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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

Since when was captcha not broken? Sites like http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/user/order have been around for ages. Yes, a mere $6.95 gets you 5000 captchas solved by OCR and humans in an avg of 6 seconds. Imagine that job.

Sure, AI can break captcha, but it can be done at scale for far less than an AI research and GPU rig costs.

Google's approach to bot recognition is training their own bots incidentally, so even an adversarial network attempting to bypass it would give it a ton of training along the way to breaking in.

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>Imagine that job.

I don't believe it's a job. Isn't this the thing where captchas on target sites are simply mirrored on other sites like sketchy filehosts? Real human users are solving captchas to access some content hosted by this service, and the solution they enter is passed through to the target site.

Yes, exactly this is the case.

Could you give me some pointers/hints (or even specific examples) where I'd find this in use?

I ask because IIRC I've never seen ReCaptcha be used on file hosting sites. (I don't think so, at least. There might be one...)

As scummy as it is, you have to admire the ingenuity. That is a damn clever solution.

That's also how Google self-driving cars work. When they don't understand what they are seeing they just show pictures to some random person in Google captcha who solves it quickly.

#1897

https://xkcd.com/1897/

So people can actually understand the reference.

Actually, you can make money by solving captchas. https://2captcha.com/make-money-online

Okay, __wow__. I'm impressed. I thought they were being farmed out to people in 3rd world countries to solve.

I believe it is a job. There are simply too much volume to be satisfied by the inconstant traffic on filehosts. Also, they have overload and lower response times on public holidays in India.

If they are using filehosts, how would they verify captcha is correct? They can double check but it will lower their capacity and solve times.

The Google cloud vision API will do this for ~$3 but you will need to automate it yourself, which you might need to do anyway with other services.

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