- Bots cause trouble to the service
- The service has to find some mitigation
- Mitigations cost money, and that cost will be passed down to the customer in some way
- Google offers a free solution, maybe not the best, but it will not cost the service anything (or close)
- So you are training Google's AI in exchange for cheaper service
Of course, you may disagree with it, you may think that a paid service shouldn't use Google's CAPTCHA, that you already pay too much, etc... But you are free to go elsewhere, and the rest is just market considerations, not something governments generally mess with, at least not governments that support free markets.
You could do lawsuits based on specific terms and conditions, but I guess large companies, Google first, have lawyers who know they stuff and get the company covered.
I don't have a sufficient capacity for sarcasm to faithfully reproduce the emotions I feel when reading this.
"Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans" is one of my top 3 browser extensions.
(Mine is, of course, tree style tabs - I could never manage without it.)
* Bitwarden
* HTTPS everywhere
* Privacy Badger/Possum/Other Furry Animal
* uBlock Origin
* uMatrix
* Windscribe
Not anymore, firefox has it by default now, just gotta turn a setting on.
> uMatrix
Sadly this is dead, I guess I'll switch to a fork once I have time to figure out who does what.
>Not anymore, firefox has it by default now, just gotta turn a setting on.
>Sadly this [uMatrix] is dead
Now if only someone could come up with similarly useful extensions that got rid of the other two forms of cancer that are ruining the internet:
1: Cookie consent dialogues*
and
2: Those modal overlays that suddenly cover up what you're reading and ask you to subscribe to some poxy newsletter or mailing list.
*not "I Don't Care About Cookies". It slowed my browser to a crawl when I installed it.
Hcaptcha (Cloudflare's alternative) is an absolutely breeze by comparison, and it even allows you to pre-generate a bunch of tokens via an extension (PrivacyPass).
I do not understand Hcaptcha hype here. Since CloudFlare switched to Hcaptcha, as a VPN user, every time I run into a site that has CloudFlare / Hcaptcha, I can forget to pass that test. No matter how many times I try, CloudFlare still shows it all the time. It is so bad, so that now every time I see now Hcaptcha shown, I just close the site without even trying anymore. PrivacyPass :) - the biggest joke I seen on privacy - they that endorse it are either naive or have some other agenda.
These "free" zero-cost captchas for site owners are now in all places where a captca is not really needed. If CloudFlare, supper-dupper DOS solution relies on captchas, or if Google super-dupper search relies on captchas to get results, that demostrated how bad these companties really are at the main thing they do, and only want more data.
Even pirate stream sites ask now for captchas. It is so easy to integrate them, why not.
captchas, followed by 2-factor authentication with phone SMSs that we are forced to accept in all main life services slowly, combined with and laws to register phone SIM cards so they really know who we are, killed the web we know - people are being identified with hight quality.
We all rant about this here. It comes same in waves in HN all the time, but what can you do?
At least, if you own or manage a site or blog do not use: CloudFlare, Google, etc - no CDNs, no shared fonts.
I run Firefox with a stringent profile config, Ublocker in medium mode (3rd party default deny), I don’t care about cookies, Cookiebro, LocalCDN, Canvasblocker, Smart Referrer, on PIA VPN, and I never have issues with Hcaptcha.
As far as Privacy Pass goes: their code is on GitHub and you can verify the checksums. Doesn’t give me a 100% guarantee but it’s good enough for me.
This. This is not said enough. Everything you do with a Google service is used to train their AI. I don't want to train their AI.
Upon researching it seems to be used by the Epic launcher and Roblox (among others), which might explain why I've never encountered it before.
Someone else's screengrab, which looks larger than what I was presented on my laptop: https://imgur.com/a/jF1HxbN
So they:
* are very small (or I'm old)
* use faux 3d walls which further complicates the image
* have to be solved 10 in a row correctly
* have an unspecified time limit (which in my untempered rage felt like maybe 3 seconds per image tops, no promises)
* don't tell you you've failed by answer or time until you're through all 10.
I as a full grown human with ~25-30 years on the internet, as well as video games and puzzles for fun, could not get through it in less than 5 (*10) tries. I accept I might be occasionally slow, but this should not be an issue.
TL:DR; Can someone at Arkose Labs please just do an rm -rf /
Edit: Apparently they have other types as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/gkpz0f/how_to...
I recognize that by looking at just the screengrab it's an extremely simple concept to solve, it's just that at every implementation turn they made the worst choices, and it just infuriates me.
What I described was just the procedure of 1 "level" of captcha. I had to complete either 2 or 3, the delineation is kind of blurred at this point.
The one I had before the above was audio based, but it failed to load a bunch of times, and failed my answers a few times as well, inexplicably.
It read out not 4-5, but 10-12 numbers, which honestly was manageable, but there was no audio spacing between the numbers that anyone who has to look at their keyboard to type would have to re-listen to it a few times to keep up. This one would also be entirely solvable by a bot, but problematic for a significant portion of humans.
I just don't understand how they make money, nor why Microsoft specifically would pay them for their services. I find the LEAST outrageous explanation that they're bribing someone in Microsoft's COTS purchasing.
It then switched to being numbers on buildings and street signs, and it immediately felt worse - we were now doing a job for Google, and an annoying one. Mechanical Turk from Amazon was invented to do this kind of chore.
It's now creating training datasets for whatever else Google wants them to - it appears to mostly be for self-driving cars now, to identify landmarks and road signs.
It's definitely not on autopilot, and it's definitely a real problem.
And in return you get an internet that is not filled with spam and bots. Or at least less filled with bots.
The fact that captcha exists on a website is the website owner's intension to cause friction for their users. It has nothing to do with google's use of reCapture directly. The only vote you have is to not use said website - sometimes harder said than done but that's the only option you have.
I like to think that somewhere out there on Google Books, my efforts have resulted in an innocuous word being replaced with something offensive.
Granted this is mostly a kerning issue.
Without wider textual context the correct answer is hard to determine.
I'd use the audio option in the reCraptcha and then see how little of what I heard I could get away with actually entering into the form. Often it sufficed to just type one word out of the entire audio clip or even enter a word which sounded similar [eg. audio clip says "tranced", I write "transit"]. The most satisfying ones of all where when, after listening to a complete sentence containing either word, I could pass the reCraptcha by simply typing "the" or "an" into the form.
One of the things that I find slightly disappointing about Buster is that it types in the entire sentence, when solving the reCraptcha. I hate to think Google are under the impression I've suddenly started trying harder!
Am I the only one who always, on purpose, put in the wrong answer for the clearly scanned word? For me it was kind of a rebelion for being used this way, but it was always super easy to tell which word is generated and which one is scanned - and the algorithm only required the generated word to be correct, so I always put in absolute nonsense for the scanned word to break their OCR detection.
Then the zeroCAPTCHA became a thing, which turned out to be even more annoying than others if you slightly cared about your privacy (meaning you at least installed an abblocken) and faced those multi-stages challenges. By looking at those challenges I think it is pretty obvious what CAPTCHA is used for nowadays, for training a recognition model for a self driving vehicle.
Sometimes literally. They'll show me series of fire hydrants that don't end after several minutes, and I just give up.
Catpcha was not invented to make the internet worse and solving one is not a real hurdle to you.
I'm not sure why you 'sat down for minutes' to solve any of them, you might just be really bad in comparison to a lot of other peoples.
Nonetheless, this helps YOU it makes YOUR experience better by making it harder for bots.
Have you ever seen a community killed by spam bots? You are probably quite happy that the amount of spam in comments etc. are as low as it is.
Since when are captchas a bigger issue than spam bots and fraud users?
and yes i also think that those tasks are actually helping our society. Adding models for self driving cars, for security/emergency breaking systems etc. So whats the issue?
If I had to guess:
> "solving one is not a real hurdle to you"
My experience is that it can be a real hurdle.
Sometimes reCaptcha forces me to complete 2 or 3 captchas (or more), some of them with an annoying artificial delay when loading new images. It seems to be worse when using a VPN or a browser like Firefox (or some privacy extension) that blocks Google tracking.
I understand why people use reCaptcha and that it works well for some users, but it can be a pain in the butt if you don't use Chrome, aren't logged in to your Google account, or if other devices in the network did something that Google doesn't like. I sometimes get captchas on my phone when using mobile data (on a major provider here in the UK) and Google search because of "unusual traffic from your computer network"...