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Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

The best way to catch a robot is just to slap a captcha there. Everything else is kind of useless and not effective.

Getting captchas solved reliably via a service costs around $1 per 1000 captchas so captchas are kinda useless as well if there's a tiny monetary incentive to get to whatever is behind the captcha.

How is that accomplished? Real humans?

https://2captcha.com

Yes

Real humans, in places where $10 / day is reasonable money.

Depends on the captcha but there's many popular services that you can plug into your code through APIs for bypassing captchas (https://www.2captcha.com, https://anti-captcha.com). I think the hardest one is probably the invisible reCaptcha Enterprise.

Mhm

https://www.deathbycaptcha.com/

i'm not sure what the current state of the art is, but my favourite way of solving captchas was the porn vendors who were monetizing their sites by presenting captchas in front of their videos, but the captchas were captured from legitimate sites. so every time a person solved a captcha to watch a video, it enabled a bot to access a captcha-protected resource.

Having people solve CAPTCHAs for you seems more ethical to me than showing them ads - at least with CAPTCHA the cost paid (here: your labour) is clear to the user.

All captchas are soon going to be difficult to solve for humans and easy to solve for bots. Many already are. They also have terrible accessibility.

How do captchas work for blind people behind screen readers? I usually use a lot of keyboard strokes which seems to trigger a lot of captcha systems

So far, the play audio option are kind of weird, specially if you're hard of hearing.

They sometimes have an audio version, unfortunately at the same time this one is used to bypass the captcha through audio recognition software.

Captchas also tell apart the average human visitor from the very committed human visitor that really, really, really needs to do whatever they can do on your website.

Ha ha, good point. When presented with captcha I often decide I don't care that much and just close the page.

I do the same, but sometimes I wish I could give better feedback.

"Dear British Airways, I booked with SAS instead because you assumed a Linux user with Firefox was a bot."

(Or maybe it was the other way round, I forgot.)

They are also very good at distinguishing paying Google users who get the fast-pass to Google captchas.

Is that a thing? What services do you need to buy to bypass recaptcha?

That means way more captchas after this release, yay

Why even bother?

> However, with recent progress in automatic and audio recognition, [detecting bots with captchas] has evolved

...and that's from 3 years ago

https://antoinevastel.com/javascript/2020/02/09/detecting-we...

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