Ok, that makes sense. Not ideal, but captchas need to be written somehow.
Next captcha from google will be even more aggressive, you're not logged to Google = you're a bot, you can't access that content.
You may be right. But you know what:
If I encounter captchas nowadays and unless I really need to get to that site it's "Fuck you very much!" time.
I'm just not that interested in most of the web to make it woth my while and provide free work for Google.
I really hope the EU hits them hard with a GDPR investigation, the amount of identifiable data they collect with reCaptcha is unacceptable.
I've never seen a reCaptcha on HN. Is that because I registered my account something like 10 years ago?
I am not convinced that training google’s image recognition algorithms is the only way to solve the captcha problem
I spent days trying it out with screen readers and tweaking it to work with as many as possible.
To me, it sounds like your system is just security by obscurity. It wouldn't scale, if it did become used prevalently then it would be very easy for bots to circumvent.
It won’t scale, because it mustn’t scale. It is a dead simple solution to a complicated problem and works as long as it works, without selling your user data and brainpower toone of the biggest tech companies there is.
If it should happen that the spam bots overcome it or your site becomes big enough to be targeted you just change it for something stricter, stronger or more sophisticated.
Actually I'm not sure I need to go to full ML: after a few rounds I can probably just use image compare (not ML) and just feed humans images that I haven't seen before.
Of course round two of the above is to expand on the above. Doing ML for image recognition isn't hard (other than CPU cost). I can also collect statistics, images humans take longer on I will take longer on as well (I can potentially collect eye movement so I have better data than google here - this can feed into ML). Images that humans are unsure of I will fake unsure of by sometimes clicking sometimes not at similar rates to humans.
I don't know what ML google has that isn't public, but we also don't know what scammers have. Ultimately google needs to expose enough data to scammers (who see more captchas than anyone else by nature of their operations) that their ML algorithms have a large training set. Once a scammer realizes the types of data good is looking for it isn't hard to collect other samples for your private training set. Go outside in any city and you will find stoplights and street signs... you now have a training set of data that isn't googles to test on - you need a few cities and seasons worth of course, but that is an implementation detail.
The game is more expensive for google because google needs expensive people to create the scheme, they can hire cheap people to figure it out. (if cheap people can't figure it out google has failed) They only need expensive people only if/when they decide to automate the scheme.