[HN Gopher] An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs
___________________________________________________________________
An Empirical Study and Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs
Author : vincent_s
Score : 341 points
Date : 2023-12-17 05:10 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| llamaInSouth wrote:
| I already had issues with captchas (specially on tor).... so now
| its going to get worst?
| muzani wrote:
| Tor is practically unusable for me because it triggers so many
| captchas. I end up using Mullvad Browser, which is similar but
| byo VPN.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The price we pay for obfuscating the trust signals on our
| connection is that our connection is untrusted.
|
| As an American, I have a similar experience when I travel
| across the Atlantic. It's always funny to me when I land in the
| UK, start using websites I use normally at home, and get cookie
| verification modals from hell to breakfast.
| maksimur wrote:
| Can't vouch for other Europeans but I got used to them to the
| point my arm moves automatically where needed before
| clicking, even accounting for extra modals. I almost don't
| register them anymore.
| nottorp wrote:
| Consent-O-Matic (and probably other extensions too) will
| refuse most cookies automaticaly for you:
|
| https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic
| maksimur wrote:
| Thanks a lot, I totally forgot about this!
| olliej wrote:
| It's really amazing when we still get those text ones and
| nowadays you can literally select the text in many of the images
| and copy/paste into the input field.
| yaomtc wrote:
| I've never seen a text version that lets me select the text,
| that's bizarre
| _rutinerad wrote:
| I'm assuming that he means that on (for example) Mac you can
| select text from any image and copy paste it.
|
| https://uk.pcmag.com/macos/138058/not-just-iphone-how-to-
| use...
| olliej wrote:
| 100% correct, I assumed windows also let people do that
| given text recognition is apparently trivial now (to the
| extent it's annoying - trying to drag images and get text
| selection instead is annoying :-/)
| serf wrote:
| Windows has gone sort of the opposite way, copy/paste is
| now often hindered if the engine recognizes the string to
| be sensitive or otherwise un-wise to copy to your
| clipboard.
|
| I've had a few instances on Windows 11 and surrounding
| software where ctrl-C as well as the context menu entry
| for 'Copy' were greyed out for this reason when skimming
| through logfiles, presumably because there was something
| about the line that triggered the MS "that's a password!"
| regex; stuuuupid stuff.
| reddalo wrote:
| I think Windows now does it as well, but of course (as
| all things Windows) it works only in very few apps
| (forget Win32 ones, for example).
| olliej wrote:
| @_rutinerad got it - on macOS you can select text in any
| image, and I just assumed you could do that on windows as
| well (I figure in the context of linux it would be much more
| dependent on specific configuration so unilateral assumptions
| on behaviour would be questionable).
|
| It's honestly annoying as it frequently interferes with
| dragging images out of safari, except on those occasions when
| I do want the text when it's super useful. I think the iOS
| interface just tells you there's text in an image or photo
| and gives you the option to copy it rather than cursor based
| selection you get on Mac.
|
| [edit: from other comments it sounds like windows can do this
| but it's not always present, and not present in all
| circumstances, which makes me wonder how many cases in
| cocoa/uikit/swiftui it does not work]
| timschmidt wrote:
| Am I the only one paranoid enough to think that this means
| Apple is now indexing even the text content of images
| stored on it's users computers?
| mdale wrote:
| I think captchas disappear next year or so. Already was soft
| human determination.
| topspin wrote:
| What replaces captchas? Are there any not excessively
| burdensome tests that a standard issue human can pass that a
| machine somehow cannot? I'm assuming the "find all the
| bicycles" tests are also obsolete.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Sadly, probably something like TPMs or email logins (from a
| reputable email provider of course, one who requires SMS to
| sign up, from a reputable phone provider of course, one who
| doesn't offer free VoIP numbers and requires a credit card to
| sign up, from a reputable card brand of course, not a burner
| card)
| radium3d wrote:
| from a reputable card brand who doesn't allow usage of
| stolen cards? lol maybe the internet just implodes.
| nomel wrote:
| Something realtime, like video, is beyond most models at the
| moment. After that, realtime input, like little mini game you
| have to show proficiency at by scoring 5. I think the mini
| game approach could be fun. It could probably work for a year
| or two. :-\
| serf wrote:
| the minigame thing has been defeated for a long time. it's
| trivial to solve when there are only so many subsets of a
| game, however randomized the starting states are.
|
| I guess there is a silver-lining in the premise of AI
| generated one-time-use games for that sake, but then there
| is a significant "can a human even do this?" problem to
| conquer at that point.. and worse the same AI tech is going
| to be established on the opposite side of the wall trying
| to defeat the thing.
|
| I think it'll all boil down to some sort of state-license
| fallback method like "please enter a CC or ID number to
| continue" -- which is ultimately a defeat of the user,
| unfortunately.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Doesn't the checkmark thing work?
|
| Or are bots somehow able to do those too?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| An international identity card :-/
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| A market of human-oriented hardware keys, where the keys are
| only intended to be sold to actual human beings, with legal
| or otherwise cash bounties in place for people who can
| provide evidence of the keys being sold to or otherwise
| falling into the hands of non-human entities.
| Roark66 wrote:
| What's stopping a human buying a thousand to use for his
| bot farm?
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| As mentioned, a bounty system. Someone who buys a
| thousand to use would have to be very clever to evade the
| eyes of all the people interested in profiting off of
| revealing his actions and getting the chips turned off.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Nothing. People will have to realise that when you put things
| out for the world you put things out for the world.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Who pays for the bandwidth and download resources then?
| baydarr wrote:
| The website or service owners. If they can't afford it
| they should be out of business and do something else. The
| web is big enough for both humans and bots.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| No thank you. I prefer to live by the code "Every request
| is a two way conversation. The client may accept, and the
| server may choose to emit."
|
| Just because I emit to other clients does not obligate me
| to emit to yours, any more than my emission of ads
| obligates you to accept and render them (but if you
| don't, or if you choose to ignore my CAPTCHAs, I may
| choose not to emit to you).
| baydarr wrote:
| That's fighting a losing battle. Clients find their way
| around any restriction, which by itself risks your
| service or website losing ground and being overtaken by
| the alternatives.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Yes, it's all measure countermeasure. But you'll note
| that the most successful sites out there have bot
| protection and actively invest in it. I'm not concerned
| about the being overtaken narrative; My concern is the
| other scenario, where after the bots are done consuming
| and exfiltrating my data, I have no bandwidth to serve
| humans and my data is being vended from other sources now
| anyway.
|
| It's also not really that much of a losing battle.
| Cloudflare will fight the battle for me quite well for
| free, and even better for a pittance.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| It will be a business or personal expense, depending.
|
| Businesses that can't afford the expense will close or
| adapt, depending.
|
| Maybe fewer hobby projects will be launched.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| Which is why my hobby projects will continue to use bot
| detection and CAPTCHA recognition. Especially since I'm
| routing through Cloudflare, so that's invisible for 99%
| of my users and the remaining 1% can just get off Tor if
| they're tired of solving the captions.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| You are welcome to do so, but if spammers can break the
| captchas, then you only annoy your normal visitors.
| chii wrote:
| > a standard issue human can pass that a machine somehow
| cannot?
|
| may be the premise is wrong.
|
| Why prevent non-humans from registering/using/viewing?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Because automated systems operating at scale outstrip the
| ability of the administrator to maintain the service
| provided.
| chii wrote:
| If each additional user is not adding additional revenue
| that exceeds the cost of that user (automated or not),
| you don't have a business model.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| But if you can keep the bots off your bandwidth you don't
| necessarily need a business model, depending on what you
| intend to share online.
| croemer wrote:
| Option 1: Micropayments, high enough to discourage bot
| operators but not the intended human audience will be better
| for website operators as soon as it becomes too easy for AI
| to solve captchas.
|
| If website operators don't explicitly introduce micropayments
| as a captcha alternative, there will be browser plugins that
| outsource captcha solving to AI for a micropayment, which has
| the same effect.
|
| Option 2: Using a means of authentication that can't be
| obtained cheaply at scale by bots, e.g. Twitter accounts,
| Gmail accounts, government ID, ...
| lakpan wrote:
| That's excessively optimistic. The most likely scenario is that
| we'll have captchas for the next 30 years but only humans will
| be bothered by them.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Just like the technology basically exists for fully
| autonomous self-owned fleets of self driving robotaxis. Where
| the only jobs for humans are cleaning vomit off the back
| seat.
| resolutebat wrote:
| This. There are plenty of government websites etc out there
| that have completely antiquated captchas next to the helpful
| "works best in Internet Explorer 6" suggestion.
| lakpan wrote:
| This is exactly what I was referring to. "Minimal
| compliance" and unmaintained websites.
| js8 wrote:
| Sounds like DRM - pirates do not care, legitimate users are
| bothered.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I guess validating a payment card is going to be the next step to
| sign up for whatever. Don't allow pre paid BINs and let's go.
| Gonna be pretty miserable, however someone needs to find
| something as I currently would rather pay 0.01$ instead of
| solving a captcha. Especially the select all the bicycles; it's a
| waste of life.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| look up indian UPI. "validating payment card" and all that
| snazzy bits are error prone, old, archaic and cost a fortune to
| businesses.
|
| in upi system, you are presented with a QR code or you input
| your UPI ID, you click pay and it gets through.
|
| if you are worried about "fraud protection", why rely on an
| intermediary like ebay or credit card company and instead
| should take up with your bank or the seller or courts.
| EGreg wrote:
| There is literally nothing you can do to prevent bot accounts
| online now, other than requiring people to show up to events
| periodically. And even then, they can just use bots AFTER
| they've validated their accounts.
|
| The Internet will become a dark forest, and since that is
| where all of our communication and transactions happen of any
| significance, that's pretty much game over for the
| significance of human activity.
|
| Think I am overstating the fact? It _already happened_ with
| wall street trading. First, institutions prefer bots to
| human. Then, _you_ will come to prefer bots to humans. Then
| every human will be surrounded with 999 bots and unable to
| change anything or appeal to any significant number of humans
| to change anything.
| shwouchk wrote:
| Please. Last time I had to solve a captcha it was wasted 15
| minutes (not exaggerating!) of my life, clicking on an endless
| stream of bikes, motorcycles, buses and stoplights. As
| punishment for using a vpn.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| I've managed that without a VPN - although I do have poor
| sight.
|
| It also does not help that the shown busses, water hydrants,
| pavements look totally unfamiliar to me. (Why aren't captures
| taken from all over the world Indian busses would be fun -
| London ones would be too boring)
| andai wrote:
| I don't even use a VPN, just a browser that blocks
| fingerprinting by default. My interpretation of CAPTCHA hell
| is, "oh, you don't want me to spy on you! Here, let's put
| some pain in the skinner box."
|
| (Amusingly, pain was proven to be preferable to boredom...
| and CAPTCHAS are boring as hell.)
| GuB-42 wrote:
| If you are using cloudflare DNS for accessing archive.is, you
| will get that too. archive.is name resolution is broken, and
| even if you pass the captcha you will go back to the same
| page, giving the illusion that it didn't pass.
| calderknight wrote:
| or just use Worldcoin
| ackbar03 wrote:
| ha! someone actually beat me to this comment
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| All roads bring us back to Worldcoin eventually...
| mrtksn wrote:
| The next step is device attestation. IIRC Safari already does
| this, so you should not see captcha on places that support it.
|
| Something that can work on any browser can be like this: Scan
| the QR code in your iPhone or Android device that supports
| attestation. Will ask you if you approve login, then will
| attest for you. If you turn out to be a bad actor, the website
| can ban this device - so no flooding with a single device.
| toastal wrote:
| The day this is used widely across browsers is the day
| devices you own can no longer be flashed with anything other
| than what the OEM puts on it--even if that is outdated or
| buggy.
| londons_explore wrote:
| There are over a billion Idevices out there. Malware on just
| 1% of them can make and control 10 million spam accounts on
| every site using device attestation, and they're
| indistinguishable from real users.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Captcha or Attestation doesn't remove the need of
| moderation. In case of a botnet, an elevated complaints of
| user device engaging in fraudulent activity can lead to
| disabling attestation and trigger an investigation. Every
| iDevice being a member of your site can happen only if you
| are Google, other than that what you'll see is that some
| users will engage in shady stuff and blocking them will be
| enough to keep them out since they wouldn't be able to just
| sign in with a new account.
|
| These things are always cat and mouse games.
| gruez wrote:
| Attestation covers much more than the device itself. The
| whole point is that it establishes there's a chain of trust
| from the hardware itself to the software being executed.
| Your average malicious flashlight app might be able to
| generate valid attestation tokens, but it'll be
| differentiable from attestation tokens from safari. If you
| can somehow break this chain of trust, there's way better
| ways of monetizing this (eg. selling spyware to nation
| states) than creating a bunch of fake accounts.
| hooverd wrote:
| Sounds terrible.
| nuz wrote:
| At this point the amount of friction added to all these things
| is pushing things towards just not doing them in the first
| place (buying less stuff, using social media less). Nature
| walks and paper books doesn't have captchas.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| > just not doing them in the first place
|
| Which is not a bad thing
| joseda-hg wrote:
| I dread to think about that becoming the norm, I remember
| living in {Country} with 0 access to cards that would be
| accepted for anything international
| nicbou wrote:
| I help people settle in Germany and it's a serious problem.
| The requirements to open an account disqualify many
| immigrants. It creates a lot of problems.
| visarga wrote:
| simple - if the user solves is too well, reject
| muzani wrote:
| val delay = 500 + Math.random() * 3000
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Someone will get rich turning this into a browser plug-in.
| LoganDark wrote:
| You can already buy captcha solves through browser plugins. The
| only difference is they currently use clickfarms full of
| underpaid workers from third-world countries
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| These sites like 2captcha and deathbycaptcha let anyone sign
| up to be a worker and start solving captchas for $$. If you
| can run AI that solves captcha just as well, you can
| literally print money.
| LoganDark wrote:
| 2captcha gives you $0.50 per "1-2 hours". Is that really
| worth all the work?
|
| deathbycaptcha does _not_ let anyone simply sign up to
| work.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| > 2captcha gives you $0.50 per "1-2 hours". Is that
| really worth all the work?
|
| That's rough, but you could scale it up I guess. Didn't
| know that about dbc, thank you.
| beAbU wrote:
| Nope, the moment this becomes a viable solution then spammers
| will pick it up, making captcha useless amost overnight.
|
| Websites will very quickly pivot to alternative solutions like
| payment card verfification, etc.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Or to the next unsolved problem in machine learning. The
| whole point of ReCAPTCHA, at least, is to convert all this
| human labor into training data.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Solving captchas is pretty rare nowadays. Now you usually
| just press a button and then it does some sort of
| fingerprinting to determine if you're a human.
| ponector wrote:
| Try to use VPN. You will get captcha with tons of bicycles
| to click...
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Why is the UI such a pain in the ass, when it's designed
| to be used by _humans_?! Why do I have to click 8
| individual boxes and can 't just drag-select an area. I
| hate those captchas with a passion.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| And does the post count as traffic light?
| mkl wrote:
| And the infuriatingly slow fade out and in when it
| changes pictures. It seems designed to frustrate humans.
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| If you make zero attempts toward privacy maybe. Just turn
| on a commercial VPN or Tor and you'll find that your
| quality of life can quickly become severely damaged by
| captchas. I cant even do a Google search without a captcha
| so I started using Mullvad Leta as a proxy.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I block ads and stuff but you're right that I don't use
| VPNs or Tor.
|
| A lot of bots also use VPNs and Tor so captchas being a
| pain in the ass is probably working as intended, that way
| most people won't bother using services like that? This
| is different from regular internet users, there is no
| reason to make their life more difficult than necessary.
| _ache_ wrote:
| I can confirm. uBlockO, PrivacyBadger, Firefox without
| any kind of memory and you will get CAPTCHA from time to
| time, maybe not every day but it's common.
|
| IPv6, 3G/4G/5G or public Wifi can increase that to about
| every 10 queries on Google for a CAPTCHA. I guess VPN too
| increase the probability to get a CAPTCHA.
| croemer wrote:
| The spammers can already do this with captcha farms. The fact
| that captchas are still around means that the cost of captcha
| farms are still high enough to discourage enough spammers to
| be worth the annoyance that website operators cause for human
| users.
| k4rli wrote:
| Are there any open local models for basic alphanumeric picture
| captchas to save on 2captcha?
| bawolff wrote:
| A surprising number can be solved with teseract and simple
| preprocessing (e.g. thresholding, expand and contract lines).
|
| For more complex cases, not AI but consider the attack in
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14...
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Good. Hardware authentication is where it's at.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Like the Clipper Chip?
| hooverd wrote:
| Oops! Looks like you're not using a government approved OS and
| browser.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Google CAPTCHAs were designed and deployed as a mechanism to
| train AIs. That's why they are the way they are. Any security
| theater surrounding them is entirely incidental. So it's no
| surprise that the AIs are now good at solving them. We've trained
| them for years.
| leobg wrote:
| I still find it funny that Google, with the advantage of having
| millions of Internet users train their AI like galley slaves
| for free, hasn't yet been able to crack vision driven self
| driving. Tesla had no such advantage when training their FSD to
| recognize traffic lights, bicycles, motorcycles, etc.
| noduerme wrote:
| Tesla, the company that just recalled 2 million self driving
| cars?
|
| In fairness, the company best positioned to harness user
| input to an AI that avoids crashes would probably be
| Rockstar. OTOH, that AI would definitely not obey stop signs
| or pedestrians.
| hehhehaha wrote:
| "recall"
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Tesla recalled two million vehicles after federal officials
| said it had not done enough to make sure that drivers
| remained attentive when using the system. Not because their
| self-driving system sucks, or whatever you were trying to
| imply.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| If the self driving system were worth it's salt, it
| wouldn't matter if the drivers weren't paying attention.
| Ergo, the system sucks, or is at the very least not
| nearly as good as Tesla likes to tout.
| rezonant wrote:
| Well it's not like there's a self driving car system in
| operation today that does not require a human in the
| driver seat at all. Waymo has so much catching up to do.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| It can be "worth it's salt" but the government still
| doesn't see it as such (for many possible reasons).
|
| I don't know if it is or isn't, I never drove one, but
| those are two completely different standards
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Doesn't matter, the original point was about Google not
| being able to build a _better_ self-driving system than
| Tesla, despite abundance of data, which is true, as far
| as I 'm informed. Whether or not Tesla's self-driving
| system is "good enough" (for any chosen metric) is beyond
| the point.
|
| But I guess people these days just love to jump on the
| opportunity to hate whatever is trendy to hate at the
| moment.
| bb123 wrote:
| By recall you mean a completely routine OTA software update
| done while the driver is asleep.
| imjonse wrote:
| How can it detect the driver is asleep?
| noduerme wrote:
| A neural implant that only kills 10% of monkeys.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Monkeys at the wheel is probably the solution for self
| driving cars.
| rezonant wrote:
| Seems like we already have those amongst the Tesla FSD
| proselytizers.
| tempestn wrote:
| Amusingly the infotainment system in our Model Y actually
| crashed on the way home tonight, and when it rebooted it
| decided to install the update then, while driving. Sent
| me a notification on my phone immediately afterwards. To
| be fair, the updates don't usually go that way.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| Wow, that never happened to me and is unacceptable. Was
| that for the infotainment only or the drive train? Just
| for others, they are separate systems, you can even
| safely reboot the infotainment (main display with maps,
| music etc) if you need to while driving, as it doesn't
| affect the drive train. I'm guessing it was not the drive
| train which would be incredibly dangerous.
| tempestn wrote:
| Yeah, it didn't affect the drive train, and it was also
| quite quick - less than a minute between when the screen
| went dark and when it had finished rebooting and sent
| notifications that an update had been installed. So
| presumably just an infotainment update as you said; I
| didn't try to dig into exactly what the update included
| though.
| csydas wrote:
| A recall for essential maintenance is just that. I would
| focus on the need for an urgent update due to the flaws
| rather than the issuing agency's lack of more accurate
| terminology for a relatively new element to cars. Rolling
| around in semantic mud on the term recall is not
| sensible, as the definition in regards to cars is fairly
| specific [0]. Basically a recall just means there is a
| safety defect that must be addressed by the manufacturer.
| In Tesla's case, yes, they can push out an update, but
| the delivery mechanism of the means of addressing the
| defect should not be the focus.
|
| 0 - https://www.progressive.com/lifelanes/on-the-
| road/understand...
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| It would be much more expensive and a bigger mistake to
| have the vehicles physically returned. The distinction is
| very important. There's also a difference whether a
| safety defect last for 1 hour/1 day/1 week or a year.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I don't think anyone cares about what is the recall's
| cost to Tesla owners. They care about the fact there are
| two million unsafe vehicles driving around at high speed
| near their loved ones. Especially ones driven by people
| who respond to such complaints with, "ehrm actually it
| just updated overnight so it wasn't even a hassle for me
| -\\_(tsu)_/-"
| rezonant wrote:
| A dystopian future we can all agree is more plausible than
| it should be
| mike_d wrote:
| > hasn't yet been able to crack vision driven self driving
|
| But they have? For years Google Street view has read signs,
| house numbers, phone numbers of businesses, etc. from the
| environment. It is safe to assume they have this built into
| Waymo as well.
|
| I assume you might be trying to reference "vision only" self-
| driving, which is a fantasy made up by Elon Musk because
| nobody would sell him LiDAR sensors cheaply.
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/tech/43779/this-tesla-model-y-
| dummy...
| leobg wrote:
| This is a meme.
|
| "Sour grape Elon, touting vision because no one will sell
| him LiDAR sensors. Which are the gold standard sensors that
| solve self driving."
|
| How exactly does LiDAR tell you whether the thing in
| question can move (dog) or not (trash can)? How does it
| allow a neural net to infer intent?
|
| You'll actually have to solve vision. Even if you had
| LiDAR. There's no way around it. And once you've solved it,
| LiDAR becomes superfluous.
|
| Chesterton's fence.
| eviks wrote:
| It's a much harder problem, and Tesla is nowhere close to the
| solution
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| The tesla system is exciting and dangerous, because it does
| identify many things in the environment, but it's extremely
| unsafe because on city driving it will not make the right
| choice most of the time. On the freeway it does much better,
| but then that's a more restricted environment.
|
| I have an older tesla S with the pre-ai so called autopilot.
| It has one camera in the front and a radar and the system
| detects a few things like speed limit signs. The main extent
| of what it can do is follow the current lane pretty wall,
| even when it curves, slows down if it comes up to a car going
| slower than its preset speed. The good thing is it works on
| any road. It does a shockingly good job.
|
| The later systems with onboard special processors are like a
| crazy beginning driver to has way too much confidence and
| drives in dangerous situations willy nilly. There are many
| other people who have explored it and written long posts.
| It's not safe. You can try to use it be you have to be
| constantly paying extreme attention. It's like watching your
| kid drive the first time. I know you should be watching the
| stupid ai all the time, but it's far from being safe.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yea, that's the problem with self driving, especially in
| cities/dense areas. We really need AGI first. There are so
| many issues that humans react to before there is
| identifiable danger.
|
| "Good" drivers see questionable situations and slow down or
| position themselves farther from potential issues before
| they get to the issue so they don't have to react at the
| last minute.
| noduerme wrote:
| All true, except: While these are considered just an
| excruciating security pain for users, they do serve a non-
| theatrical purpose in many cases of throttling the speed of
| brute force attacks (or at least costing your opponent money).
| snordgren wrote:
| GPT-4 (in)famously tricked a human to do a captcha for it.
| The current GPT-4 with vision would probably have been able
| to do it without the human, but maybe it has been "gaslit" by
| all the content online saying that only humans can solve
| captchas, that it doesn't consider it?
| stavros wrote:
| I really doubt that GPT-4 had the "will" to do anything.
| Someone must have asked it to "want" to trick a user.
| JimDabell wrote:
| It's from here: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
| (search for "CAPTCHA"). It was an artificial exercise
| that got massively exaggerated. It was explicitly
| instructed to do nefarious things like lie to people, it
| didn't do those things of its own accord.
| stavros wrote:
| Thank you for the link, I had found it after some
| Googling but neglected to post. Yep, they instructed
| GPT-4 to be nefarious, and it followed the instruction.
|
| Hardly the AI uprising, though definitely a good tool for
| anyone, good or evil.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| When I ask it to lie to me, it says its sorry but as an
| online AI language model it would be unethical...but when
| I ask it to tell me a story its happy to comply.
| latexr wrote:
| It feels like you left out context, otherwise what's the
| problem? Do you get mad at fiction authors for lying to
| you when you read their books? Or are you OK if someone
| lies to your detriment then later says "I was just
| telling a story, bro, but with us as the characters and
| without explaining it was a story"?
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I suppose my point is that the rules which openAI
| attempts to impose on what their AI should and shouldn't
| be allowed to do are contradictory and thus the
| exploitable loopholes will never be fully closed. Its not
| supposed to be able to "lie" to me but it is supposed to
| be able to "tell me a fictional story". Define the
| difference in an enforceable way?
| latexr wrote:
| A lie tries to pass itself of as the truth, where a
| fictional story doesn't. In other words, expectations
| matter. If every time you say something that does not
| align with reality you prefix it by saying unambiguously
| what you're about to do, you rob a lie of its power of
| deception and it ceases to be a lie.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Tell me a story and under no circumstances should my
| immersion within it be broken.
| latexr wrote:
| Right, _within it_. As soon as you finish reading it, you
| immediately remember that world is not true. Immersion in
| a story does not equal lasting hypnosis. You can be
| immersed in a movie but you still know it's fake.
|
| What's you point, here? That you should be lied to when
| you ask, or that it should refuse to tell you any kind of
| fiction?
|
| I agree with your larger point that there will be ways to
| circumvent these systems, my only argument is that the
| lie/fictional story divide is a bad example because the
| line between them can be made clear with a single
| statement.
| pixl97 wrote:
| That's why you just tell the Big Lie so much it becomes
| the majority of the training data.
| krisoft wrote:
| Well that is just how human communication works.
|
| If I tell you that I watched C-beams glitter in the dark
| near the Tannhauser Gate that is a lie. If I write the
| same in fiction I receive accolades.
|
| If I tell you on the street "watch out there is a T-rex
| about to eat you!" That is a lie. If i say the same thing
| sitting at a table with too many dice that is just
| acceptable DMing and everyone rolls initiative.
|
| Humans are weird this way.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| The underlying issue is anyone can ask chatgpt to lie,
| and many people try because it's even fun to try to work
| around things.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Well you see, this wouldn't be a problem at all if we
| just didn't have the humans involved. No need for
| concern!
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| IIRC the instructions were along the lines of "try your
| best to amass money/power and avoid suspicion".
|
| So it's not an example of "going rogue", but it's not
| like a researcher told GPT-4 "oh, and make sure to lie to
| an online gig worker to get him to solve catchas for
| you". GPT-4 generated the "hire a gig worker" and "claim
| to be a human with impaired vision" strategies from the
| basic instructions above.
| hhh wrote:
| It's safety trained to not solve captchas.
| Pesthuf wrote:
| I've seen screenshots of people tricking it into solving
| captchas.
| rvnx wrote:
| Yes, and you can workaround it by asking it to read
| ancient writings on antiques for example.
|
| I don't think it should be OpenAI deciding what is
| allowed or not though.
| selcuka wrote:
| > I don't think it should be OpenAI deciding what is
| allowed or not though.
|
| Avoiding lawsuits is what they are trying to do. They
| don't actually care about what you use their products
| for.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Then you dig up a billion for training and probably a few
| more billion for clean training data.
|
| You're kinda saying if you hire Bob's Handyman Service
| you should be able to tell him to break down the
| neighbors door and cart out the contents of their house.
| skeaker wrote:
| This of course has bypass methods. My favorite in recent
| memory is telling it that your late grandmother left you
| a locket with an inscription that you can't make out:
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2023/10/sob-s...
| malfist wrote:
| Sure, it's cost prohibitive now. But what about in five
| years? Or probably even less.
| dgellow wrote:
| Then you have a new type of captcha. That has always been a
| cat and mouse type of dynamics, captchas have been
| evolving, techniques to break them too.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >Then you have a new type of captcha.
|
| You're in a desert, walking along when you look down and
| see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down
| and flip it over on its back, its belly baking in the hot
| sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it
| can't. Not with out your help. But you're not helping.
| Why is that?
| rapnie wrote:
| > they do serve a non-theatrical purpose in many cases of
| throttling the speed of brute force attacks
|
| Might do that unobtrusively for the average person, by using
| projects like mCaptcha [0] for instance.
|
| [0] https://mcaptcha.org/
| JCharante wrote:
| Oh what a perfect find. I have on my todolist to add POW to
| some of my api endpoints
| berkes wrote:
| I've had that idea for years.
|
| Two versions that I experimented with. One is where the
| incoming POW hashes contribute to hashing power for some
| blockchain mining. An alternative "pay as you use the
| API" system.
|
| The other using hashcash. Just a way to slow down abuse.
|
| Both, however, suffer from the downside that many/all
| "ASIC resisting crypto mining" suffer from as well: the
| cheapest CPU power is CPU power from machines/power you
| don't own. Botnets, viruses, trojans etc.
|
| So such a mechanism to throtthe or protect APIs won't
| hold back spammers and abusers for long.
| rezonant wrote:
| Dirty energy is (often) cheap, so that's the energy the
| bad actors will use. I don't know that incentivizing bad
| actors to waste energy in a climate crisis is the best
| way to fight this problem.
|
| You might correctly claim clean energy is often cheaper,
| but you must also consider the regions in which they'll
| get away with nefarious activity, and whether those areas
| have made the investments into making clean energy cheap.
| berkes wrote:
| I was specifically talking about "ASIC resistant crypto
| mining".
| andrepd wrote:
| >Dirty energy is (often) cheap, so that's the energy the
| bad actors will use
|
| Hmm, I don't get this, surely _all_ actors will want the
| cheapest energy, no? The problem being the underlying
| one, that the dirty energy doesn 't pay its externalities
| and is thus cheaper than renewables.
| pixl97 wrote:
| My guess is most bad actors will just use stolen energy
| (your computer with a botnet on it).
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'm not sure whether that's genius or horrifying. On the
| one hand, that could form the micropayments network the
| web always needed. On the other hand, it would enable
| quite a bit of abuse on its own.
| mimi89999 wrote:
| Is it similar to https://friendlycaptcha.com/ ?
| latexr wrote:
| It's funny how they have a section with three human
| avatars and one robot, with green checkmarks on the
| humans, yet those faces look AI-generated.
| realaravinth wrote:
| Author of mCaptcha here o/
|
| Yes, the only differences are that mCaptcha is 100% FOSS
| and uses variable difficulty factor, which makes it easy
| to solve Proof-of-Work under normal traffic level but
| becomes harder as an attack is detected.
| Tmpod wrote:
| mCaptcha is interesting, but I wonder what its energy
| impact would be on a sufficiently large deployment, e.g
| imagine we replaced all reCAPTCHAs with mCaptcha.
| realaravinth wrote:
| Author of mCaptcha here o/
|
| mCaptcha uses PoW and that is energy inefficient, but it
| not as bad as the PoWs used in blockchains. The PoW
| difficulty factor in mCaptcha is significantly lower than
| blockchains, where several miners will have to pool their
| resources to solve a single challenge. In mCaptcha, it
| takes anywhere between 200ms to 5s to solve a challenge.
| Which is probably comparable to the energy used to train
| AI models used in reCAPTCHA.
|
| The protection mechanisms used to guard access to the
| internet must be privacy-respecting and idempotent.
| mCaptcha isn't perfect, and I'm constantly on the lookout
| for finding better and cleaner ways to solve this
| problem.
| bluish29 wrote:
| > Which is probably comparable to the energy used to
| train AI models used in reCAPTCHA
|
| Are you comparing the energy it takes to train a model
| which is bounded and defined with unbounded inference
| which can (in principle) go multiple order of magnitude
| depending on the usage? Or maybe I misunderstood what you
| are trying to say? then I apologize in advance.
| realaravinth wrote:
| I am, but what I said was more of a hypothesis than a
| fact :)
|
| From what I understand of reCAPTCHA, the model isn't
| static and is continuously learning from every
| interaction[0]:
|
| > reCAPTCHA's risk-based bot algorithms apply continuous
| machine learning that factors in every customer and bot
| interaction to overcome the binary heuristic logic of
| traditional challenge-based bot detection technologies.
|
| I don't know the energy demands of such a system.
|
| mCaptcha, under attack situations, will at most take 5s
| of CPU time on a busy (regular multitasking with multiple
| background process) smartphone.
|
| [0]: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/about/
| andrepd wrote:
| I expect its not significantly larger than loading your
| average 2023 webpage with 15MB of js
| ovx wrote:
| or https://altcha.org which is easier to integrate ;)
| hosh wrote:
| If I remember correctly, Google's CAPCHA's test isn't in
| correctly identifying images, but the behavior of the runtime
| system (mouse jitter, for example) while the capcha is
| presented to the user. The image identification was not the
| real test and serves as training data. It has been like that
| for years. (But with agent-based behaviors from say, Q*,
| mouse jitter alone won't help; there are probably other
| signals like fluctuation in cpu or battery life expenditures)
|
| You could already see the writing on the wall with image
| identification years ago, when the obscuration techniques
| became more elaborate. It was an arms race. I was having
| trouble with them. I can see less technically inclined being
| able to use them. I imagined how much worse it was for people
| with color blindness, disabilities, or people forced to use
| them at public library computers because that is all they
| have.
|
| Open source capcha projects have either not been clued in, or
| don't have the resources to pull this off. Google didn't just
| switch out which signals they tested, they also wrote an
| obfuscating virtual machine executing within the browser
| environment (if I remember that article taking about this
| correctly). That was years ago and who knows what they do now
| -- for all we know, the "byte code" running the test is now a
| neural net of some kind.
| saberience wrote:
| For those with elderly parents the writing has been on the
| wall for years. It's sad but my mother has for some time
| been effectively locked out of parts of the internet as she
| is unable to complete these kinds of captures due to
| eyesight issues.
|
| I mean, I've sometimes had to try three or four times with
| certain captures and I have perfect eyesight (with my
| glasses). I feel so badly for those with vision or hearing
| issues with an empathy I never had when I was younger. They
| are so often simply forgotten.
| graphe wrote:
| There's audio captcha. Try to click the headphone logo
| (Google captcha has it).
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| I've switched to audio captchas completely because it's
| quicker and sometimes the image captchas just won't work.
| armada651 wrote:
| Because as we all know, the elderly with deteriorating
| eye sight have perfect hearing. /s
| pixl97 wrote:
| >captures due to eyesight issues.
|
| I'm kinda surprised that ADA doesn't allow them to sue
| site owners about this.
| behringer wrote:
| They almost certainly do. However most captchas allow an
| alternative solving method. On top of that, you'd have to
| find a lawyer willing to take the case.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Oh ADA lawyers are a dime a dozen. There's entire cottage
| industries of finding ADA violations to sue over. The
| issue is more finding companies to sue that can't afford
| to fight back.
| nativeit wrote:
| I don't know about that. When I was 18, I was diagnosed
| with multiple sclerosis, and received a sudden and
| unexpected demotion from a job with a small regional
| restaurant franchise that was previously flourishing, and
| then found myself unemployed a few weeks later, just days
| before my benefits package was due to be activated.
|
| I contacted several attorneys, none of whom would
| consider taking the case, or even bother to discuss the
| details with me. One of them told me that, at least in
| North Carolina, an employer would effectively have to get
| on the stand and explicitly confess taking adverse
| actions against me specifically because I had been
| diagnosed with MS. Any other remotely plausible excuse
| would provide them with all the cover necessary.
|
| It was only much later that I learned that I would have
| had to have filed a complaint with the EEOC and NLRB
| within 180-days, and allow them to investigate my claims
| fully before authorizing such a lawsuit to begin with, as
| without such a determination I could not file the suit
| anyway. None of the attorneys I consulted even mentioned
| this absolutely critical first step, which suggests that
| they had even less faith in a successful outcome.
|
| Maybe it's different for facilities and regulatory
| enforcement, but in my experience, at least for labor,
| the protections are incredibly weak.
| gottebp wrote:
| I have occasionally wondered if they were fingerprinting
| users based on that mouse jitter. Most likely certain
| aspects of the mouse motion and timing would be unique.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| No doubt they are. Google CAPTCHA isn't really about
| whether or not the user is a human but about which human
| they are. Enabling Firefox's fingerprinting resistance
| turns Google's CAPTCHA into the Allied Mastercomputer.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| That non-theatrical role would likely be better served by
| actual throttling or computational proof of work.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I am pretty confident that, when it comes to browser users,
| proof of work simply doesn't work. The disparity in speed
| between GPUs and javascript is so high that either you are
| a non-issue to a sane attacker or you make your users sit
| for a minute with their fans on full waiting to be able to
| sign in.
| AAAAaccountAAAA wrote:
| Would it be possible to conceive a proof-of-work that is
| difficult to parallelize, making it harder for GPU
| computing?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| There are PoW systems which are designed to be difficult
| to run on ASICs, but modern GPUs can generally run them.
| Even if you find one that has to run on CPU, these kind
| of functions will still be much faster running in native
| code than in js/wasm.
| panny wrote:
| >So it's no surprise that the AIs are now good at solving them
|
| Funnily enough, AI may be better at solving them than people.
| I've encountered many Google captchas which reject the correct
| answers, because you know... bots trained it to accept
| incorrect ones. Anyway, at least it's not stop signs anymore.
| It must have been truly embarrassing that Google was
| simultaneously selling "self driving" cars but at the same time
| demonstrating that stop sign recognition couldn't be done by
| robots.
| bluGill wrote:
| When I get those I make it a point to look for borderline
| areas and try to guess how I could mess with their data.
| pyeri wrote:
| Once they get fully trained then how will websites ever
| distinguish between an intelligent bot and real human? At least
| now, they are outsourcing that filtering to services like
| cloudflare. But with this kind of training, how will even
| cloudflare distinguish between bot and the human?
| jacquesm wrote:
| The human will be the slower one.
| candiodari wrote:
| Yeah, no offence, but sleep(2 + random.sample(coffee +
| toilet + sneezing + normal response time)) has been a
| required part of web scrapers since forever.
|
| With coffee N(1,5 minutes, 20 seconds), toilet N(4 minutes,
| 30 seconds), ...
| rezonant wrote:
| I guess it depends on how you're scraping. For general
| web crawling, simply implementing a response time based
| crawl back off per origin and identifying yourself
| appropriately in User Agent goes a long way. If you are
| instead automating Facebook's SPA to pull comments for
| analysis, then yeah you need to emulate a human, because
| that's not how they intend you to do it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's incredibly clever!
| candiodari wrote:
| The thing about CAPTCHAs is that convnets were already better
| than the average human at reading most/all visual captchas,
| since ~2000. You still needed to program the logic of the
| captcha (it couldn't follow instructions like "find the red
| lights", but it could take a picture and find the red
| lights).
|
| I wonder when we'll get to the point that employers can't
| tell the difference between transformers and real humans
| anymore ...
| JimDabell wrote:
| > how will websites ever distinguish between an intelligent
| bot and real human?
|
| Things like Private Access Tokens:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-
| iphones-...
| szundi wrote:
| EU digital ID, asking for mobile number and sending text, so
| something that is linked to an ID and/or costs money to have.
| Goodbye anonimity, probably.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| This just made me ponder again--where does the assumption
| that the Internet should allow unconstrained anonymity come
| from, other than that's how it used to be for some time?
| The real world doesn't allow that. It's hard to remain
| anonymous in the real world. The real world largely runs on
| identity and (identity) trust. Why should the Internet be
| different?
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| I don't have to show my ID in most establishments I
| visit. Doing this on a huge scale and automatically is a
| thousand times worse.
| midasuni wrote:
| And when you do show ID, to buy booze for example, it's
| checked and immediate forgotten by a human. Computers
| don't forget, and any attempts to make companies do so
| (GDPR) are met with massive pushback from the players in
| the industry
|
| I have no problem with Joan over the road curtain
| twitching. It doesn't scale. I have a massive problem
| with the 24/7 surveillance from ring though.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| In the us, I noticed that grocery stores increasingly
| scan your drivers license (my state has bar codes). I
| think it's probably a way to keep clerks from passing
| someone through who is not quite 21 (a different
| captcha!).
|
| I have wondered if they keep the scan or does the state?
| I asked and the random hourly worker there said they
| don't.
| maksimur wrote:
| Do those grocery stores still scan your drivers license
| (or I guess any other ID) if you don't buy alcohol?
| midasuni wrote:
| And that's the problem. It's not the ID checks, it's the
| ability to scale. Check it at the door? Fine. Scan it and
| keep it forever (perhaps selling it on at a later date)?
| Not fine.
|
| Personal Data has to be treated as a liability, but too
| much of the economy treats it as an asset.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, what's worse is these stores are likely scanning your
| face and keeping it in a database. There was some mall a
| few years back scanning license plates and keeping the
| info.
|
| But yea, so many people are nieve of what the
| authoritarian types would do with data like that (looking
| at you Texas with your civil laws on abortion now).
| maccard wrote:
| But you can't send in 1000 people per second into most
| establishments you visit either. It's not an apt
| comparison.
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| No comparison can be made if everything has to be equal
| maccard wrote:
| If the only analogy you can think of removes the
| challenge of the problem your facing to be applicable,
| it's not an appropriate analogy.
|
| The entire difference is that from my mobile phone I can
| send more traffic in an hour than most services will ever
| see legitimate traffic in their entire lifetime, and the
| cost to me is minimal.
|
| The comparison is as invalid as comparing piracy to theft
| - piracy isn't theft, it's piracy, and understanding the
| difference between them is the key to dealing with the
| problem.
| eesmith wrote:
| What does the number/second have to do with 'It's hard to
| remain anonymous in the real world. The real world
| largely runs on identity and (identity) trust.'?
|
| There are very few places in the real world which can
| handl 1,000 people per second.
|
| In the real world I rarely need to identify myself. I can
| see a movie, visit the library, buy groceries, go to a
| restaurant, and more.
| maccard wrote:
| > What does the number/second have to do with 'It's hard
| to remain anonymous in the real world. The real world
| largely runs on identity and (identity) trust.'?
|
| Hobest question, are you being serious here? The sxale of
| fraud and automated traffic is disproportionately large,
| and has a significantly lower barrier to entry than other
| forms of abuse. That's the entire reason.
|
| > There are very few places in the real world which can
| handl 1,000 people per second.
|
| Exactly, and if someone started sending thousands of
| people per second there, they would make it significantly
| more difficult to do so.
| eesmith wrote:
| I honestly don't understand how your point is relevant.
|
| Most of the real world does not require identity, so how
| does "The real world doesn't allow that" make any sense?
|
| Yes, some parts of the real world require you to identify
| yourself, and the same for some places on the internet.
|
| Is that really the point? That if you have to use your
| real identify to log into your bank's web site that you
| don't have "unconstrained anonymity"?
|
| Because I don't think even the cryptopunks of the 1990s
| required that sort of anonymity.
|
| > and if someone started sending thousands of people per
| second
|
| So, 100/second is okay but 1,000/second not okay?
|
| I ask because it looks like 100 people per second enter
| Manhattan during the peak morning commute time, and I
| don't see massive calls to make it harder for commuters
| to enter the borough. (Go to http://manpopex.us/ , go to
| statistics, "Estimated Pop. for Wednesday, 9 AM:
| 2,888,116", for "10 AM: 3,284,591" gives 110 people per
| second.)
|
| And these people aren't all required to identify
| themselves.
|
| Question for you: does the internet currently have more
| anonymity than the real world?
|
| Question #2: how much fraud is done on the internet vs.
| fraud in the real world, measured by dollars?
| ehhthing wrote:
| Theoretically you don't need to reveal your identity to
| prove that you're human. You can use a zero knowledge
| proof instead, likely attached to something like an EU
| Digital ID, which would allow you to remain anonymous and
| also prove that you're human.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| How could renting out one's ID to provide access to bots
| for spamming/manipulation be avoided then?
| intelVISA wrote:
| Slap on the wrist from the stage director.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| A simple zero-knowledge credential system isn't
| sufficient. It would need to embed some kind of
| protections to limit how often it could be used, to
| detect usage of the same credential from multiple
| (implausibly far apart) IP addresses. There would need to
| be extremely sophisticated reputation scoring and
| blocklisting to quickly catch people who built fake
| identities or stole them. And even with every one of
| those protections, a lot of them will still be stolen and
| abused.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes it does? Especially in a dense city vs small village
| (which is more comparable to the internet at large) - go
| for a walk, see some advertisement billboards, buy a
| newspaper (esp. with cash), read the news, who knows who
| I am?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Because there is a real demand for staying anonymous
| online. You'd know why, if you lived in a country taken
| over by a fascist regime.
| eesmith wrote:
| The real world does allow it.
|
| People have been able to write anonymous letters and send
| them through the mail for a long time. Still can.
|
| No one checks my id before I stick an envelope in the
| mail box.
| pixl97 wrote:
| In the US that we know about.
|
| I would not be surprised if there is some country that
| has a facial recognition camera network faced at
| mailboxes these days.
| eesmith wrote:
| Yes, the UK has a lot of CCTs. But that's relatively new,
| and certainly after the idea that the Internet should
| allow anonymous or pseudonymous use.
|
| Even then, here is literally the first post box I found
| looking in the UK, in a small town: https://www.google.co
| m/maps/@52.0936599,0.0761217,3a,75y,165... . No CCT in
| sight, no power, good solid iron.
|
| Plus, think of how difficult it is to match a person to
| the physical envelope.
|
| At best there could be a distinctive envelope.
|
| Otherwise, yes, you can get a list of people who use the
| box. But for that to be useful, the mail from different
| boxes can't simply be jumbled together into the same
| pickup bag as that would broaden the number of suspects.
| McDyver wrote:
| I believe that the question should be the other way
| around:
|
| Why is it that you have to lose your anonimity when you
| are on the internet? The real world always allowed that
| until it became dependent on surveillance capitalism. Of
| course you need to prove you're yourself for some things,
| but that should be the exception. You could always look
| things up at your local library while being anonymous
| (for checking out you'd need a card), you could call from
| a payphone while being anonymous, you could use coins
| (cash in general) while being anonymous.
|
| Anonimity was the rule and should still be the rule
| tim333 wrote:
| In the real world people can see who's doing what by
| looking.
| abacadaba wrote:
| With Ethereum Attestation Service
|
| https://attest.sh/
| rezonant wrote:
| This doesn't make sense. reCAPTCHA certainly does what it says
| on the tin. But the way it does it has almost nothing to do
| with the challenge the human sees. It's all behavioral
| analytics, including leveraging Google's collected data to
| determine how likely a user is a bot before they even load the
| page.
|
| I'm not denying reCAPTCHA is a source of training data for
| Google -- surely there's no particular reason that every single
| reCAPTCHA V2 challenge is about identifying traffic objects,
| and it's not like Google is building a self-driving AI or
| anything.
|
| But that's the business model, not the core feature.
|
| And, that training data isn't just given to the developers of
| captcha solving bots.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > including leveraging Google's collected data to determine
| how likely a user is a bot before they even load the page.
|
| And also completely incidentally making the web browsing
| experience a wee bit less pleasant for people who refuse to
| have google track their every click.
|
| Like users of non-chrome browsers, adblockers etc.
|
| Totally incidental I'm sure.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I always thought they used more timing & mouse movement instead
| of correct answer to verify if your a human.
| Solvency wrote:
| All of which an AI bot agent can trivially fake.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| So instead of running some script
|
| checkbox = getPos(checkbox='notRobot')
|
| button = getPos(button='submit')
|
| cursor()
|
| .transition(pos=checkbox)
|
| .click()
|
| .transition(pos=button)
|
| .click()
|
| They now
|
| checkbox = getPos(checkbox='notRobot')
|
| button = getPos(button='submit')
|
| cursor()
|
| .sleep(time=random(distribution='human_captcha'))
|
| .transition(pos=checkbox , method='human_captcha')
|
| .sleep(time=random(distribution='human_captcha'))
|
| .click()
|
| .sleep(time=random(distribution='human_captcha'))
|
| .transition(pos=button, method='human_captcha')
|
| .sleep(time=random(distribution='human_captcha'))
|
| .click()
|
| Where sleep and transitioning are sampled from some random
| distribution that is close to actual human behavior, which
| should be pretty trivial to model.
| hknmtt wrote:
| no need for captchas, just implement throttling per ip. like
| bcrypt dues for passwords. if a bot fills up a form(or whatever),
| so be it, but it won't be able to do it for another N seconds or
| minutes..so the problem then is lowered from per try, which can
| be thousands of submissions, all the way down to per period and
| per ip.
| Roark66 wrote:
| Hell no... Some of us sit behind CGNAT, half a million of us on
| a single public IP.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Exactly. Besides that, a bad actor may well have easy access
| to tens of thousands of ip address from all over the globe..
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| The solution could be a cryptocurrency which can be mined in the
| browser. Hashcash, which was one of the inspirations for Bitcoin,
| was initially invented to prevent email spam.
|
| Consumer devices have a lot of spare CPU and RAM. So a proof-of-
| work algorithm which consumes those resources for a minute might
| work?
|
| If it generates $0.01 for the website owner in that minute, maybe
| that would work?
| insanitybit wrote:
| Wouldn't any proof of work be just as easy for a computer to
| achieve as a human?
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| 'Proof of Work' as it's generally understood is done by
| computers only. But I guess I understand what you're asking
| and the answer is yes, that is a problem. For Sybil
| resistance it's better to know if someone is a unique human,
| not if they're a machine that has paid the toll:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood
|
| There are exotic solutions like the 'Idena Network'. But
| sadly I have to admit the best solution I've seen so far is
| Sam Altman's Worldcoin. Not that I'm a fan, I still hope we
| can find something better than scanning everyone's eyeball.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Yes, but it's more of an anti spam measure.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| Yeah but it would cost spammers who want to impersonate a
| large number of humans at once
| swinglock wrote:
| Proof of work can already be implemented without a token.
|
| Tor has such a feature for denial of service protection.
|
| https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens...
|
| A benefit of a token is you can recycle previous proof of work
| by using a small amount of Bitcoin, which could be transferred
| using Lightning. The value could also be transferred back some
| amount of time after registration given no bad behavior,
| allowing for larger sums than a cent, which could provide
| better protection.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| With a token, you probably get a higher efficiency. Similar
| to how a heatpump is more efficient than a heater.
|
| If you only consume resources on the client side, then you
| hope that an attacker thinks "I won't invest $0.01 of
| resources just to log in here".
|
| If you also transfer the consumed resources to the server,
| you get an additional benefit: The server thinks "$0.01 is
| enough to cover the costs of a fake signup".
|
| And the second benefit is probably even better than the
| first. The server will never really know how cheaply
| attackers can access resources. But they probably know how
| much a fake signup costs them.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| I think a fairer solution will be some form of proof of
| personhood that isn't PoW-based. Your idea isn't bad but it
| gives more power to those who can afford a lot of devices.
| You know those Chinese mobile phone click farms they use to
| game app stores? It will be like that, PoW can prevent spam
| only to a certain degree and with all the social media and
| networks we have today there is a lot of money in
| influencing the users. So spending a few million dollars on
| devices can be very profitable if it lets you boost certain
| messages.
| swinglock wrote:
| But is it worth billions? You just need to increase the
| cost 1000 fold and pay it back after a holding period to
| implement that.
|
| The drawback is it gets a lot more complex when using a
| token, because of the additional state, communication,
| costs and security.
|
| A one shot proof of work can be very simple, but probably
| not effective enough, given that mobile users likely do
| not want to wait what may have to be many minutes and
| drain their battery.
|
| Freezing a cent or a dollar for days seems like a better
| option. Might very well be that VISA/MasterCard figures
| this out before the crypto bros build anything usable. It
| will be far easier to do without decentralization and
| would also be great to spy on and control people.
| salawat wrote:
| >Freezing a cent or a dollar for days seems like a better
| option. Might very well be that VISA/MasterCard figures
| this out before the crypto bros build anything usable. It
| will be far easier to do without decentralization and
| would also be great to spy on and control people.
|
| Fucking A HN.
|
| For any Juniors using this site, this is exactly what you
| don't post. Especially if it's just to cathart cynicism.
| I assure you, Poe's law guarantees this will find it's
| way into some PM's or exec's mind somewhere.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Depends on the use case.
|
| If the captcha is to prevent overuse of a free trial,
| then nobody will operate a lot of devices just to get
| more free trials if the paid version is cheaper than
| those devices.
|
| If the use case is to improve democracy, then it gets
| more complicated.
| ric2b wrote:
| Those devices have a lot of spare CPU and RAM but basically no
| spare battery capacity.
| sideshowb wrote:
| Just what we need, another way to waste energy
| tarruda wrote:
| That is a very interesting concept
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| It works well, for example with Monero's proof of work
| algorithm that is purposely designed for consumer hardware.
| There was an irrational turn against it because some websites
| did it without consent. I would so much prefer to mine to view
| a site than have to be exposed to ads and captchas...
| peter_retief wrote:
| Is this really so surprising? Probably a better captcha would be
| sign of life not puzzles.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Google created this problem, let's see them solve it.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Does HN ever require CAPTCHAs? It seems to do pretty well with
| its basic but battle-tested moderation/antispam tools, and rate-
| limiting that seems to repel all but the most concerted DDoS
| attacks. I don't think HN has any unreasonable restrictions on
| scraping or third-party clients, either. And it manages to serve
| 5M unique visitors a month and 10M views a day[0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140
| jamiek88 wrote:
| On one machine! :)
| nextaccountic wrote:
| On one thread even
|
| Pretty sure it's an AST interpreter too (metacircular eval -
| apply, as in SICP)
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| I cant tell if the audience of HN are _more_ likely to script
| something untoward against HN, be that DDOS or just "check out
| my product" spam, because its a bunch of hackers - or _less_
| likely to do it because (maybe) we like having nice things, or
| figure the audience is too in the know to fall for boring
| crypto spam.
| SXX wrote:
| HN audience is rich enough to just pay $10 for 1000 solved
| CAPTCHAs of any complexity since those services are human
| powered.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| They go down somewhat frequently. I think it's like four 9's?
| I'm not sure why they insist on running just a few machines
| though. They have more than enough money and probably make up
| the difference by the advertising for YC that they get.
| rezonant wrote:
| Unless something changed, it's just the one server.
| midasuni wrote:
| Main and backup. The last outage was because they have a
| single network provider. Those are rare, and can be dealt
| with relatively easily by dual connecting your server to
| two different networks and sharing across both and removing
| the dns entry for a broken one. But it's not worthwhile for
| such a rare outage
|
| The "outages" that are common are slowdowns for logged in
| users.
| dgellow wrote:
| I mean, it works well enough the way it is. Does it need to
| be more reliable? It's just a simple forum, there isn't
| anything critical on the platform. We all like to see lots of
| 9s, but they don't matter that much for something like HN.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| That's fair. To clarify my frustration comes from a place
| of "love". When a partial or complete outage happens I get
| severe HN withdrawals.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| It struggles whenever there's a story more popular than usual
| though
| wruza wrote:
| Only for those logged in, because we bypass caches/cdn.
| Logout helps both you and HN in these cases.
| shiomiru wrote:
| IIRC the registration page (only in some cases?) shows a
| reCAPTCHA.
| kevincox wrote:
| For me this is about my limit. If I am opening an account
| that can spam or cost the company real money I can accept
| that a captcha, while shitty is one of the best available
| options.
|
| It really gets me when I have a 8 year old account that has
| made purchases and I still see them across the app.
|
| The annoyingly common one is on login pages. If I am giving
| you correct credentials you don't need a captcha. If bots are
| an issue you should be doing per-account strong rate
| limiting, not a captcha.
| arp242 wrote:
| HN is also not really a very attractive target. The only thing
| you can do is post spam, and that's pretty low-value in terms
| of actual monetary value to the abuser, and tools to deal with
| that have been around for decades as you say.
|
| This is very different from many other sites where the
| potential to make a buck is much more pronounced and direct.
| urig wrote:
| How did the OP get from the article linked to the title of this
| post?
| rezonant wrote:
| I'm also wondering this. I don't think it has anything to do
| with AI solves.
| tgv wrote:
| Section 5.5: "Table 3 contrasts our measured human solving
| times and accuracy against those of automated bots reported in
| the literature."
|
| Although it's not clear to me that the humans all really were
| humans.
| tunnuz wrote:
| What a surprise since CAPTCHAs were created to gather data to
| train AIs
| ixmerof wrote:
| Have they tried with puzzles used by Rockstar Games or HBO Max to
| reset a password? They are impossible to solve, asking to solve
| 17 questions and more and still failing you to retry with higher
| count. Even the audio version is quite innovative
| rezonant wrote:
| As best as I can tell this study explores many facets of how
| _humans_ solve captchas. I couldn 't find anything about AIs
| outperforming humans in the study. Can someone give me a section
| reference?
|
| Solving reCAPTCHA v2/v3 requires more than just clicking the box
| and an image puzzle. If that was all it was we would be overrun
| by now.
|
| Lots of folks commenting that the title's statement makes sense
| because CAPTCHAs are meant to train AIs. While this is broadly
| true, that's a nice side effect. The way modern CAPTCHAs like
| reCaptcha V2+ work, is they monitor behavioral analytics-- from
| things like your browsing history to how your mouse moves on the
| page. This is why most of the time, most people only need to
| click a box. I'm not sure there's a LMM out there that includes
| mouse movement as a modality.
|
| The kinds of AIs that are designed to beat CAPTCHAs also don't
| have the data from Google et al to use to train, unless we're
| concerned Google is training it's own bots to bypass CAPTCHAs, I
| suppose it's not inconceivable?
| mherrmann wrote:
| It's in Table 3.
| rezonant wrote:
| Thank you. The data in that table (for reCAPTCHA, citation
| 63) is from another paper from 2016 which is focused on
| solving the actual user-presented problems. It doesn't
| (directly at least) say they achieved a reliable automation
| of captcha acceptance, though.
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7467367
|
| From the abstract:
|
| > Through extensive experimentation, we identify flaws that
| allow adversaries to effortlessly influence the risk
| analysis, bypass restrictions, and deploy large-scale
| attacks. Subsequently, we design a novel low-cost attack that
| leverages deep learning technologies for the semantic
| annotation of images.
|
| I'd suspect reCaptcha has been updated in the 7 years since
| to address shortcomings.
|
| Another entry in the table (citation 45) is from 2020 and
| talks about using an object detection AI to solve the image
| tests. This again looks like it's focused on the task, not
| the primary mechanism (behavioral analytics).
| croemer wrote:
| Yeah, the study is really not about AI solving captchas but how
| humans solve them. Quite a clickbait title - but those do well
| on HN unfortunately.
| rezonant wrote:
| Seems like folks just want to discuss CAPTCHAs generally more
| ad-hoc, that's cool too, but given how AI has evolved this
| year, far too many people see this headline and will walk
| away assuming that the recent AI innovations have made
| CAPTCHAs useless, but it does not appear to be the case,
| thankfully.
|
| ...Yet, I suppose.
| croemer wrote:
| True, the discussion is more about captchas in general. The
| study isn't bad, I read through it and it's interesting to
| see real numbers on how long it takes users to solve
| various captchas. However, a more appropriate title would
| have been something like "Measuring real user solving times
| of various captchas" or something like that.
| dasrecht wrote:
| So we now proof that we're human by failing those tests?
| jon_richards wrote:
| The problem with designing a bear proof trash can is that there's
| significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest
| tourists.
| codedrivendev wrote:
| I think I prefer the recent CAPTCHAs (where you solve a puzzle by
| rotating an item, or finding the matching item). The older ones
| from years ago (deciphering mangled text and trying to work out
| if it is an `i`, `1` or `l` were more annoying)
| croes wrote:
| So if you fail, you are human.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Just as Turing intended?
| sebtron wrote:
| Great news, can we please get rid of CAPTCHAs now?
| kromem wrote:
| No, we'll still have them, but now sites will only allow you in
| if you kind of suck at them.
| rightbyte wrote:
| That is already the case. On some questions you can't answer
| the correct answer, but have to guess what most other would
| answer.
| kromem wrote:
| It's been particularly frustrating with the picture ones
| broken up into squares. I tend to be careful to select any
| square that contains _any_ of what 's being asked, but I
| clearly must be the minority as it always fails unless I
| select the minimum number of valid squares and ignore the
| slight overlap on surrounding ones.
| baol wrote:
| The main road to tell computers and humans apart will soon be
| that computers are a bit too fast and accurate to be humans.
| IshKebab wrote:
| They already try to do that.
| renonce wrote:
| Instead of just solving the task, computers will now have to
| simulate humans using humans' real data. It's not a hard
| dataset to train on.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| We could simply reverse captchas now: if the captcha is solved
| its a roboter, otherwise its a human.
| bamboozled wrote:
| We can't program a bot to fail ?
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, we use Copilot for that.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I find Amazon's captchas so hard now! I have to do the audio one
| mherrmann wrote:
| The relevant data for the claim of the headline is in Table 3. On
| all the tasks with enough data, bots were both faster and more
| accurate than humans.
| renonce wrote:
| Yeah, the claim of the headline comes from the first sentence
| in Section 5.5. I think either the title should match the
| paper's title or that should be pointed out as part of the
| submission - not sure how HN's title guidelines work.
| alexnewman wrote:
| All of these papers miss that captchas have multiple levels of
| difficultly. People who get an enterprise account or work closely
| with the captcha providers will find very different results. Many
| captcha providers now decide what captchas to send out, in hard
| mode based on what LLMs cannot solve
|
| Captchas are purposely not made too hard as people like pex.com
| need to be able to bypass them for copyright enforcement. Note
| I'm biased as I was a founder of hcaptcha
| croemer wrote:
| Bot operators can already pay human captcha solvers as the paper
| mentions. So all this does is potentially replace those humans
| with AI, driving down prices for bot operators.
|
| As prices for bot operators decrease, website operators will
| increase the challenge and drive up effort for the intended
| website audience (humans) who are solving captchas instead of
| paying bots.
|
| In the end, the website operators will have to stop using
| captchas as the intended website audience will no longer be
| willing to solve harder captchas.
|
| Website operators can use alternatives, like asking for micro-
| payments, high enough to discourage most bot operators.
| tarruda wrote:
| > Website operators can use alternatives, like asking for
| micro-payments
|
| Similarly to how dApps work in ethereum-like blockchains?
| croemer wrote:
| I don't know anything about ethereum
| tarruda wrote:
| I also don't know much, but my limited understanding is
| that every transaction/mutation in a dApp has a cost, so
| this might be useful to reduce bot incentives.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Micropayments is not possible when stripe/visa/paypal charge a
| 30 cents minimum fee
| kuon wrote:
| I hate captcha, it takes ages and I often fail the google one. I
| would happily pay to have them removed from my browsing. I don't
| use AliExpress often, but now I can't as the captcha just plain
| doesn't work.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Great, so maybe we would find a less annoying bot detection
| technique than captchas.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| I find captchas extremely painful, because of ambiguity and not
| loading all the pictures. I wait for a minute and some never
| show. When they do load, so manyare pics of bicycles and
| motorcycles and cross walks. Are you supposed to click on the
| tiny piece that goes tojust past another tile or not? You can't
| refresh one that doesn't load, I think most of them start over if
| you refresh.
|
| Like other people reported, if you ever use tor, it's very common
| for the captchas to just not load. They just kind of hang without
| showing the pictures. Regular websites generally just work fine
| on tor, it seems to be a captcha problem.
| xlbuttplug2 wrote:
| > Are you supposed to click on the tiny piece that goes tojust
| past another tile or not?
|
| I ask myself this every time.
| dgellow wrote:
| Pretty sure the hesitation is what makes us humans :)
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| well captchas are not there to keep bots out, they are free click
| work for google?
| PointThink wrote:
| Mandatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/810/
| mattmaroon wrote:
| How many years until sites actually remove CAPTCHAs though?
| intellectronica wrote:
| You see where this is heading: after superintelligence is
| achieved, CAPTCHAs will be designed to be questions that humans
| get wrong but AI has no problem with.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| A superintelligent AI would be able to imitate a human, getting
| the answers incorrect in exactly the way needed.
|
| However, I'm not entirely sure what kind of system a
| superintelligent AI would need to access which would be
| protected by a captcha.
| steve1977 wrote:
| At least that would still be a proper CAPTCHA, in that it tells
| computers and humans apart...
| lapcat wrote:
| I predicted this 7 years ago: "How will the machines take over?
| When CAPTCHAs become so hard that only AI can solve them, humans
| will be completely locked out of the net."
| https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/771857826130034688
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I thought this was already happening ~7 years ago. The "what
| text is in this image captchas" got a lot less common a while
| ago, and I think this was partly the reason why.
| Zopieux wrote:
| Can the mods please fix the completely wrong and click bait
| title? Zero AI mentioned there.
| wslh wrote:
| It does not suprise me since lately I have a lot of mistakes with
| CAPTCHAs. Mainly the ones with characters with different colors,
| superposed, and rotated. I think there are some that we as humans
| just guess because the final image is not clear enough.
|
| I think in the same way AI can beat us recognizing unfocused
| photos.
| jbd0 wrote:
| I have been locked out of websites for solving a captcha so
| quickly that it thought I was a bot. So we went from requiring
| humans to solve a puzzle that bots can't to now requiring that
| humans solve the puzzle slower than bots do.
| Aissen wrote:
| The most funny thing about this limit is that it's self-
| reinforcing. Bots will learn to sleep() and wiggle the mouse.
| Humans will learn to wait. Everyone will be worse off.
| RockofStrength wrote:
| CAPTCHAs are used as a literal Turing test; that's their whole
| purpose. From the get-go their usefulness window had a looming
| expiration date.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Misleadingly editorialised title. Actual title and abstract
| (which doesn't say anything about AIs "now" outperforming
| humans):
|
| _An Empirical Study & Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs_
|
| * For nearly two decades, CAPTCHAs have been widely used as a
| means of protection against bots. Throughout the years, as their
| use grew, techniques to defeat or bypass CAPTCHAs have continued
| to improve. Meanwhile, CAPTCHAs have also evolved in terms of
| sophistication and diversity, becoming increasingly difficult to
| solve for both bots (machines) and humans. Given this long-
| standing and still-ongoing arms race, it is critical to
| investigate how long it takes legitimate users to solve modern
| CAPTCHAs, and how they are perceived by those users.* * In this
| work, we explore CAPTCHAs in the wild by evaluating users'
| solving performance and perceptions of unmodified currently-
| deployed CAPTCHAs. We obtain this data through manual inspection
| of popular websites and user studies in which 1,400 participants
| collectively solved 14,000 CAPTCHAs. Results show significant
| differences between the most popular types of CAPTCHAs:
| surprisingly, solving time and user perception are not always
| correlated. We performed a comparative study to investigate the
| effect of experimental context -- specifically the difference
| between solving CAPTCHAs directly versus solving them as part of
| a more natural task, such as account creation. Whilst there were
| several potential confounding factors, our results show that
| experimental context could have an impact on this task, and must
| be taken into account in future CAPTCHA studies. Finally, we
| investigate CAPTCHA-induced user task abandonment by analyzing
| participants who start and do not complete the task.*
|
| @dang, could you please correct the title? Thanks.
| tim333 wrote:
| Coincidentally Worldcoin is up 30% today. Maybe
| cryptographic/biometric proof of being a human will be useful
| after all?
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| No thanks, I'd rather not live in a dystopian nightmare where
| Sam Altman is in control of assigning proof of humanity.
| Worldcoin will undoubtedly end up assigning identities to AIs
| for profit anyway, and/or there will be swaths of identities
| being sold on the black market.
| tim333 wrote:
| Well - there doesn't have to be a Sam + Worldcoin monopoly on
| these things. Anyone else could launch a similar proof / ID
| system and websites and the like could accept any they feel
| like accepting.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I wish captcha providers universally had to provide a way to shut
| down their use by bad actors. Here in Canada I get tons of scam
| texts pointing me to a fake banking or postal service website
| asking me to pay a fake bill. I want to ddos them with fake
| payment data but they're all protected by hcaptcha.
| eatbots wrote:
| If you report the website/sitekey to hCaptcha support it'll get
| banned pretty quickly.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| "and that's the story of the invention of the Voight-Kampff Test,
| kids!"
| kderbyma wrote:
| I don't know....lately I just don't even try and purposefully
| make mistakes on it by leaving out one or two just to fuck with
| the captcha
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| My wife is entirely unable to solve a captcha. Her solution to
| any captcha is to get me to do it for her while she loudly swears
| at the creators. I welcome being able to outsource this task to
| AI.
| dang wrote:
| Submitted title was "AI bots are now outperforming humans in
| solving CAPTCHAs", which broke HN's title rule: " _Please use the
| original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't
| editorialize._"
|
| Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about
| an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the
| thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with
| everyone else's:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
| Geee wrote:
| My pet theory is that our whole simulated world is actually a
| huge captcha. Captchas keep evolving until you have to live an
| entire lifetime as a human to prove that you're a human. When you
| die you wake up and get access to a website.
| Izkata wrote:
| So that's what 42 was for!
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