Google is _the worst_ for that. At least hCaptcha is a bit less culturally specific.
Every time Google blocks me for refusing to label a motorbike as a "bicycle" I get utterly pissed off. And likewise with the traffic lights on the californian skies. Are the traffic lights the actual lights themselves, or the boom holding them up?
I'm not a human very often, according to Google. hCaptcha tends to let me in...
I recently failed a google-bicycle captcha.. "you can't fool me, that's a motorcycle not a bicycle!" I thought.. and then had to complete 2 more challenges. Including a cross walk one where one of the images was just asphalt and painted lines (no context/edges so it could be a parking lot, and airstrip,a highway, an intersection, or a cross-walk).
If Google says you're a robot, it must be true! You should behave accordingly.
There's actually a comic strip in the newspaper going through this storyline right now. Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! was told by a CAPTCHA that he's a robot, so he's going through life that way. The other robots do not seem to be happy to have him as part of their culture.
Sorry, but Google captcha is specifically designed to annoy real people in some cases. They literally implemented slow fade-in / fade-out for images. This does absolutely nothing against actual bots, but annoying as hell for a real person.
I thought the fade thing was specifically to trip up bots. Like bots know what the picture is long before it is shown to the user, so if the bot clicks on it then the CAPCHA knows something is up.
Easy for a bot to fake that with a random number generator. If nothing else bot authors can collect their own statistics. I understand the bots have an army of people in the background for images they don't understand yet, just collect timing data from that set and have your random number generator emulate that timing data. (I'm guessing a bell curve)
Honestly, that service looks like something I'm almost tempted to pay for myself. $1 per 1000 recaptchas is a lot cheaper than how I value my time, at the very least. It's not like google couldn't pay people to do these ML training datasets; I resent giving them free labour.
Unfortunately I doubt that "recaptcha solver" can be built as browser extension. Most of advanced bots for parsing automation built on proprietary platforms like ZennoPoster and they basically heavily modify Firefox / Chromium.
Also latency of human-recognition service is quite high so while you wouldn't need to solve it you'll need to wait for number of seconds anyway.
Few years ago back when I created such bots I had similar idea .
For certain this can't be mainlined. And if we talk about extensions then at least in past extension code didnt have enough capacities to automatically bypass recaptchas.
This would require fake mouse pointer control and it's obviously not one of features that extension api expose.
You dont need fade-in / fade-out effects for rate limiting.
Bots are obviously get to see images instantly once they're returned by the server as they dont need to wait for fade-in to complete. Because bots API is injected into browser internals instead.
If rate limiting is needed there is always CloudFlare way where you're literally show user "wait" and refresh page a bit later. This is annoying, but nowhere as much as reCaptcha fading is.
people tend to have very different experiences with google captchas based on how normal they are. if you block everything and try to anonymize your browsing as much as possible and otherwise do everything you can to look like a bot, you're going to get a very difficult captcha to somebody with all their browser settings on default.
Yup. This reminds me of the ‘introduction’ of an old hacker simulation game from 2004 that was quite prescient.
“ In the year 2012, the corporations of the world paved over the Internet, designing their own network system. Keeping the same name, they developed a system where every piece of information was audited and paid for before it was passed on to the world at large. Those who still followed the ideology of an open and uncontrolled Internet gathered what resources they could and formed the SwitchNet. Build mostly out of discarded technologies and backdoors in the current Internet, it allowed some manner of uncontrolled communication around the world. The "Hacker Outpost" is in need of new recruits to perform missions in information gathering against the corporations, which will allow them to increase the presence of the SwitchNet in the world.”
And the slightly different press release one:
“ In 2012, a new Internet was introduced--one that prohibited users from posting anything on personal home pages, prohibited them from using software of their choice, and from having an e-mail address. Having no place to stay, hackers created the SwitchNet, an underground network operating on the old wires and infrastructure of the original Internet”
Don't forget that Recaptcha magically works better in Chrome, and even bettery-better if you're logged into a Google account. In FF (with tracking protection) you can expect to see the enforced wait and "Please try again". Honestly, it's awful. Half the time I have to second-guess what the average American would think which of the (noise-added, corrupted) images matches the description.
Your comment suggests you would exchange money for an assassination. I know you are joking (right?), but this is not something that you should joke about.
Shouldn’t do this no matter what ofc. But why the devs? Sure the devs are well paid and privileged. That’s mostly relative to others in society. They are still more cogs than anything.
Easier target, a couple of google devs hanging on a public square would do much to disincentivize others from working on similar products in the future.
At least executives can dream of hiding behind private security, for mere developers earning 300k/yr the situation isn’t so rosy.
It wouldn’t really disincentivize that much. You aren’t grasping the status quo and power dynamics of all of this. Double that $300K and even i would strongly consider risking my life for that amount of money for some time. That money is peanuts in the scheme of things but is enormous to many, many people.
Seriously. If Google doubled that money and the only way for me to be safe would be to stay in some glorified prison while working, I’d probably do it for a few years.
All you’re doing is pointing out how bad the power dynamics are and attacking the weakest and least powerful parts of said dynamics. When there are so many simple ways to get around this sort of scheming. Mine is one example. When you’re talking about cogs. It is extremely easy to replace them. It is sad you want to attack the working class (in this situation it’s privileged workers making a lot but in terms of the system, they fit into this).
Every time Google blocks me for refusing to label a motorbike as a "bicycle" I get utterly pissed off. And likewise with the traffic lights on the californian skies. Are the traffic lights the actual lights themselves, or the boom holding them up?
I'm not a human very often, according to Google. hCaptcha tends to let me in...