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Google reCAPTCHA is the absolute worst. It makes me solve several puzzles very often, usually when I use a mobile network and I’m not logged in with any Google account. It’s so frustrating that most of the times I find a reCAPTCHA I give up before trying and just go elsewhere e.g. when a site uses reCAPTCHA for sign up or after the first failed login, I’ll most likely skip if I don’t absolutely need to access such website.

Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s getting tired!

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I am starting to think that I may be a machine given how many time I fail that stupid test... The traffic light is absolutely the worse. Should I select the box that includes the vertical yellow pole? And what about the horizontal one between two opposite traffic lights? And if just a small fraction of the border of the traffic light is in a box what should I do? I can’t wait for a captcha solver as a service honestly...

I can't use Google search directly any more without being presented with a never-ending series of these things. Thus I use DuckDuckGo, and if it returns inadequate results I rerun it with "!g" at the end which sends it to Google. That seems to work without CAPTCHAs.

Or use !sp to get StartPage results, which is basically anonymized Google results.

!s also works for Startpage

The worst part is that quite a huge percentage of the Internet relies on it! Soon we won't be able to use any sites whatsoever because of it. I don't like where this is going. :/

Indeed, I definitely am not happy with how much control Google has over the Internet in general. Everything from how they present and rank search results, Google Analytics scripts everywhere, the sometimes vaguely-political messages on their homepage, the ostensibly-anti-bot checks including CAPTCHAs and just plain banning you if you want to do more "advanced" searches (like the ones Fravia would've taught...), etc.

There's other (mysterious to me) stuff that sites call to Google for, apart from captchas and analytics.

As a uMatrix (and former NoScript) user, I've long noticed that many sites make calls to ajax.googleapis.com for I have no idea what. Quite often the site will refuse to work without that.

To be fair, a lot of sites make use of javascript from a lot of other sites as well: cloudfront and amazon are common.

Yeah, or Akamai.

As a uMatrix user as well, I have manually whitelisted ajax.googleapis.com. It is actually not tracking scripts, but hosted libs like jQuery, which many many sites use and will not function without. See here: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/

There's solution for that: "Decentraleyes - Local CDN Emulation" https://decentraleyes.org/

But Google gets your request nonetheless. Which I'd like to avoid.

It's using you as human labor to label data. That's why you have to solve multiple. It's annoying but greatly helps accelerate research and development since data is king.

If this is so, how does it know when I've mis-labeled?

I think it works by labelling something like half the images, but doesn't tell you which is which. At least that's how the older text recaptcha stuff worked - you could easily identify the pre-labelled text by the kind of distortions they used and just enter any old gibberish for the rest. So actually the training stuff is extra work beyond just classifying you as human

By showing the same images to thousands of other people and going with the consensus, I imagine. For any given label, if you pick a photo that few other people picked, it presumably considers that to be "wrong."

And would it be possible to sabotage via a botnet that submits all-incorrect responses?

>It's using you as human labor to label data. That's why you have to solve multiple.

That's actually not cool: recruiting your time under false pretenses to create value for themselves.

reCAPTCHA helps Google to digitize books that are too illegible to be OCR'd. Do you appreciate Google Books?

It's not as bad as you're making it out to be.

No, I don't enjoy Google Books, but that's really not the point.

If that's what I'm helping you do then tell me that and let me opt-in. Maybe I want to contribute. But, don't instead throw up a road-block to the service I'm actually trying to consume, under the guise of providing that service, then double my required effort to help you provide some other service.

It's actually implemented as a dark pattern. If you want cheap labor then use Mechanical Turk or otherwise. But, don't steal thousands of hours of your customers' time under misleading pretenses.

Google isn't providing a service to you, they are providing a service to the site that uses the captcha. And they haven't put any roadblocks, the site did - by installing a captcha.

You should complain to the site that decided to offload their captcha costs to you.

Fair point. But, does Google have any culpability here, as the service provider?

I don't see why they would. If some delivery service had an expensive pay-on-delivery model, and some ecommerce site decided to use it, but didn't tell you (the buyer) that they did, and so you got a surprising shipping bill on receiving the product, would you blame the delivery service?

Your relationship is with the site, and so it should be their responsibility to inform you of the "bill" you'll have to pay to Google for using the site's captcha-protected services.

The analogy doesn't hold. For this argument to be valid, we'd have to pretend that dark patterns don't exist.

And, Google is definitely employing a dark pattern here. This is designed to be a stealth tax, to go largely unnoticed by anyone, including the site operator.

Even Google's selling of the product doesn't make clear that users will be doing additional work; instead suggesting that saving the world will be a by-product of a normal captcha process. [0]

[0] https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/v3.html

I agree that Google's description of reCaptcha is deceptive.

This isn't true any longer -- reCaptcha used to help digitize text but now it's all Google Maps (streetview) images they're using to train their own self-driving and Maps software.

reCAPTCHA pushed me over to DuckDuckGo. I use a VPN, and a fair number of my Google searches are blocked by a reCAPTCHA with 5 or more challenges.

Now, I use DDG and fall back to Google search with !g if I can't find what I'm looking for.

You can fall back to Startpage with !s, which should give you the same results as Google.

its because google no longer just tests if you are a human- they also train their model- try this- and I've tried it successfully far too many times-

Enter your first captcha wrong and then half the times, on the second one it won't say you did first wrong. (it's because first was a learning set). do the second one right and then you're good.

I deliberately mark the exact opposite of right boxes in the first captcha at times, takes me the same time but at least I can say I delayed skynet.

You are training it to better translate scanned books for Google Books. That's where the samples come from. They are words from actual books that Google isn't sure about. Stop messing up Google Books, please.

As far as I know, reCaptcha stopped being used for books a long time ago. It's now used to improve Google's mapping data instead.

It's to improve Google Car

In my experience if you just press next captcha without solving them, a bunch of times, it will stop with those and give you one of the "pick all storefronts" with multiple pictures, that can actually be solved.

Too me it seems that if you take your time and try to answer them properly they will try to get you annotate as much data as possible. While if just click though it fast it'll let you pass.

I got the 'pick all the storefronts' one just this week.

Was mildly infuriating because what constitutes a storefront seems pretty culture specific, and I got shown a bunch of buildings, where half of them i had to go 'well, that MIGHT be a storefront, it looks kind of commercial, but it doesn't appear to have much explicit signage...god dammit..."

indeed. it needs to bloody stop. its no different than a whites only washroom in 1929. im not logged into google tracking. so im not allowed to participant in a huge swath of the internet unless i spent 15 minutes a day training AI. when will UX be taken seriously? when will users (aka humans) be respected?

The most annoying thing for me is that I often encounter them in various websites for the Brazilian government, when I want to get somd official documents.

This is how things are done at the Federal University I'm currently attending. I have filed a complaint against the university on the grounds that they're using Federal resources (the students' labor, whose place there is being paid by the government) to enrich a private, international corporation (Google).

This is wrong on so many levels.

There's no decision yet, and the process is still running.

Bad guys also are getting tired and they start to hack more accounts of normal users because now those normal user accounts are worth more.

This is one of the major pains of building a platform: you also have the limit the damage that a "trusted" user can do, like if a moderator were to get hacked by username/password reuse.

I learned this the hard way on a forum I built and ended up painstakingly building a feature that lists all moderator actions and a "Reverse" button next to them. ...Among many other similar features.

It's funny to think back on the day I decided to build a forum: "How hard could it be?"

the word combination "fuck Google" has become very common in my thoughts when I encounter Google's reCAPTCHA... Google is breaking the web in many ways and this is one of them.

also is blocked in China, so all Chinese visitors fail the captcha and can't proceed.

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