even public freely available ones. If you wanted to increase the precision of the model further, you'd end up using very ambiguous images which wouldn't be suitable for a captcha.
    • gambiting 5y ago
      Yes, which is why every time you are given one of those captchas you deliberately pick at least one incorrect image, and it still lets you through. Back in the day when google captcha had you typing in words, it was super clear which one was generated and which one was scanned from a book or whatever - you'd always type in the scanned word completely randomly and it would still accept it.
  • noduerme 5y ago
    If CAPTCHA was only about trying to keep bots out of websites, it wouldn't be that hard. CAPTCHA is a profitable enterprise, because every user response is used to train an AI. It is presented as a free service for website owners, but actually it uses your users to be trainers. A truly free open-source captcha wouldn't be very hard to implement or to keep updated, but no one does it because it would be very expensive to host the server.
• captn3m0 5y ago
  It's Arkose Labs (also used by Roblox, GitHub, Dropbox, Twitch, and more). There's some more links here: https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/178 https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/178 (Buster is a browser extension for automated captcha solving). You can subscribe here https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/320 https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/320 Their audio captcha (no longer available?) involved listening to 3 MIDI tunes and picking "the sad one".
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    It's probably no longer available because picking out "the sad one" just amounts to picking out the one in a minor key. Machines should be able to do that fairly easily.
    • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      That's the ironic part, machines are able to solve these just fine so they defeat the purpose entirely. I wonder, does recaptcha work with your google account? Because at some point a lot of people will end up doing some kind of identity verification on there. But I think Google and co can make a reasonable assertion about being human by looking at activity across said Google account - location, emails, documents, etc.
      • robin_reala 5y ago
        Yes, it does. Which means that people like me who block Google domains outside of designated sandboxes have a flipping awful time with ReCAPTCHA.
        • aembleton 5y ago
          That's why I've added the following rule to allow recaptcha. @@||google.com/recaptcha/\*$script
      • withinboredom 5y ago
        Then you’d just have people farming legitimate google accounts to get around captchas.
• simonbarker87 5y ago
  Minor and basically unrelated but it’s dice, not dices. Like sheep, it’s singular and plural.
  • cronin101 5y ago
    <pedant>The singular is "die" not "dice".</pedant>
    • smcl 5y ago
      Interestingly this is one case where I think the technically incorrect version is winning. Many of us who who know that it's "one die" and "two dice" would still say something like "what does the dice say?" or "pass the dice", if only because "what does the die say" or "pass the die" sounds a bit awkward. This is one I'm not worried about, I'd be more annoyed if "more then" or "should of" started taking off :D
      • ntauthority 5y ago
        New captcha question: "What is the should of 20?"
  • readthenotes1 5y ago
    Well, die is the singular.
    • OscarCunningham 5y ago
      Yes, but it can also be der or das.
  • OscarCunningham 5y ago
    I think we should just let the language treadmill do its thing. Singular: dices, plural: diceses.
    • Beltalowda 5y ago
• kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  At least they don't make you work for a company you possibly detest, like RECAPCHA forcing you to work for Google. It often boggles my mind how serious businesses do that kind of thing to their customers.
• raverbashing 5y ago
  I could understand if this was for a job application, but it does seem excessive Requiring the sum of one set would (I think) be almost as effective and less painful
• d--b 5y ago
  Maybe it's part of the SHA-256 algorithm and they use it to compute crypto-hashes!!! It's proof of work farmed out to humans!
• the-dude 5y ago
  They didn't steal it, you voluntary gave it to them.
• fastball 5y ago
  As someone who added CAPTCHA to their own platform recently after resisting for years because of how much I hate them, I have to tell you that the unfortunate truth is that eventually bad actors ruin the party for everyone on every platform. CAPTCHA is necessary for the same reason locking your car/house is necessary. You can probably not do it 9 times out of 10 and it will be fine, but then that 1/10 happens, all your stuff gets stolen, and you start locking your doors 100% of the time.
  • gpderetta 5y ago
    Well, CAPTCHA is more like locking your store and then asking your customers to pick the lock.
    • cbg0 5y ago
      You're comparing solving a typically simple puzzle with breaking and entering.
      • wink 5y ago
        You're saying that but in ~2007 I wanted to sign up to Steam and simply gave up after like 10 failed Captchas. I think I made my account around 3 years later.
      • mnd999 5y ago
        Breaking and entering is not particularly difficult, in fact it's probably easier than a lot of CAPTCHAs. The reason people inclined to do illegal / immoral things don't do it is the likelihood of getting caught and the consequences therein. Of course most people aren't spammers or burglars so in most cases it doesn't matter.
        • gpderetta 5y ago
          The Lockpicking Lawyer should publish videos comparing times to break a locks vs solving captchas :)
• zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  That looks like a really poor captcha, as overhyped as machine learning is I think defeating a system like this accurately is something you’d give as a class project. It might slow down legitimate users but anyone nefarious will get through. Never mind you can outsource solving these to Bali for a penny each - maybe less.
  • bspammer 5y ago
    I'm not sure how effective an AI would really be on this. Distinguishing from a pattern on top of the dice vs a pattern on the side/front seems like it would actually produce a lot of false positives.
    • aglionby 5y ago
      I don't know - with some edge detection I think you could distinguish between the faces of each die, and some heuristics would probably get you the upwards-facing one. Another thing that may be useful is that in each image the only face that is fully visible for all dice is the upward one (who knows if that is just for this example though).
    • heavyset_go 5y ago
      I think if you iterated over enough pictures of the dice from the CAPTCHAs along with the correct sums, you could easily train a model to solve it.
  • jack_pp 5y ago
    I think the trick is to change the puzzle very often or produce 1000 puzzles and randomly assign one
• trevormcneal 5y ago
  Let's push the idiocracy to the extreme by asking Arkose to add a timeout to their captchas, so people have to solve it fast and make the default puzzle be a prime factorization. Modern web become so unusable and poluted that I don't think that it can get worse.
  • harel 5y ago
    Careful what you wish for - it can, and probably will get worst. I still get cookie rage every time I have to deal with cookie popups. To put things in perspective, i recommend trying to run with a pihole plugged in your network. Even just for a week or two. The difference is so stark it emphasises how shit things are right now.
    • 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
      Just a friendly reminder to anyone reading this — the "annoyances" lists you can enable in uBlock Origin get rid of basically all cookie popups. I haven't seen one in a couple of years.
      • marcusklaas 5y ago
        Did not know this, just enabled all of them. Thank you!
        • i67vw3 5y ago
          There is also an extension on chrome and firefox store named 'I don't care about cookies' which is specifically made for this issue.
          • bmn__ 5y ago
            Better: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic
• Fnoord 5y ago
  Just like RIAA and MPAA you have a strange definition of stealing.
• kwyjibo12345 5y ago
  I came across a website that wanted to force-feed ads to me before watching a video yesterday. However, they wanted me to select the best-fitting ad of 5 different ads with one ad playing automatically after 30s of not choosing one to play. Sometimes this branch of reality feels like it wasn't meant for productive use. Needless to say I will never come back.
  • rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    Aachener Zeitung does this when you visit with an ad blocker.
• benjaminwootton 5y ago
  It feels like sometimes that developers are more interested in showing how clever they are than proving Im not a robot. If I can correctly choose 2 buses from 3 then surely give me the benefit of the doubt!
• hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  You use both ABP and uBlock Origin? Why?
  • aembleton 5y ago
    and Privacy Badger
    • JeanMarcS 5y ago
      Privacy Badger doesn't provide the same thing. With PB you can choose to just block cookies from a website but still view content.
  • JeanMarcS 5y ago
    OP here: And all that is behind a Pi-hole :-D With default conf, sometimes one doesn't block what the other blocks. Maybe if I spend time tuning and configuring them one will be enough. At this very moment, I'm on a page where both block 1 thing, not the same
  • seattle_spring 5y ago
    Likely so they can look as much like a bot or malicious user as possible, and then complain when websites treat them as such.
• ianpurton 5y ago
  Captchas are often used to prevent credential stuffing where an attacker has a list of email addresses and passwords and runs a script to try those out on different sites. They also help prevent password brute force, i.e. an attacker has your email and tries the top 100 passwords to crack your account. There are other ways to tackle this, for example email OTP where a code (or link) is emailed to you before you login. Probably the reason Captchas are getting harder is that there are services on the internet that will use human operators to crack captchas in a semi automated fashion.
  • gigglesupstairs 5y ago
    And as another user said in this thread that there are even extensions which can break captchas. Very questionable then what captchas are even doing on web.
    • zydex 5y ago
      The extensions can only break the captcha given a real user on a unique browser, something the “robots” struggle with massively at scale which is why Google don’t mind the extensions existing.
  • billpg 5y ago
    If they need a human to solve the puzzle, it is doing its job. The problem is that somewhere along the way, we've decided that Robot⇒Evil and Human⇒Good and forgotten that evil humans exist.
• postit 5y ago
  That's the moment I'd recommend you to close the website and book a hotel. The whole pandemic reminded me I miss staying in hotels. Not having to worry about groceries, lunch, cleaning ... A great hotel experience turns your holiday into a holiday experience. The older I get the whole bnb experience feels like a premium stressful hostel.
  • jack_pp 5y ago
    I use airbnb and booking.com specifically for searching cheaper alternatives to hotels. If their value for money proposition wasn't better than a hotel I doubt they would even exist at all.
    • dorchadas 5y ago
      Their value-to-money is better because the externalize all the cost to the local community where they remove supply and up the rent for what supply is left.
      • wink 5y ago
        The problem I see is that for certain trips a Hotel is simply bad. My last one was a Chaos Communication Congress where I knew I'd be in my room exactly 6h-8h per night for like 4 days. All I really need is a bed and a shower. In the end I chose a hostel for that but if I don't use 90% of the amenities of the hotel (not even storing my luggage there), why would I pay that high amount? Maybe it's too situational, maybe what I would have wanted was a capsule hotel with a tiny room with a bed (or something to put my sleeping bag on), and it wouldn't have to be the same one every night if I had a locker there. Disclaimer: Have never used AirBnb or alternatives before, but I think it has its uses. For example sharing a flat with 6 people is sometimes half the cost of 3-4 hotel rooms (depending on how you can split)
        • dorchadas 5y ago
          > For example sharing a flat with 6 people is sometimes half the cost of 3-4 hotel rooms (depending on how you can split) And, again, this is the whole problem. Because that's a flat that could have gone to someone who actually lives and works in the local area, not a tourist. It's cheaper because it externalizes that cost. I'm fine with hostels too, I see no problem with people choosing them. I'm not fine with converting residential homes into unlicensed hotels . It destroys the local community, and drives up prices for all the other people who are left trying to live there, and further feeds housing crises.
• BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Airbnb has been very human hostile since the beginning. The first time I had to create an account, they required that I connect with a google account with access to all my contacts. Then ask me to make a video of myself. I didn't create the account and booked an hotel. Now they are less aggressive with their new procedures, but still, you can see that the people behind it see technical solutions way before they perceive the human impact. My grand-father was like that. A brilliant engineer from the most elite school of his generation in France. He once told me very seriously a solution for making more accommodations for the poorest people would be to remove individual bathrooms, and create common ones for the whole building instead. Airbnb tech teams remind me of him.
  • jb1991 5y ago
    I’ve been so turned off by the entire concept of AirBnB, ever since their practices ruined several cities I love with massive overtourism influence. Like so many tech companies, the influence has just gotten completely out of control in the modern world on a global scale.
    • imiric 5y ago
      Why would Airbnb be to blame for this? They're providing a market that fulfills demand for low cost or privately owned accommodations, competing directly with the established hotel industry. Not everyone wants or needs to stay in a hotel, and many people prefer the tourist experience facilitated by local hosts. Long-term rentals are also a convenient way to experience a location that doesn't involve complicated paperwork. Airbnb is not the problem. You're bothered by tourists.
      • lambic 5y ago
        I have a friend who owns a condo in a building downtown that is almost empty of owner occupiers. The vast majority of the condos are rented out as airbnbs. She has no regular neighbours and most of the people she sees in the building are strangers. When it reaches that level, it is a problem.
• cambaceres 5y ago
  The other week I was in an argument with a product owner regarding an interface for creating new items in our web portal. His take was that we should make it more difficult to make new items, since that would make it annoying for our competitors to map our site and functionality. I would have loved watching Steve Jobs reaction to someone suggesting that to him.
• steerablesafe 5y ago
  Yeah, you know what computers suck at but it's relatively easy for humans? Summing numbers. /s edit: I mean the captcha could keep all the "hard for robot" elements (recognizing top face, recognizing symbols) and remove the "hard for human" one (sum), like "select the dice that have the following symbols on top: <red circle>, <blue rectangle>, <green triangle>".
  • plorntus 5y ago
    Problem with the latter example is those that are colour blind although I guess it's not much worse than asking people to sum up dice. I'm guessing though they are more so looking at % correct and the actual behaviour of making a selection rather than just whether you are capable of adding up numbers.
    • JeanMarcS 5y ago
      Well that's not the case. I made a mistake on the fifth one and had to start all again from the start. So it's 100% correct or redo. Infuriating
    • steerablesafe 5y ago
      Good point on accessibility, it could always be black-on-white shapes, numbers, letters. Not to mention blind users, it looks like OP's captcha had a speaker icon on the captcha, I wonder if it would have made the challenge easier.
• joshxyz 5y ago
  LOL CAN WE STICK WITH SPIRAL GALAXIES, IT IS WAY WAY EASIER.
• DominikPeters 5y ago
  I see this as high-IQ software developers building systems to shut out non-high-IQ people from society. Managers look at these CAPTCHAs and think "oh I could solve these no problem, let's use them". In fact, they can only be solved by unusually smart people or by ML bots. Arkose Labs (the maker of this particular captcha) explicitly advertises that their methods can keep out "low-skilled workers" on "human fraud farms". They keep out everyone else too if they're not that good at mental rotation and mental arithmetic or logic -- this dice puzzle and the mouse labyrinth puzzle are pretty much prototypical IQ test problems.
  • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    In other words captcha use on some essential services might be a case for the courts if those services are thereby inaccessible.
    • elil17 5y ago
      They don’t even have to be essential services. US equal rights law would apply to any public accommodation - AirBnB being a perfect example
  • Johanx64 5y ago
    How do I get to play with this? I want to know if I would be filtered out
    • DominikPeters 5y ago
      You can go to https://www.twilio.com/login/password https://www.twilio.com/login/password and enter a fake email address and repeated fake passwords. Or one of the addresses listed here: https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/178 https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/178 Though I got pretty easy ones trying it.
      • hobasuk 5y ago
        twilio site actually prompts a captcha after a few unsuccessful login tries but it just says "Pick any square". I've tried a few times and clicking any of the 6 options underneath work lol.
• gandutraveler 5y ago
  I remember interviewing for Airbnb and how every interviewer made it a point to say user experience & design is in their core. In my head I was thinking slow page load time, dark user patterns, it takes several clicks to get to search results, home page feed is pretty much static.
• gandutraveler 5y ago
  Why can't Google and apple solve the 'are you a human?' check at operating system level. As a user on mobile phone they are already tracking our clicks and should be easy to communicate that to the apps and browsers.
  • zeepzeep 5y ago
    lol no thanks I'd rather not have an OS based tracking API, even worse for every website out there. Just dont use captchas. "Are you a human" is not something a website should know.
    • bob1029 5y ago
      > "Are you a human" is not something a website should know. This is the only long term solution as ML gets closer to AI. If your website is fucked because it can't handle the traffic, that's better solved at the source (hardware/software/bandwidth) If your website is fucked because someone can trivially scrape the most important bits from the web interface, you need to have a business conversation, not a technology conversation.
  • aembleton 5y ago
    If Google or Apple were to do that, then bad actors could do the same - even if they have to run a bank of old Android phones. Then we'd need some way of distinguishing bot from non-bot - so we'd be back to captcha.
• rich_sasha 5y ago
  The issue is, we want tasks where it s easy to generate lots of data that a human of any level of healthy intelligence can solve with simple intuition and low prior skill. I.e. exactly the kind of tasks where ML excels.
• Lich 5y ago
  Just a tip, if you find a place that looks nice to book on airbnb, try checking for booking directly. I found a place on airbnb and was in a hurry, but later when I checked the cabin rental's website, I found that the money I spent in fees to airbnb could get me an upgrade to a much nicer cabin if I had booked directly with the cabin rental company.
  • slaw 5y ago
    Many times you can find the same place with search for apartments on booking.com. You will get full address and most of the times cheaper.
    • newsbinator 5y ago
      4 times out of 5 I find the price on booking.com to be 20% ~ 40% cheaper than the price on the place’s own website. Even when I call them for a price like booking.com (because I hate giving Booking my money), the place says the best price is on Booking and I should book there.
      • slaw 5y ago
        I compared booking.com to Airbnb. Booking.com is mostly cheaper. You can get cheaper if you are at reception desk and talk to owner. It means place to stay is not part of a chain. Or you are extending your stay at reception.
• joefife 5y ago
  Counting spots? Not the biggest challenge for a robot. I wonder if there are any disability legal concerns with this?
  • tyingq 5y ago
    Well, counting spots and also printed numbers in a specific font. And then figuring out if the question is to sum them, or identify the highest number, or "how many threes?", etc.
• stevespang 5y ago
• yongshengwu 5y ago
  Secure. But bad UX. Probably some ML engine behind the scene decided you were more suspicious than others so you got a more difficult challenge.
• SergeAx 5y ago
  OP is literally encourages this behavior by solving those captchas. The right way is to say "fuck you" and use another service.
  • JeanMarcS 5y ago
    OP here. TBH I was that close of doing that, I totaly understand your reaction. But until this day I was happy with the service provided, never had a bad surprise, and my profile is very shiny with good reviews from everywhere I stayed, alone or with my (young) kids so I never have problem to book any place I go. But maybe it's time to try other services
    • SergeAx 5y ago
      Sunk cost then. Understandable, but a bit irrational. My heart is with you, though.
• brianhorakh 5y ago
  In the usa you can sue airbnb for ada accessibility compliance (this captcha spunds like an a obvious fail). all it takes to qualify tis feeling "embarrassed" by the way they treated you / or exparte. You can do this in small claims court on your own, or behalf of an organization that helps other disabled web users.
  • seattle_spring 5y ago
    If it is indeed Arkose like other commenters are claiming, they offer audio and other a11y-complaint alternatives.
• plorntus 5y ago
  Funnily enough I got this captcha 2 days ago and tried searching out to see if anyone else had thought about how ridiculous this captcha is - couldn't find any discussions elsewhere though at the time. Glad someone has brought it up though. There has to be better way to determine if someone is a robot or not surely.
• huqedato 5y ago
  All CAPTCHA are abusive and hostile against the user. Soon the EUPARL will debate&introduce a regulation to forbid CAPTHCA across EU. The service providers/SaaS must find another way to protect their servers from abuse/DDOS, by not penalizing the users.
• gameswithgo 5y ago
  Captchas in general are user hostile and rude, when possible I back out and won’t use a website when I see them. If you give a company money when they fuck you, they are gonna keep fucking you.
• dathinab 5y ago
  Putting besides the fact that I'm 100% certain it's not to hard to brake it with AI and it being dam annoying: There are people with Discalculia, for them such a think is torture. This is an accessibility nightmare.
• auntienomen 5y ago
  I've run into these before, on a site run by DataBricks. If you've never tried them, then you need to believe OP: There is something deeply broken about them. I suspect they're only used when the company doesn't want you to access the resource they're protecting.
• Bayart 5y ago
  The single worst captcha I've ever had to this day was the « gift » of German hosting company 1&1, which managed to stonewall their customer support (I think) by putting it behind a captcha made exclusively of a string of the digit 1 and the lower case letter l in a font where they look nearly identical. I remember trying for an hour to get past it but never could. It left such a sour taste in my mouth that even 15 years later it's still engraved in my mind, and I refuse to ever do business with that company again.
  • shalmanese 5y ago
    I mean, nobody is complaining to support about not being able to solve the captcha so how bad could it be?
• yread 5y ago
  You're lucky. I always get prompted to access new terms of use and when I say yes, I get an error that I've tried to change something I don't have the right to change.
• whiddershins 5y ago
  I have to say, knowing to only read the 'top' number in a picture that is two dimensions is kind of a heavy lift. Part of my really wants to just add up every number I see in the picture.
• wiliaonson 5y ago
  It's just not Airbnb, Ronin Wallet also does this. It's definitely a waste of time.
• cnst 5y ago
  I call this "protection from real customers". If it takes me 5 minutes to solve this puzzle of yours, I just lost 5/60 of my hourly wage, which could easily be $10 or more. What a novel idea to protect your website from real customers. The worst is when they do these puzzles when you simply want to access some static information like the product page, the cost of serving which is way below 1¢.
• seattle_spring 5y ago
  Do you have a bunch of ad blockers or similar types of add-ons running? I doubt they’re using this sort of captcha for every user, and I wouldn’t be surprised if something about your setup flagged you as potentially malicious or fraudulent. If your aim is to deactivate every other possible strategy a site has for knowing if you’re a real user or not, then of course you’re going to end up with stuff like this. This can’t possibly be a surprise to you, can it?
• throwawayvibes 5y ago
• flipdot 5y ago
  I don’t know if Rockstar Social Club dice CAPTCHA is still around, but about half a year ago I’ve had an opportunity to experience it. That CAPTCHA required you to select one image out of six in which two displayed dice would add up to a certain number. To pass the test, you had to do this 10 times in a row, making no mistakes. The worst part was that it didn’t even tell you that you failed; it restarted the whole thing only when you finished selecting the last 10th image.
• alexgao 5y ago
  I found the world has more confusing captcha for foreigners...Like this Chinese captcha provider named TongDun. A Rubik's Cube like experience. Interesting. https://postimg.cc/rdyh52mc https://postimg.cc/rdyh52mc https://postimg.cc/HJL2V0Zk https://postimg.cc/HJL2V0Zk
• rdtwo 5y ago
  I could solve one of these in about 15-20 seconds but more than one would suck. I don’t know if it’s any worse than the cat box h captcha though