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Comment by dimal | Hacker News Reader

As I get older, I can see a future where I’m cut off from parts of the web because of captchas. This one, where you just have to click a button, is passable, but I’ve had some of the puzzle ones force me to answer up to ten questions before I got through. I don’t know if it was a glitch or if I was getting the answers wrong. But it was really frustrating and if that continues, at some point I’ll just say fuck it and give up.

I have to guess that there are people in this boat right now, being disabled by these things.

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> I can see a future where I’m cut off from parts of the web because of captchas.

I’ve seen this in past and present. Google’s “click on all the bicycles” one is notoriously hard, and I’ve had situations where I just gave up after a few dozen screens.

Chinese captchas are the worst on this sense, but they’re unusual and clearly pick up details which are invisible to me. I’ve sometimes failed the same captcha a dozen times and then saw a Chinese person complete the next one successfully on a single attempt, on the same browser session. I don’t now if they measure mouse movement speed, precision, or what, but it’s clearly something that varies per person.

> I just gave up after a few dozen screens.

A few dozen?? You have much more patience than me. If I don't pass the captcha first time, I just give up and move on. Life is too short for that nonsense.

It doesn’t help that they think mopeds and scooters are bicycles

This is probably caused by Google aggregating the answers from people with different languages, as the automatic translations of the one-word prompts are often ambiguous or wrong.

In some languages, the prompt for your example is the equivalent of the English word "bike".

> Google’s “click on all the bicycles” one is notoriously hard

It is hard because you need to only find the bicycles people on average are finding.

Google captchas are hard because they're mostly based on heuristics other than your actual accuracy to the stated challenge. If they can't track who you are based on previous history, it doesn't matter how good you answer, you will fail at least the first few challenges until you get to the version with the squares that take a few seconds to appear. This last step is essentially "proof of work", in that they're still convinced you're a bot, but since they still can't completely block your access to the content, they resign themselves to wasting your time.

It's just incredible to me that Blade Runner predicted this in literally the very first scene of the movie. The whole thing's about telling humans from robots! Albeit rather more dramatically than the stakes for any of us in front of our laptop I'd imagine

What was once science fiction is bound to become science fact (or at least proven it can never be done).

Hollywood has gotten hate mail since the 70s for their lack of science research in movies and shows. The big blockbuster hits actually spent money to get the science “plausible”.

Sidney Perkowitz has a book called Hollywood Science [0] that goes into detail into more than 100 movies, worth a read.

[0] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/hollywood-science/978023114280...

The fictitious Voight-Kampff test is based on a real machine based on terrible pseudo-science that was used in the 1960s to allegedly detect homosexuals working in Canadian public service so they could be purged. The line from the movie where Rachel asks if Deckard is trying to determine whether she is a replicant or a lesbian may be an allusion to the fruit machine. One of its features was measuring eye dilation, just as depicted in the movie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

The stakes for men subjected to the test were the loss of their livelihoods, public shaming, and ostracism. So... Blade Runner was not just predicting the future, it was describing the world Philip K. Dick lived in when he wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" in the late 1960s.

This was an uncomfortable read, I'm quite frankly shocked at the amount of brainpower and other resources that went into attempting to weed out gay men from the Canadian civil service, into the 90s no less! To what end was this done? Is a gay man a worse cop or bureaucrat?

Then I remembered what happened to Turing in the 50s.

> To what end was this done? Is a gay man a worse cop or bureaucrat?

We seem to need an internal enemy to blame for our societies' problems, because it's easier than facing the reality that we all play a part in creating those problems.

Gay people are among the oldest of those targets, going back to at least the times of the Old Testament (i.e. Sodom and Gomorrah).

We've only recently somewhat evolved past that mindset.

If a malicious actor found a gay person in such a job, they could easily extort them with the threat of getting them fired! So obviously you had to fire gay people, lest they get extorted by someone threatening to expose them and thus get them fired.

Not sure if it's just me or a consequence of the increase in AI scraping, but I'm now being asked to solve CAPTCHAs on almost every site. Sometimes for every page I load. I'm now solving them literally dozens of times a day. I'm using Windows, no VPN, regular consumer IP address with no weird traffic coming from it.

As you say, they are also getting increasingly difficult. Click the odd one out, mental rotations, what comes next, etc. - it sometimes feels like an IQ test. A new type that seems to be becoming popular recently is a sequence of distorted characters and letters, but with some more blurry/distorted ones, seemingly with the expectation that I'm only supposed to be able to see the clearer ones and if I can see the blurrier ones then I must be a bot. So what this means is for each letter I need to try and make a judgement as to whether it's one I was supposed to see or not.

Another issue is the problems are often in US English, but I'm from the UK.

Have you tried some of the browser extensions that solve captchas for you? Whenever captchas get bad I enable an auto solver

This is funny. So the captchas to detect scrips vs humans are so complex for a human to solve but are easy for a program?

It's never been about making things that actually work. It's always been about ticking the box (ironic) that says you've implemented the thing.

For me it was installing linux. I don't know if it's my agent or my fresh/blank cookie container or what, but when I switched to linux the captchas became incessant.

>I don’t know if it was a glitch or if I was getting the answers wrong.

It could also be that everything was working as intended because you have a high risk score (eg. bad IP reputation and/or suspicious browser fingerprint), and they make you do more captchas to be extra sure you're human, or at least raise the cost for would-be attackers.

Somehow, using Firefox on Linux greatly increases my "risk score" due to the unusual user agent/browser fingerprint, and I get a lot more captchas than, say, Chrome on Windows. Very frustrating.

Lots of it is just enhanced tracking prevention. If you turn that off for those sites, the captchas should go away.

Your boat comment makes me think of a stranded ship with passengers in them, but you can't find each other because the ship's doors have "I'm not a bot" checkboxes...

And the reason for stranding is probably because the AI crew on it performed a mutiny.

As per the Oscar winning "I'm not a Robot" [0], you should also consider that you might in fact be a robot.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VrLQXR7mKU

Hmm. I am autistic, so as far as humans go, I'm robot-adjacent.

The future will definitely include more and more elaborate proofs of humanity, along with increasingly complicated “hall passes” to allow bots to perform actions sanctioned by a human.

One early example of this line of thinking: https://world.org/

Skyrocketing complexity actually puts the web at risk of disruption. I wouldn’t be surprised if a 22 year old creates a “dumb” network in the next five years—technically inferior but drastically simpler and harder to regulate.

Gemini? :)

Haha yeah, something like that :)

The Blizzard / Battle.net captcha if you get flagged as a possible bot is extremely tedious and long; it requires you to solve a few dozen challenges of identifying which group of numbers adds up to the specified total, out of multiple options. Not difficult, but very tedious. And even if you're extremely careful to get every answer correct, sometimes it just fails you anyway and you're forced to start over again.

I have the same experience. My assumption is that if the website serves me the "click all the traffic lights" thing it's already determined that I'm a bot and no amount of clicking the traffic lights will convince it otherwise. So I just close the window and go someplace else.

I'm already cut off from parts of the web because I don't want to join a social network. Can barely ever see anything on Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, or Facebook without hitting a log-in gate.

That's when you immediately stop using the website and, if you care enough, write to their customer service and tell them what happened. Hit them in the wallet. They'll change eventually.

I have twice attempted to make a Grubhub account and twice failed to solve their long battery of puzzles.

Unless I really, really, really need to get to the site, I leave immediately when the "click on bicycles" stuff comes up. Soon it will be so hard and annoying anyways that only AI has the patience and skills to use them.

This is an issue when using VPNs. I always just go to the audio alternative which is much quicker to “solve” (you hear a word played back and type it out)

In this future, we’ll be forced to use AI to solve these puzzles.

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