5 ms·

What makes that work against robots versus other things?

GeneralMayhem 12y ago
In 99% of cases, whether or not you're a bot can be determined before you interact with the box. It's mostly just a vector to download the script that does the actual detection based on mouse and keyboard patterns while you're using the rest of the page.
- therealdrag0 12y ago
  Interesting! But while I find captchas annoying, I like helping out with the text-decoding that re-captcha does.
  - rspeer 12y ago
    By now the helping-out-with-OCR part of ReCaptcha is entirely unrelated to the actual captcha. In some cases now you're just identifying street numbers for Google Maps. If captchas got simpler, you could still do Mechanical Turk jobs if you wanted to.
    - ademarre 12y ago
      The easy house number tests are for users with established sessions because the system already has a high degree of confidence you are a human. Delete your cookies or use an incognito window and I expect you'd see the traditional captcha with two words.
  - differentView 12y ago
    I do not. Maybe they can make a site that is solely for the purpose of helping decode text for you and your ilk.
  - Kequc 12y ago
    It used to be there were two variables one that was uncertain to the machine and the other that was known. The known variable was used to ensure you weren't making up your answer. But for at least a couple of months now I haven't seen a two variable captcha. I can only assume every captcha has been solved and verified to a reasonable degree of certainty. If Google, who is probably most able to benefit off of captcha solutions is willing to move past it I can't really argue with them.
    - duskwuff 12y ago
      I think a lot of the single-challenge CAPTCHAs they're using now are house numbers on Street View. Even if Google doesn't know the exact answer, they can rule out a lot of wrong answers (e.g, the number entered is on the wrong side of the street, or is completely out of range for the current block). Also, if you look really suspicious (particularly if you fail an easier CAPTCHA, or ask for lots of challenges), Google will still give you one of the old two-scrambled-words CAPTCHAs. Except both of the words are ones they know the answers for, and you'll have to enter them both correctly to pass.
  - hobarrera 12y ago
    Do we get anything back for that? I mean, millons of humans contribute to solving captchas, and does google give anything back (like the OCR tech they're developing) to the community, or does it end up as part of some propietary product of theirs?
- EGreg 12y ago
  Why can't robots simply record actual humans' mouse and keyboard patterns and replay them in various combinations in this arms race?
  - emerongi 12y ago
    They absolutely can. This is what bot developers did in Runescape after Jagex implemented the same system. It blocked bots for a few months, but after that it was pretty much useless.
- makomk 12y ago
  That sounds familiar. Apaprently Google have been using a similar technique to detect botting in Ingress for a while now.
ocfx 12y ago
I think it's assessing your risk level based on what you put on other sites. For example, I received the street address captchas which are easy to solve and allow for some margin of error (missing a number). However, when I solved it incorrectly a number of time it brought me to those distorted text captchas and really warped ones too. I'm assuming if you build up enough trust level then all you have to do is click and you go through.

In 99% of cases, whether or not you're a bot can be determined before you interact with the box. It's mostly just a vector to download the script that does the actual detection based on mouse and keyboard patterns while you're using the rest of the page.

therealdrag0 12y ago
Interesting! But while I find captchas annoying, I like helping out with the text-decoding that re-captcha does.
- rspeer 12y ago
  By now the helping-out-with-OCR part of ReCaptcha is entirely unrelated to the actual captcha. In some cases now you're just identifying street numbers for Google Maps. If captchas got simpler, you could still do Mechanical Turk jobs if you wanted to.
  - ademarre 12y ago
    The easy house number tests are for users with established sessions because the system already has a high degree of confidence you are a human. Delete your cookies or use an incognito window and I expect you'd see the traditional captcha with two words.
- differentView 12y ago
  I do not. Maybe they can make a site that is solely for the purpose of helping decode text for you and your ilk.
- Kequc 12y ago
  It used to be there were two variables one that was uncertain to the machine and the other that was known. The known variable was used to ensure you weren't making up your answer. But for at least a couple of months now I haven't seen a two variable captcha. I can only assume every captcha has been solved and verified to a reasonable degree of certainty. If Google, who is probably most able to benefit off of captcha solutions is willing to move past it I can't really argue with them.
  - duskwuff 12y ago
    I think a lot of the single-challenge CAPTCHAs they're using now are house numbers on Street View. Even if Google doesn't know the exact answer, they can rule out a lot of wrong answers (e.g, the number entered is on the wrong side of the street, or is completely out of range for the current block). Also, if you look really suspicious (particularly if you fail an easier CAPTCHA, or ask for lots of challenges), Google will still give you one of the old two-scrambled-words CAPTCHAs. Except both of the words are ones they know the answers for, and you'll have to enter them both correctly to pass.
- hobarrera 12y ago
  Do we get anything back for that? I mean, millons of humans contribute to solving captchas, and does google give anything back (like the OCR tech they're developing) to the community, or does it end up as part of some propietary product of theirs?
EGreg 12y ago
Why can't robots simply record actual humans' mouse and keyboard patterns and replay them in various combinations in this arms race?
- emerongi 12y ago
  They absolutely can. This is what bot developers did in Runescape after Jagex implemented the same system. It blocked bots for a few months, but after that it was pretty much useless.
makomk 12y ago
That sounds familiar. Apaprently Google have been using a similar technique to detect botting in Ingress for a while now.

ocfx 12y ago

I think it's assessing your risk level based on what you put on other sites. For example, I received the street address captchas which are easy to solve and allow for some margin of error (missing a number). However, when I solved it incorrectly a number of time it brought me to those distorted text captchas and really warped ones too. I'm assuming if you build up enough trust level then all you have to do is click and you go through.