• jol@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    126
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    Captchas te not meant to deter all bots. It’s meant to make it ever so slightly expensive that a mass DDOS attack would be extremely expensive to perform. Think like thousand sof requests per second, all being Captcha’d and how much it costs to run AI. It’s current not a feasible solution.

    There is cheaper AI that can solve Captchas though, and it’s only gonna get cheaper.

    • frezik@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      30
      ·
      1 month ago

      It’s long been cheap enough that you can pay a call center full of people in a developing country to solve them for you. Going to be a while before AI is cheaper than that.

      Having used them to protect a few web sites from spammers filling up forms, they do cut down on the bullshit. This makes things more convenient for the people reading the information coming in from those forms, but I sometimes wonder if it’s worth the cost of everyone else having to pick out the bicycles in the picture.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      26
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      Also, captchas are meant to gather data to train on. That’s why we used to have pictures of writing, but that’s basically solved now. It’s why we now have a lot of self driving vehicle focused ones now, like identifying busses, bikes, traffic lights/signs, and that sort of thing.

      Captchas get humans to label data so the ML algorithms can train on it, eventually being able to identify the tests themselves.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 month ago

        Now it’s making me identify developed pictures from a photo negative. I’m not quite sure what they’re going to do with that training since computers can already perform that task.

        • TheOakTree@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 month ago

          Also the “select the image below containing the example image above.”

          Like… we already have computers that can recognize image repetitions.

          • Cethin@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            1 month ago

            So that’s almost certainly trying to gather data to defeat data poisoning. The other image is probably slightly altered in a way you can’t detect.

        • bitwolf@lemmy.one
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          29 days ago

          A common OCR tactic is to turn the image negative and bump the contrast to make text easier to recognize.

          It could be a precursor for that step.

    • Ballistic_86@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      I believe this is why Google, and a few other companies, have started using behavioral analysis to figure out if you are human. Did your mouse wonder around the page before clicking to verify? Did you come from another website as if browsing the web? What device are you using and have you used it on this site before? Are you logged into an account? I’m sure they use many more factors, but it’s something that would be hard to replicate with bot behavior on a consistent basis (for now).

  • Cistello@reddthat.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    73
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    I have an extension which solves most Captchas for me It does it better than me which is why I use it

    • problematicPanther@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 month ago

      it’s the recaptchas that they should have trouble with. since it’s not just about finding the right picture, it’s also about the time between clicks, the way the mouse moves, etc.

        • problematicPanther@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 month ago

          but us humans aren’t truly random, we probably behave in similar ways to each other, but also have individual ‘fingerprints’. like the time it takes between keystrokes, or the length of time we spend holding the button on the mouse down while clicking. we could probably come up with a way of identifying someone based only on that kind of data. what was i talking about?

          • snooggums@midwest.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 month ago

            Not without enough context to know what time of day, if the person is ill, or a ton of other things that would make someone respond differently at different points in time.

            The anti bot stuff is going to be looking for too much consistency, which is hard look for on its own before trying to look for some kind of ‘fingerprint’

      • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        reCaptcha never works for me. Probably something with thirdpartyisolation.enabled. Can’t snoop all the history and stuff.

      • lad@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 month ago

        Yeah, and a couple of people I know who were consistently reported to be robots because they’ve been shown captcha too much and as a result solved it too well. Which in turn led to more captcha and improved solving speed. Well, you see the problem, I guess

  • nucleative@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    1 month ago

    There’s a program called Xevil that can solve even HCaptcha reliably, and it can solve these first gen captions by the thousands per second. It’s been solving Google’s v3 recaptchas for a long time already too.

    People who write automation tools (unfortunately, usually seo spammers and web scrapers) have been using these apps for a long time.

    Captchas haven’t been effective at protecting important websites for years, they just keep the script kiddies away who can’t afford the tools.

    • edgesmash@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      Captchas haven’t been effective at protecting important websites for years, they just keep the script kiddies away who can’t afford the tools.

      To be fair, keeping the script kiddies away has some good value. Whether that value outweighs all the wasted time and impact to sight/hearing impaired people is another discussion.

    • lud@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      ?

      Lots of websites force capchas when on a VPN they don’t even have to be provided by Google. Rarbg for example forced a terrible captcha which I usually solved by using OCR with the OCR tool in powertoys. They letters were barely edited or fucked up at all.

        • no_name_dev_from_hell@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          30 days ago

          It’s extremely bad if you come from a country like mine, Iran, where we have to use VPNs religiously in order to circumvent censorship and it has become painful to Google anything especially when you’re not logged into your Google account.

        • johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 month ago

          They appear to have degrees of blacklist. Usually when this happens if I get a new ip it resolved the issue.

          Note that VPN users share IPs with other users and many of the people using the same IP may very well actually be doing malicious things. Not everyone uses VPNs for just “privacy”.

        • Quack@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          30 days ago

          If you use the audio captcha it’s done in just one go. That’s been my experience at least after having been stuck in one too many endless loops with pictures.

  • ZwoofBlaf@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    34
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    Yeah captchas are done. Soon they will be easier to figure out for AI than for humans.

    This is why Sam Altman is doing his worldcoin thingy with the iris scanners. His idea: One iris (well, two…) is one real human. I’m sure this will be abused though and I absolutely vehemently don’t trust him with my biometrics so no way I will join that.

    I think what we should do is just get used to the fact that the internet now consists of humans and AIs. Learn to take things with a grain of salt.

  • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    30
    ·
    1 month ago

    Some disabled people have trouble with captchas, so these days you can download an extension where a robot solves the captcha for you.

  • Zeppo@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    1 month ago

    This is why a lot of sites have moved to something more complex than text, like the weird “rotate this to match” stuff that LinkedIn uses.

  • BluesF@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 month ago

    The “puzzle” isn’t the test, the test uses your browser history, mouse activity, etc to identify you as human (or not). The puzzle is used to generate training data for ML models.

  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    30 days ago

    There’s a lot of misunderstanding in this thread about how captchas work.

    What modern captchas examine isn’t actually your ability to solve the puzzle… It’s how you solve it. Things like mouse movements and how you type are big factors. So a bot would process for a moment, and then basically copy and paste in the answer, whereas as a human is going to type at a normal pace, often with pauses as they double check the details. Same goes for the click the tiles challenges. A bot will work through systematically, a human will bounce around, and their timings will be very different.

    • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      30 days ago

      Captchas have largely been solvable by machines at a rate higher than humans for a long, long time.

      It is very easy to train a model to behave like humans do by simply having a sample of human inputs.

      Here is an article from august 2023 covering how much better machines are than humans at accomplishing captchas of many flavors. Sauce

  • tiredofsametab@kbin.run
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    1 month ago

    I wonder how that works on a Japanese captcha. I know people have had issues shortly after moving but not knowing the language at all yet trying to set some things up.