Comment by kevmo314 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevmo314 | Hacker News Reader

I know a little bit about this "industry". I would be pretty surprised if this actually done by AI. At least if it is, it's likely only AI-assisted. If it were truly AI, then they would make more money offering their own CAPTCHA service instead of a CAPTCHA-breaking service. You can see how many active workers (ie humans) are online on their network stats screen: https://nopecha.com/statistics_network

Typically, the API is a screen recorder and the CAPTCHA is sent to thousands of workers who essentially mini-remote-desktop in and solve them for about 80 cents/1k CAPTCHAs. Here are some other, similar services: https://0captcha.com/, http://bypasscaptcha.com/, https://deathbycaptcha.com/

I'm surprised these players are still around. They've been operating for nearly 20 years back when I had discovered them.

The entire industry is actually not completely as black hat as you might think. Yes, it's used for spam and botting, but at least at the time a lot of people used it for bulk downloading, which is how I discovered it. Additionally, it does provide work for the poorer parts of the world.

This does seem to use AI or at least not use the "human workers" method.

Going to the Google SSO page for their signin flow and clicking on the blue domain name for their app, the Google auth page shows the email of the GCP account that started the auth project, which in this case is jaewany@gmail.com

Looking that up on Google shows that it corresponds to Jaewan Yun.

Looking him up on GitHub gives you his profile which contains some captcha solver extension code for this very website and also many TensorFlow-related things.

His personal website[1] also lists the solver under "My Products"

[1] https://jaewan-yun.com/

If I were to enter the CAPTCHA-breaking business today, I'd probably use one of these services at first to collect a million correct solutions for $800, and then use that dataset to train my AI.

Once the AI is good enough, I can buy a bunch of used GPUs from former ethereum miners, throw them in a cheap DC somewhere, and undercut everyone else! Sounds like a decent side project that could yield a bit of passive income. Somebody else has probably done it already. Maybe OP is that somebody.

This works fine until Google changes the image set. Of course then you can pay another $800, but then your product doesn't work until you update.

This is what hCaptcha is currently doing, they are switching the image category every 24-72 hours. How useful is it? Not very. Modern ML models such as mobilenet, resnet or yolo require only a few hundred images for it to be accurate to solve those captchas.

You don't need few million samples, with 500-700 images per category you are more than ready to solve current captchas.

Yep, the cost of keeping the model up to date would be negligible compared to the hosting bill.

btw hCaptcha has an accessiblity page for you to sign up and never solve a hCaptcha again.

here is the link https://dashboard.hcaptcha.com/signup?type=accessibility

*edited typo

I tried it doesn’t work

you need to enable cookies

I wonder if stable diffusion / dall-e type offerings could procedurally generate images?

hcaptcha already seems to be using ml to generate their challenges

“If it were truly AI, then they would make more money offering their own CAPTCHA service instead of a CAPTCHA-breaking service.”

Please elaborate.

“workers (ie humans)”

Do you know what we call a process that takes tasks from a queue?

That statistics page also shows that the median solve time is under one second, which seems too fast for a human, even when assisted by an AI.

As someone with experience using services like these, and at the price point and solve speed their offering its quite clear that is a model. Legacy players using low paid humans had solve speeds >20 seconds usually and now model based solvers are now down to under a second.

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