Hacker News Reader

Comment by letstryagain | Hacker News Reader

This page has zero information. What am I looking at?

I think people don't fully appreciate what you mean. I do. This site is literally information-free. It contains a picture of a yawning cat and two buttons that do nothing. This is on chrome/iOS.

I mean this with utter sincerity: try tapping harder. I too was confused by the landing page and its silly two button-like things that don't work. Then I tapped it again, harder, and the link followed.

It's a trick I learned from industrial SCADAs. Sometimes buttons simulate how a literal contractor works by watching for down-debounce-up events. No idea if that's the case here, but it seems to help to dwell slightly on the button to let the event thing really catch the event fer sure.

I had the same problem. Requiring users to modify their clicking habits seems excessively onerous -- especially to "prove you're not a bot." The fact that you had to explain to me why a bloody web button didn't work proves the point; it's like throwing out the baby w/ the bathwater.

Looks like a button to click that you're not a robot: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo

What makes that work against robots versus other things?

In 99% of cases, whether or not you're a bot can be determined before you interact with the box. It's mostly just a vector to download the script that does the actual detection based on mouse and keyboard patterns while you're using the rest of the page.

Interesting! But while I find captchas annoying, I like helping out with the text-decoding that re-captcha does.

By now the helping-out-with-OCR part of ReCaptcha is entirely unrelated to the actual captcha. In some cases now you're just identifying street numbers for Google Maps.

If captchas got simpler, you could still do Mechanical Turk jobs if you wanted to.

The easy house number tests are for users with established sessions because the system already has a high degree of confidence you are a human. Delete your cookies or use an incognito window and I expect you'd see the traditional captcha with two words.

I do not. Maybe they can make a site that is solely for the purpose of helping decode text for you and your ilk.

It used to be there were two variables one that was uncertain to the machine and the other that was known. The known variable was used to ensure you weren't making up your answer.

But for at least a couple of months now I haven't seen a two variable captcha. I can only assume every captcha has been solved and verified to a reasonable degree of certainty. If Google, who is probably most able to benefit off of captcha solutions is willing to move past it I can't really argue with them.

I think a lot of the single-challenge CAPTCHAs they're using now are house numbers on Street View. Even if Google doesn't know the exact answer, they can rule out a lot of wrong answers (e.g, the number entered is on the wrong side of the street, or is completely out of range for the current block).

Also, if you look really suspicious (particularly if you fail an easier CAPTCHA, or ask for lots of challenges), Google will still give you one of the old two-scrambled-words CAPTCHAs. Except both of the words are ones they know the answers for, and you'll have to enter them both correctly to pass.

Do we get anything back for that? I mean, millons of humans contribute to solving captchas, and does google give anything back (like the OCR tech they're developing) to the community, or does it end up as part of some propietary product of theirs?

Why can't robots simply record actual humans' mouse and keyboard patterns and replay them in various combinations in this arms race?

They absolutely can. This is what bot developers did in Runescape after Jagex implemented the same system. It blocked bots for a few months, but after that it was pretty much useless.

That sounds familiar. Apaprently Google have been using a similar technique to detect botting in Ingress for a while now.

I clicked on that button, and got a popup with a regular captcha. Did I miss anything?

(As a note, I'm browsing using a private window)

The site thought you were a bot (probably because you were browsing privately), so rather than assuming you are a human, it decided to challenge you traditionally.

> The site thought you were a bot

Based on what? It assumes the same for me. There's zero information anywhere. When does it assume you're a human?

When I was logged in Google (I usually am), it didn't ask me to solve a captcha. When I tried from a private browser, it did.

So google-users are non-bots and non-googlers are bots? That sounds extremely poor. Especially considering you solved a captcha to create that same google account.

That's better than "everyone is a bot" though.

Where did you find that?

The problem is that the OP posted nothing at all.

Could this be a geolocation thing? I'm in the UK here and I see a picture of a cat, and two buttons, one of which is to redirect to the old recaptcha website, the other is a useless "sign up for more information", and there is no actual information on the page.

It sounds like others are seeing something different however?

No, they dug up the link elsewhere:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8655178

Reply on news.ycombinator.com