this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
87 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37719 readers
197 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
87
Google's reCAPTCHAv2 is just labor exploitation, boffins say • The Register (www.theregister.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/15908451

I've been saying this and people keep arguing.

top 18 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 months ago (3 children)

This seems like the critical part to me:

The paper, released in November 2023, notes that even back in 2016 researchers were able to defeat reCAPTCHA v2 image challenges 70 percent of the time. The reCAPTCHA v2 checkbox challenge is even more vulnerable – the researchers claim it can be defeated 100 percent of the time.

reCAPTCHA v3 has fared no better. In 2019, researchers devised a reinforcement learning attack that breaks reCAPTCHAv3's behavior-based challenges 97 percent of the time.

So it isn't even effective at deterring bots? Then what the hell was all this for?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago (1 children)

For getting free labor, of course.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago

We are basically training their models/bots for them.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's great for gaslighting people into thinking they don't know what a bicycle looks like!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I spent a huge amount of time last night clicking on motorcycles because I absolutely could not convince PayPal or Google I was a legitimate human who wanted to exchange currency for goods and services

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I find if I trace a figure 8 in the screen with my mouse the captcha passes much more often. I think it probably reads the small variations in your mouse movement to sus out bots, so the figure 8 gives it more data to work with.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I eventually gave up and decided to see if they were being hostile to my network and privacy settings. Lo and behold, I was able to log in when I adjusted the strictness of my VPN. Fortunately the service I was trying to exchange currency for was a better VPN with more security and privacy, so I was willing to take the L on that one interactions

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Introducing a Captcha on a form on my website basically blocked bots 100% of the time. It's arguably good enough from a practical standpoint.

If someone really wants to exploit my site, then they will find a way. You can only make it harder but never truly impossible if you don't want to dispose of all convenience.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

thank you for sharing your experience! Good to hear an anecdote to the contrary.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Always has been

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I mean that is true but there is some nuance.

At one time it was a cheap way to protect your site from drive by scripts and make your users help pay for that protection.

They still work in that way on say the comment section of a tiny WordPress blog because the cost to solve them isn't worth what a random boner pill ad is worth.

The issue now (made worse recently by LLMs) is that more bots then ever are scraping any and every thing so people are putting captchas on every bit of every web app content they have. This increases the work of your users while it only slows down the bots. The hope is that the cost to solve is slightly higher than the value of the data.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

that is 100% true👍

I just saw a good opportunity to use the meme here so I took it😆

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Yeah it's pretty clearly just getting people to manually train self-driving cars for a while now.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Jokes on them. I randomly select extra or less boxes than are correct. Yes, it takes me more time but I'm doing my little part to stymy Skynet.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Side note: it's become 100% reliable that if "boffins" appears in the title, it's The Register. Damn, they love that word.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

there should be a plugin that autosolves these

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I did try to get literal with reCAPTCHA a while back, and it just never finished. "Select every image with a bicycle in it" or motorcycle or stop light. I would select the images that only had a WHOLE in it, not the broken up ones into several images. It doesn't like it when you try to answer it's question properly.

Anyways, there's several other captcha and anti-bot services now days, really would recommend people use a different provider, I hate reCaptcha so much.