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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I want this as a browser plugin. The image recaptchas are extremely time consuming (maybe I click the wrong images, or they're just punishing me for logging out and clearing cookies...), and I don't want to futz with the audio ones.

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One good thing about not really caring about cookies and trackers is that I only have gotten recapchas 3 times ever

Yeah, it's really brutal. I find the new recaptchas which I hit almost every time are much more exhausting than the old text-based ones, and probably much easier for a machine to solve to boot.

"probably much easier for a machine to solve to[sic]"

Surely, CAPTCHA wasn't replaced with something less dificult for machines to solve.

Have you seen research to indicate this?

Someone will train a pigeon to break captchas some day just for fun. In reference to pigeons being trained to diagnose cancer in X-rays.

I was meaning to use the idiom "to boot", you cut off a word.

Perhaps my grammar wasn't correct there though.

In any case, check out the blackhat presentation about using Google's image recognition to solve the image based captchas. There are a wide variety of fairly advanced image recognition tools but a surprisingly small number of complex text recognition ones.

The state of the art has improved so much that for the older tasks, computers are arguably better than humans at them:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6082

So humans have to clear higher and higher hurdles to prove themselves human while the computers use the answers from the captchas to get closer to humans' capabilities.

The worst are the questions like "Click the images with a store front" what the hell is a store front? Especially in today's world.. Is a garage a store front? Is a hot dog stand a store front? Same with like "Click the images with cars" but there's a crossover. Is that a car? Is a station wagon a car?

Yeah, I think this is a big reason it feels like I'm spending a lot more mental energy to solve these captchas than the old ones.

I've found it's best to just not think about it too much. CAPTCHAs are, after all, designed to "tell Computers and Humans Apart". You're a human, so just pick whatever seems reasonable and move on. If the system doesn't accept your answer, that's _its_ fault, not yours.

I've gotten several times the one asking for "tea", that requires you to select three pictures of coffee[1]. With the store fronts, at least I can read what they say. They are often in Spanish, for one reason.

[1] http://m.imgur.com/YdqKUf3?r

These are almost certainly just Google training its car AI.

It's not you. They simply don't fucking work anymore. I'd pay for this as a browser plugin because clearly Google at some point stopped testing to actually see if recaptcha actually works. It doesn't, though it used to. Sites that use recaptcha are broken and if I do contact them for other reasons, I make sure to let them know that the site is inaccessible to a large part of their audience. Ironically, that includes part of Google itself ...

"I want this as a browser plugin"

Haven't tried such plugin myself, but I know it exists: https://antcpt.com/eng/home.html

I get a recaptcha every time I log into hilton to book a hotel room for a trip. That's the only site this happens on; I wonder what I'm doing to trigger it.

An upgrade of your firmware may solve it.

Sites get to set the captcha security. There's 3 tiers. The highest one will always bug the user, the lower one will almost never do it (unless it's a specific flagged IP). Default is somewhere in the middle, but I'm guessing that site has it set to the highest.

The person you're replying to has a different issue. The way the one button captcha works is by using your cookies to try to figure out if you're a real human user or a robot. If you clear your cookies, you'll almost always get the captcha.

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