Hacker News Reader

Comment by amasad | Hacker News Reader

We've moved to hCaptcha from reCAPTCHA after Google surprised us with their pricing (blog[1], hn discussion[2]), and couldn't be happier. We use it in invisible mode and it does a great job at finding bots while getting out of users' way.

Also top-notch customer support. The CEO was personally in the slack channel helping us. Highly recommended.

[1]: https://blog.repl.it/anon

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25004476

View on HN

> We use it in invisible mode and it does a great job at finding bots while getting out of users' way.

Interesting didn't realize this was a thing hcaptcha did[0]. It's basically recaptcha in terms of tracking which sites you visit then, no?

0: https://docs.hcaptcha.com/invisible

I think parent means hCaptcha enterprise in passive mode, where hCaptcha is detecting bots in the background using ML: botstop.com

Surely this ML must be presented a wide set of data on the user and their browser to make this determination? So just like recaptcha, they determine if they should admit you based on passively snooped data rather than active challenges.

My knowledge of this is that hCaptcha uses anonymized user data to ensure that the user doesn't look like a bot. What ReCAPTCHA did differently is not only not anonymizing data, but specifically trying to find out which person was presented with their captcha by matching cookies and profiles to Google accounts (which the majority of users would have and be logged into for many reasons). When you combine this with Google owning everything from Gmail to Youtube to Android to Chrome, it gets extremely pervasive.

hCaptcha's ML is 90% "Is the user agent the newest version of Chrome? -> Not a bot, Otherwise -> Bot"

Compared to reCAPTCHA v3, our approach does not depend on tracking your visit history. (disclosure: work there.)

Would you pass this feedback on? Having completely opaque pricing is a big red flag. I assume it is very expensive, or else you couldn't afford to route inquiries through a sales rep. If you aren't hiding a high price, you should publish it. Also, and this is a strong personal preference, I never ever want to talk to or hear from a sales rep.

Couldn't agree more. When comparing my options, I usually discard the options that hide their prices if at least one has a published theirs. I don't even bother contacting them. I don't have the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com