[HN Gopher] Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for ...
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Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet
Author : timshell
Score : 84 points
Date : 2025-06-25 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (research.roundtable.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (research.roundtable.ai)
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Ironic that we are so intent on creating bots that ask and check
| questions unsolvable by other bots.
| JimDabell wrote:
| This is interesting stuff, but I'd be seriously concerned about
| this accidentally catching people who have accessibility needs.
| How is it going to handle somebody using the keyboard to tab
| through controls instead of the mouse? Is a typing cadence
| detector going to flag people who use voice interfaces?
| qoez wrote:
| I totally assumed typing cadence and mouse behaviour was
| incorperated into bot detection for years before this already,
| interesting.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| You can never go wrong betting on laziness and aversion to
| ambition for excellence.
| bgwalter wrote:
| chess.com had this a long time ago.
| lq9AJ8yrfs wrote:
| You are not wrong.
|
| The article is more of an intro piece for newcomers and doesn't
| discuss at all the state of the art or where the competition is
| --the high end of the market is pretty saturated already but
| the low end is wide open.
|
| There is a bit of a spread in the market, and the specific
| detection techniques are ofc proprietary and dynamic. Until you
| have stewed on it quite a bit, it is reasonable to assume
| everything you can think of has a- been tried b- is either
| mainstream or doesn't work well c- what working well means is
| subtle.
|
| Bots are adversarial and nasty ones play the field. Sources of
| truth are scarce and expensive to consult, and the costs of
| false positives are felt acutely by the users and the buyers,
| vs false negatives are more of a slow burn and a nagging
| suspicion.
| hinkley wrote:
| As I understand it detection software is also at great pains
| to make it difficult for bots to analyze the patterns of
| rejections to figure out what rule is catching them.
|
| If they can narrow down the possibilities to quadratic space
| then you lose.
| timshell wrote:
| That's definitely been the marketing. The point of Section 1 is
| to refute that point
| lucb1e wrote:
| I had a security manager at a big bank (one of my first
| clients) tell straight to my face that the website decides
| whether to let me in before I even start typing the
| password(-equivalent) and that the password is just a
| formality not to scare people. Near as I could tell, he
| believed it himself
|
| Marketing indeed. He had me doubting for a while what magic
| they weren't sharing with the rest of us to avoid
| countermeasures being developed, but I know better now
| (working in infosec, seeing what these systems catch, don't
| catch, and bycatch)
| ipdashc wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like I'm going crazy looking at that first example
| video. Was Google's CAPTCHA not supposed to analyze _exactly_
| that? Yet the mouse is insta-jumping to the input boxes, the
| input text is being pasted in instantaneously, and somehow it
| gets past? That seems utterly trivial to detect. Meanwhile us
| normal users are clicking on pictures of traffic lights all
| day?
| timshell wrote:
| me and you both
| mitchitized wrote:
| That is because I do not think Google's aims for captcha are
| the same as ours.
|
| I can tell you that as soon as you download Chrome and login
| to any Google account of yours, the captcha tests are
| suddenly and mysteriously gone.
|
| Use firefox in full-lockdown mode, and you will be clicking
| fire hydrants and crosswalks for the next several hours.
|
| My crazy conspiracy theory is that Google is just using
| captcha as an opportunity to force everyone out of privacy
| mode, further empowering the surveillance capitalism engines.
| The intent is not to be effective, but inconvenient.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. As someone who runs with Firefox in full lockdown
| mode, including Privacy Badger and total blocking of Google
| Tag Manager, I have to click on a lot of fire hydrants and
| crosswalks.
|
| Very few sites are broken by blocking Google's features,
| incidentally. Even Privacy Badger warns that blocking
| Google Tag Manager may break sites. It doesn't break
| anything important.
| busymom0 wrote:
| For me it's having to click on bikes. Except the pictures
| are of motorcycles and not bicycles. English isn't my
| first language, so when I hear bike, I am thinking of
| bicycles and not motorcycles.
| chromatin wrote:
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| BRB, changing the simulated latency in my bot.
| timshell wrote:
| Agreed. Section 3 takes the idea to the extreme -- can a bot
| replicate human cognition? Traditional OCR CAPTCHAs were a good
| 'measure' that couldn't be fully gamed. That is, while the rise
| of computer vision made them eventually ineffective, the gains
| in computer vision did not come from bot farms
| imiric wrote:
| I applaud the effort. We need human-friendly CAPTCHAs, as much as
| they're generally disliked. They're the only solution to the
| growing spam and abuse problem on the web.
|
| Proof-of-work CAPTCHAs work well for making bots expensive to run
| at scale, but they still rely on accurate bot detection. Avoiding
| both false positives and negatives is crucial, yet all existing
| approaches are not reliable enough.
|
| One comment re:
|
| > While AI agents can theoretically simulate these patterns, the
| effort likely outweighs other alternatives.
|
| For now. Behavioral and cognitive signals seem to work against
| the current generation of bots, but will likely also be defeated
| as AI tools become cheaper and more accessible. It's only a
| matter of time until attackers can train a model on real human
| input, and inference to be cheap enough. Or just for the benefit
| of using a bot on a specific target to outweigh the costs.
|
| So I think we will need a different detection mechanism. Maybe
| something from the real world, some type of ID, or even
| micropayments. I'm not sure, but it's clear that bot detection is
| at the opposite, and currently losing, side of the AI race.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > So I think we will need a different detection mechanism.
| Maybe something from the real world, some type of ID, or even
| micropayments. I'm not sure, but it's clear that bot detection
| is at the opposite, and currently losing, side of the AI race.
|
| I think the most likely long-term solution is something like
| DIDs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier
|
| A small number of trusted authorities (e.g. governments) issue
| IDs. Users can identify themselves to third-parties without
| disclosing their real-world identity to the third-party and
| without disclosing their interaction with the third-party to
| the issuing body.
|
| The key part of this is that the identity is persistent. A
| website might not know who you are, but they know when it's you
| returning. So if you get banned, you can't just register a new
| account to evade the ban. You'd need to do the equivalent of
| getting a new passport from your government.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It also allows automated software to act on behalf of a
| person, which is excellent for assistive technologies and
| something most current bot detection leaves behind.
| imiric wrote:
| On the one hand, yes, this might work, but I'm concerned that
| it will inevitably require loss of anonymity and be abused by
| companies for user tracking. I suppose any type of user
| identification or fingerprinting is at the expense of user
| privacy, but I hope we can come up with solutions that don't
| have these drawbacks.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The benefit of majorly reducing fraud can create an
| ecosystem where the trade off is worth it for users to
| take. For example generous free plans or trials can exist
| without companies needing to invest so much in antifraud
| for them.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > I'm concerned that it will inevitably require loss of
| anonymity and be abused by companies for user tracking.
|
| Are you sure you read my comment fully?
| Liquix wrote:
| > trusted authorities (e.g. governments)
|
| the governments powerful enough to roll something like
| this out are _not_ trusted authorities which will protect
| the privacy of their citizens. remember before the
| Snowden revelations when the NSA 's director of national
| intelligence swore under oath that they did not collect
| "any type of data at all on millions of Americans"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clapper#Testimony_to_
| Con...
| imiric wrote:
| I did. It doesn't matter that the website might not be
| able to directly associate a real-world identity with a
| digital one. It takes a small number of signals to
| uniquely fingerprint a user, so it's only a matter of
| associating the fingerprint with the ID, whether that's a
| real-world or digital one. It can still be used for
| tracking. By having a static ID that can only be issued
| by governments or approved agencies we'd only be making
| things easier for companies to track users.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| This sounds like a red herring to me.
|
| If the only way to associate a user with their ID is by
| fingerprinting them, you can do the same thing _without
| an ID_ with having shadow profiles. If the proof system
| is designed for privacy, the ID doesn 't make you more
| trackable.
|
| In other words, if the ID never directly leaks companies
| can just make up a static ID for you and get the same
| results.
| imiric wrote:
| Kind of. A fingerprint is an implicit ID, whereas the ID
| suggested by GP would be semi-permanently associated to
| an individual. So it would make tracking even easier,
| since most web sites outside of adtech don't bother with
| sophisticated fingerprinting. It would be similar to a
| tracking cookie, except the user would have no control
| over it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > the ID suggested by GP would be semi-permanently
| associated to an individual
|
| There is a permanent ID, but it doesn't have to be told
| to the site.
|
| In which case it doesn't make tracking any easier than
| the site making up a "fake" ID for you.
| thatnerd wrote:
| https://www.wired.com/story/worldcoin-sam-altman-orb/
| timshell wrote:
| Yup, Worldcoin has been the one of the efforts in this
| space. We're trying to have a frictionless, less privacy-
| invasive method than biometric scanning
| jskrn wrote:
| Do you work for Worldcoin?
| timshell wrote:
| nope, for roundtable :)
| julkali wrote:
| That is the silicon valley cryptoscam version.
|
| This concept has been studied already extensively, e.g [1]
| (in 2000!) by people like Rivest and Chaum, who have actual
| decade-old competence in that field.
|
| [1]
| https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/pubs/LRSW99.pdf
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Or just charge bots and humans and we're good to go
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/technology/postage-is-
| due...
| TJSomething wrote:
| While that works for attacks that are like spam, bot
| detection for high margin attacks like show ticket
| scalping really wants an identity-oriented solution.
| servercobra wrote:
| Ah yes, postage has stopped all the spam coming to my
| house!
| throw10920 wrote:
| This is an extremely ignorant take. It's extremely well-
| known that one of the primary ways you stop spam is by
| making it economically infeasible, specifically by making
| the cost of distribution higher than the expected return.
| It's also extremely well-known that spam snail-mail is
| subsidized by the US post office and doesn't pay normal
| post rates.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| But this mean that now a saas baning you from your account
| for spurious reason can be a serious problem.
| econ wrote:
| You could roll a new id to replace the previous one. Each
| user would still have only one at a time. If this isn't
| acceptable a service may ask to have the feature disabled
| for clear mission critical reasons and/or a fee.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I have not heard about DIDs at all before. How does this
| really work? They are Government-issued? I am not sure I
| would trust that though.
| encom wrote:
| I have to ask the government for a roided up tracking cookie?
|
| Hell. No.
| turnsout wrote:
| Exactly. If the financial incentive is there, they'll add
| sufficient jitter to trick the detector, and eventually train
| an ML model to make it even more realistic.
| timshell wrote:
| Yes and no. Traditional CAPTCHAs didn't cause bot farms to
| advance computer vision
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Weren't advancing computer vision (and digitizing books)
| among the goals of ReCAPTCHA? They seem to have been pretty
| successful with that.
| timshell wrote:
| Google was successful in creating a labeled dataset for
| computer vision. That's different than bot farms beating
| captchas via computer vision because there exists a
| financial incentive
| raincole wrote:
| > Traditional CAPTCHAs didn't cause bot farms to advance
| computer vision
|
| Are you sure? And how do you know?
|
| There are a lot of CAPTCHA cracking services. Given the
| price, they are hardly sustainable even under developing
| country wage level. I believe they actually solve the easy
| ones automatically and humans are only involved for the
| harder ones.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I don't see how that contradicts the parent post. Computer
| vision wasn't as good when reCAPTCHA was still typing out
| books, but machine learning has (per my expectation, having
| worked with it since ~2015, but the proof would be in the
| pudding) likely been good enough for mimicking e.g.
| keystroke timings for decades. It hasn't been needed until
| now. That doesn't mean they won't use it now that it is
| needed. Different situation from where tech did not yet
| exist
| timshell wrote:
| Section 3 anticipates and addresses this objection.
|
| The ultimate challenge is to replicate end-to-end natural
| human cognition, which is currently an unsolved and hard
| problem (and also not necessarily the main focus of AI
| researchers).
| turnsout wrote:
| It's possible they didn't _advance_ computer vision, but
| they certainly _applied_ it.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _We need human-friendly CAPTCHAs, as much as they 're
| generally disliked. They're the only solution to the growing
| spam and abuse problem on the web._
|
| This is wrong, _badly_ wrong.
|
| CAPTCHA stood for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to
| tell Computers and Humans Apart". And that's how people are
| using such things: to tell computers and humans apart. _But
| that's not the right problem._
|
| Spam and abuse can come from computers, or from humans.
|
| Productive use can come from humans, or from computers.
|
| Abuse prevention should not be about distinguishing computers
| and humans: it should be about the actual _usage behaviour_.
|
| CAPTCHAs are fundamentally solving the wrong problem. Twenty
| years ago, they were a tolerable proxy for the right problem:
| imperfect, but generally good enough. But they have become a
| worse proxy over time.
|
| Also, "human-friendly CAPTCHAs" are just flat-out impossible in
| the long term. As you identify, it's _only_ a "for now" thing.
| Once it's a target, it ceases to be effective. And the range in
| humans is so broad that it's generally distressingly easy to
| make a bot exceed the lower reaches of human performance.
|
| > _Proof-of-work CAPTCHAs work well for making bots expensive
| to run at scale, but they still rely on accurate bot detection.
| Avoiding both false positives and negatives is crucial, yet all
| existing approaches are not reliable enough._
|
| Proof-of-work is even more obviously a temporary solution,
| security by obscurity: it relies upon symmetry in computation
| power, which is just _wildly_ incorrect. And _all_ of the
| implementations I know of have made the bone-headed decision to
| start with SHA-256 hashing, which amplifies this asymmetry to
| ludicrous degree (factors of tens of thousands with common
| hardware, to tens of _millions_ with Bitcoin mining hardware).
| At that point, _forget_ choosing different iteration counts
| based on bot detection, it doesn't even _matter_.
|
| --***--
|
| The inconvenient truth is: _there is no Final Ultimate Solution
| to the Spam Problem (FUSSP)._
| imiric wrote:
| > Spam and abuse can come from computers, or from humans.
|
| > Productive use can come from humans, or from computers.
|
| I agree in principle, but the reality is that 37% of all
| internet traffic originates from bots[1]. The overwhelming
| majority of that traffic (89% according to Fastly) can be
| described as abusive. In turn, the abusive traffic from
| humans likely pales in comparison. It's vastly cheaper to
| setup bot farms than mechanical turk farms, and it's only
| getting cheaper.
|
| Identifying the source of the traffic, while difficult, is a
| generalizable problem. Whereas tracking specific behavior
| will depend on each site, and will likely require custom
| implementation for each type of service. Or it requires
| invasive tracking of users throughout the duration of their
| session, as many fraud prevention systems do.
|
| Both approaches can be deployed at the same time. A CAPTCHA
| is not meant to be the only security solution anyway, but as
| a first layer of defense that is generally simple to deploy
| and maintain.
|
| That said, I concede that the sentence "[CAPTCHAs] are the
| only solution" is wrong. :)
|
| > Proof-of-work is even more obviously a temporary solution,
| security by obscurity
|
| I disagree, and don't see how it's security by obscurity.
| It's simply a method of increasing the access cost for
| abusive traffic. The more signals are gathered that identify
| the user as abusive, the higher the "price" they're required
| to pay to access the service. Whether the user is a suspected
| bot or not could just be one type of signal. Behavioral and
| cognitive signals as mentioned in TFA can be others. Yes,
| these methods aren't perfect, and can mistakenly penalize
| human users and be spoofed by bots, but it's the best we
| currently have. This is what I'd like to see improved.
|
| Still, even with all their faults, I think PoW CAPTCHAs offer
| a much better UX than traditional CAPTCHAs ever did. Yes,
| telling humans apart from computers is getting more
| difficult, but it doesn't mean that the task is pointless.
|
| [1]: https://learn.fastly.com/rs/025-XKO-469/images/Fastly-
| Threat...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Proof-of-work is even more obviously a temporary solution,
| security by obscurity: it relies upon symmetry in computation
| power, which is just wildly incorrect. And all of the
| implementations I know of have made the bone-headed decision
| to start with SHA-256 hashing, which amplifies this asymmetry
| to ludicrous degree (factors of tens of thousands with common
| hardware, to tens of millions with Bitcoin mining hardware).
| At that point, forget choosing different iteration counts
| based on bot detection, it doesn't even matter.
|
| It takes a long time and enormous amounts of money to make
| new chips for a specific proof of work. And sites can change
| their algorithm on a dime. I don't think this is a big issue.
| nico wrote:
| > Proof-of-work CAPTCHAs work well for making bots expensive to
| run at scale
|
| "Expensive" depends on the value of what you do behind the
| captcha
|
| There are human-solving captcha services that charge USD 1 for
| 1k captchas solved (0.1 cents per captcha)
|
| So as long as you can charge more than what solving the
| captchas cost, you are good to go
|
| Unfortunately, for a lot of tasks, humans are currently cheaper
| than AI
| econ wrote:
| There must be hilarious undiscovered unknown rube Goldberg
| machines out there where a human completes a captcha, then
| the host sells the captcha to the seller who passes it to
| next user who passes it to the next website who sells it
| again and so on.
| msgodel wrote:
| POW captchas aren't actually captchas, it's just hashcash (IE
| make sure the person reading the content is using as much or
| more compute as you are serving it so they can't DOS you
| either on purpose or accident.) We stopped needing it for a
| while because compute and bandwidth grew really fast while
| serverside software mostly stayed the same.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Agreed, it indeed is Hashcash. I love it. So simple yet
| effective.
|
| http://www.hashcash.org
|
| https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashcash
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
|
| C implementation (feature-rich):
| https://github.com/hashcash-org/hashcash/tree/master/c
|
| A Factor (Forth-like language) implementation of it: https:
| //github.com/factor/factor/blob/master/extra/hashcash/...
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| 1. Create a website with a series of tasks to capture this
| data.
|
| 2. Send link to coworkers via Slack so they can spend five
| minutes doing the tasks.
|
| 3. Capture that data and create thousands of slight variations
| saved to db as profiles
|
| 4. Bypass bot protections.
|
| There is nothing anyone can do to prevent bots.
| ATechGuy wrote:
| > There is nothing anyone can do to prevent bots.
|
| Are you sure about this?
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| I was part of the team managing tens of millions of
| dollars' worth of NFL event-ticket inventory, which meant I
| had to automate the Ticketmaster UI to delist any ticket
| that was put into checkout or sold on a secondary market
| like StubHub. For legal reasons, Ticketmaster wouldn't
| grant us direct access to their private API while they were
| still building out the developer API (which our backend
| team actually helped design), so I spent about half my time
| reverse-engineering and circumnavigating their bot
| protections on Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, StubHub, etc. I made
| it very clear that anyone caught using my code to automate
| ticket purchases would face serious consequences.
|
| At the time, Ticketmaster's anti-bot measures were the gold
| standard. They gave us fair warning that they planned to
| implement Mastercard's SaaS-based solution (same as
| described in OP's article), so I had everyone on the team
| capture keyboard-typing cadence, mouse movements, and other
| behavioral metrics. I used that as the excuse to build a
| Chrome extension that handled all of those tasks, and I
| leaned on the backend team to stop procrastinating and
| integrate the new API endpoints that Ticketmaster was
| rolling out. For about a week, that extension managed
| millions of dollars in inventory--until I got our headless
| browsers back up and running.
|
| In the end, any lock can be picked given enough time; its
| only real purpose is to add friction until attackers move
| on to an easier target. But frankly, nobody can stop me
| from scraping data or automating site interactions if it's
| more profitable than whatever else I could be working on. I
| have some ideas how to prevent me from using automated bots
| but all of the companies I've applied to over the years
| never respond -- that's on them.
|
| The company was acquired by some jerks and who knows how
| they abused my code jacking up those prices without any of
| the profit going to athletes or artists.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > but [PoWs] still rely on accurate bot detection.
|
| No they don't, that's the point: you can serve everyone a PoW
| and don't have to discriminate and ban real people. This system
| you're enthusiastic about is what tries to do this "accurate
| bot detection" (scratch the first word)
| vhcr wrote:
| The default policy of anubis tries to detect bots and changes
| the difficulty of the proof of work based on that.
|
| https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/data/botPolici.
| ..
| lucb1e wrote:
| Oh... that I regularly see these pages working on a
| challenge probably says something about my humanness
| msgodel wrote:
| Everything on the web is a robot, every client is an agent for
| someone somewhere, some are just more automated.
|
| Distinguishing en mass seems like a waste to me. Deal with the
| actual problems like resource abuse.
|
| I think part of the issue is that a lot of people are lying to
| themselves that they "love the public" when in reality they
| really don't and want nothing to do with them. They lack the
| introspection to untangle that though and express themselves
| with different technical solutions.
| bobbiechen wrote:
| I do think the answer is two-pronged: roll out the red carpet
| for "good bots", add friction for "bad bots".
|
| I work for Stytch and for us, that looks like:
|
| 1) make it easy to provide Connected Apps experiences, like
| OAuth-style consent screens "Do you want to grant MyAgent
| access to your Google Drive files?"
|
| 2) make it easy to detect all bots and shift them towards the
| happy path. For example, "Looks like you're scraping my
| website for AI training. If you want to see the content
| easily, just grab it all at /LLMs.txt instead."
|
| As other comments mention, bot traffic is overwhelmingly
| malicious. Being able to cheaply distinguish bots and add
| friction makes your life as a defending team much easier.
| msgodel wrote:
| IMO if it looks like a bot and doesn't follow robots.txt
| you should just start feeding it noise. Ignoring robots.txt
| makes you a bad netizen.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > They're the only solution to the growing spam and abuse
| problem on the web
|
| They're the only solution that doesn't require a pre-existing
| trust relationship, but the web is more of a dark forest every
| day and captchas cannot save us from that. Eventually we're
| going to have to buckle down and maintain a web of trust.
|
| If you notice abuse, you see which common node caused you to
| trust the abusers, and you revoke trust in that node (and,
| transitively, everything that it previously caused you to
| trust).
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The problem has never been that some bots could eventually seem
| like they were human. The problem is and will continue to be that
| many humans (millions upon millions) look like bots.
|
| Have you never once looked at the captcha and couldn't decide
| whether the 3 pixels of the motorcycle sticking out into the grid
| square meant that you should select that grid square too? Not
| once? As the tests become ever more sophisticated, more and more
| of you all will be locked out.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Or you'll get the "click all squares with a stop light" prompt
| and it's a closeup of a signal light so you just click
| everything... But if you get it correct _and_ too quick l,
| you're a bot!
| gus_massa wrote:
| Is the guy on the motorcycle part of the motorcycle? I guess
| no.
|
| Is the big box on the back seat part of the motorcycle? I guess
| yes.
|
| Who can be sure???
| kjok wrote:
| Solutions relying on JavaScript that runs in user-controlled
| browsers are vulnerable to attacks and manipulation.
| _df wrote:
| >Solutions relying on JavaScript ...
|
| ... break the Web.
|
| ftfy
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| I personally work on this all day everyday, you're never going to
| find my crawlers, stop trying lmfao.
| erekp wrote:
| same. good luck finding us out there - we can replicate all the
| patterns you point out there. been in this industry for 10
| years now :)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Just don't cause problems on purpose and almost nobody will
| care about blocking you. Don't be an asshole.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >How much can these behavioral patterns be spoofed? This remains
| an ongoing question, but the evidence to date is optimistic.
| Academic studies have found behavioral biometrics to be robust
| against attacks under adversarial conditions, and industry
| validation from top financial institutions demonstrates real-
| world resilience
|
| I have the opposite view. This already played out in the
| Minecraft community and it turns out ghost clients are effective
| in spoofing such behavioral signals and avoiding anticheat. Also
| I doubt you can get any meaningful signal from the couple of a
| seconds a user's ai agent is scrolling through a site.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| I feel like we are fighting the wrong battle here. Eventually AI
| bot behavior online will be indistinguishable from human, but so
| what?! We've had teams of underpaid humans being paid to be
| organic bots for years now.
|
| Whether the person interacting with your website is human or not
| isn't relevant anymore. What matters is what they are doing; be
| they human, bot, or AI agent.
| butundstand wrote:
| You have to understand the motive to understand why this is a
| problem; their startups haven't unicorned yet. They never had a
| fallback plan so humanity must cling to web app driven
| economics until they unicorn.
|
| See also Elon demanding ad spend on his platform or like it's
| literally just like when the Nazis invaded Poland. Anyone got
| some E? PLUR, bro but also fewer vacay days for you.
|
| Empty economic activity driven by fiat decree of wealth
| hoarders suffering from post war and Cold War and leaded gas
| fume, lead water fueled paranoias and psychosis.
|
| People made insane by memorization of illusory social
| obligations to history always run the world.
| Terr_ wrote:
| IMO in most cases, the _real_ need is to ensure the new account
| has "skin in the game", so that their requests are not
| frivolous and they will "care" about the good standing of their
| account.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| We also need an inverse turing test. ie, detect humans pretending
| to be AI.
|
| Like the case recently of builder.ai which had humans pretending
| to be ai.
|
| Turing was a visionary - but even he could not imagine a time
| when humans pretend to be bots.
| jenadine wrote:
| Yet, human pretending to be machine have existed for centuries
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
| hobs wrote:
| Not so far fetched, The Mechanical Turk was created in the
| 1700s, so that already happened a long time before Turing was
| born.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've wanted to create a wiki for a hobby for a long time, but I
| don't want to get stuck in spam and abuse reports, which just
| becomes more of a given with each passing year.
|
| With a hobby wiki, eventual consistency is fine. I believe ghost
| bans and quarantine and some sort of invisible captcha would go a
| long way toward my goal, but it's hard to find invisible captcha.
|
| There was a research project long ago that used high resolution
| data from keyboards to determine who was typing. The idea was not
| to use the typing pattern as a password, but to flag suspicious
| activity. To have someone walk past that desk to see if Sally
| hurt her arm playing tennis this weekend of if Dave is fucking
| around on her computer while she's in a meeting
|
| That's about the level I'm looking for. Assume everyone is a bot
| during a probationary period and put accounts into buckets of
| likely human, likely bot, and unknown.
|
| What I'd have to work out though is temporary storage for
| candidate edits in a way they cannot fill up my database. A way
| to throttle them and throw some away if they hit a limit.
| Otherwise it's still a DOS attack.
| lucb1e wrote:
| How does one graduate from probation, while being hellbanned /
| having your contribution quarantined? Since I'm certainly not
| wasting my time doing a second contribution so long as the
| first one isn't getting approved, it sounds like this would
| have to be a manual process or you'd lose out on new
| contributors that are seeing their work go to /dev/null and
| never returning
| hinkley wrote:
| Do you believe what we are doing now is working? Because with
| the exception of places like this the internet sure looks
| pretty Dead to me.
|
| You always have to show people their own edits. It's a common
| form of proofreading. But what's added and how often does
| matter. Misinformation is one thing. External links are
| potentially something much worse. I used to think SO had it
| figured out as far as mutual policing, but that's not working
| so well now either.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I'm not sure what e.g. showing one one's own change
| answers. Do you manually review submissions or how does get
| one out of this initial "put everyone in quarantine" state?
|
| I'm also not sure what "we" are doing now that makes the
| web look dead to you. I receive no more email spam than ten
| years ago, less if anything, and I haven't seen any spam on
| the places that I frequent like HN, stackexchange,
| wikipedia, mastodon, signal, github, etc.
| busymom0 wrote:
| > and I haven't seen any spam on the places that I
| frequent like HN, stackexchange, wikipedia, mastodon,
| signal, github, etc.
|
| Could that just be because the modern LLM generated spam
| doesn't look like old-school spam? Just recently we
| learnt that a university conducted a study on Reddit
| changemyview subreddit using LLM generated comments
| without getting caught.
| timshell wrote:
| Happy to help if I can :)
| hinkley wrote:
| I think the real purpose of Google's recaptcha is to punish
| people who have privacy settings turned on, and gather training
| data for AI research.
| logsr wrote:
| In a few more years there will probably be virtually no human
| users of web sites and apps. Everything will be through an AI
| agent mediation layer. Building better CAPTCHAs is interesting
| technically, but it is doubling down on a failed solution that
| nobody actually wants. What is needed is an authentication layer
| that allows agents to act on behalf of registered users with
| economic incentives to control usage. CAPTCHA has always been an
| economic bar only, since they are easy to farm out to human
| solvers, and it is a very low bar. Having an agent API with usage
| charges is a much better solution because it compensates
| operators instead of wasting the cost of solving CAPTCHAs. Maybe
| this will finally be the era of micro payments?
| mdahardy wrote:
| Co-founder of Roundtable here.
|
| I agree that better authentication methods for AI agents are
| needed. But right now bots and malicious agents are a real
| problem for anyone running sites with significant traffic. In
| the long run I don't think human traffic will go to zero even
| if its relative proportion is reduced.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| > Building better CAPTCHAs is interesting technically, but it
| is doubling down on a failed solution that nobody actually
| wants
|
| I want it. I don't want my message boards to be people's AI
| agents...
| mzmzmzm wrote:
| All of the behavioral analysis stuff going on in the background
| makes me wonder if big accessibility problems are brewing. If
| we're looking at how naturally keystrokes are input, what does
| that mean for someone who uses dictation tools that generate text
| in chunks? Will this strategy make accessibility worse in
| unforeseen ways?
| illegally wrote:
| It's pointless, it's just a matter of time when AI agents will be
| able to mimic human behavior exactly (they probably already do,
| it's just not public).
|
| These tests here are easily bypassable, just adding a random
| delay somewhere during the action phases to mimic humans, and
| there's already tools for mimicking human mouse movements.
| adityaagr wrote:
| This is a super clean research post! Absolutely loved the demos
| too
| koalaman wrote:
| I'm not sure reCAPTCHA is really trying to detect automated vs
| human interaction with a browser. The primary use-case is to
| detect abusive use. The distinction here is if I automate my own
| browser to do things for me on sites using my personal account
| may not be a problem for site owners, while a spam operation or
| reselling operation which generates thousands of false accounts
| using automation is a big problem that they'd want to be able to
| block. I think reCAPTCHA is tailored towards the latter, and for
| it not to block the former might be more of a feature than a bug.
| roguecoder wrote:
| LinkedIn, for example, doesn't care if you as a human are
| manually looking at all your connections one-by-one or if you
| have automated a bot to do it: it will lock you out the same
| either way.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| assume this is basically nosedive but for presence on the
| internet. except you don't rate anyone. your device, motion,
| latency, and scroll inertia get rated by some pipeline you'll
| never see. and that's what decides what version of the site you
| get.
|
| > what if the turing test already runs silently across every site
| you open. just passive gating based on scroll cadence, mouse
| entropy, input lag without captcha or prompt
|
| >what if you already failed one today. maybe your browser
| fingerprint was too rare, maybe your keyboard rhythm matched a
| bot cluster from six months ago. so the UI throttled by 200ms. or
| the request just 403'd.
|
| > what if the system doesn't need to prove you're a bot. it just
| needs a small enough doubt to skip serving you the real content.
|
| > what if human is no longer biological but statistical. a moving
| average of behavior trained on telemetry from five metro cities.
| everyone outside that gets misclassified.
|
| >what if you'll never know. timeline loads emptier than someone
| else with explicit rejection to the content
| loandbehold wrote:
| Aren't those distinctions only work because bots aren't
| specifically designed to circumvent them? If you have an arms
| race between bots and bot detectors, eventually bots will learn
| to overcome them to the point that you can't distinguish human
| and bot.
| lucb1e wrote:
| And so what am I supposed to do if a false positive happens?
|
| I use keyboard navigation on many pages. Using the firefox
| setting "search when you start typing", I don't have to hit
| ctrl+f to search on the page, I just type what I want to click on
| and press enter or ctrl+enter for a new browser tab, or press
| (shift+)tab to go to the nearest (previous/next) input field.
| When I open HN, it's muscle memory: ctrl+t (new tab) new enter
| (autocompletes to the domain) thr enter (go to threads page)
| anything new? type first few chars of username, shift+tab+tab
| enter to upvote. Done? Backspace to go back. View comments of a
| link? Type last char of a word in the link, space, and first char
| of next word, that's almost always unique on the page, then
| escape, type men, enter, to almost always activate the comment
| link. Or shift+tab enter instead to upvote. On the comments page,
| reading top-level comments is either searching for [ and then
| enter+f3 when I want to collapse the next one, space for page
| down... Don't have to take my hands off the home row
|
| etc. on lots of website, also ones I've never visited before
| (it'll be slower and less habitual of course, but still: if there
| is text near to where I want to go, I'm typing it). I use the
| mouse as well, but I find it harder to use than the keys that are
| always in the same place, much easier to press
|
| So will it _tell me_ that my mouse movements don 't look human
| enough or will I see a "Sorry, something went wrong" http 403
| error and have no clue if it's tracking cookies, my IP address,
| that I don't use Google Chrome(r), that I went through pages too
| fast, that I didn't come past the expected page (where a cookie
| gets set) but clicked on a search result directly, that I have a
| bank in country A but residence in country B, that I now did too
| many tries in figuring out which of these factors is blocking
| me.... I can give examples of websites where I got blocked in the
| last ~2 months for each of these. It's such a minefield. The only
| thing that always passes is proof-of-work CPU challenges, but I
| dread to think what poor/eco people with slow/old computers are
| facing. Will this "invisible" captcha (yeah, invisible until you
| get banned) at least tell me how I'm supposed to give my money to
| whatever service or webshop will use this?
| Animats wrote:
| Previous CAPTCHAs were based on tasks humans could do but
| machines could not. The machines caught up and passed humans on
| those tasks. These new tasks are based on the concept that humans
| are _dumber_ than AI agents, making more mistakes and showing
| more randomness.
|
| It might work for a while, but that's a losing battle.
| timshell wrote:
| > These new tasks are based on the concept that humans are
| dumber than AI agents, making more mistakes and showing more
| randomness.
|
| Hi this is incorrect. Different =/= dumber. The insight is that
| humans and computers have different constraints / algorithmic
| capabilities / objective functions / etc.
| Animats wrote:
| For a few more years, humans who haven't been laid off yet
| can believe that.
| avoutos wrote:
| Anyone know how this compares to Cloudflare Turnstile?
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| So recently two things have happened. I have been banned on
| reddit technology, and warned on other subreddit that I behave
| like a bot.
|
| Maybe it was my fault to advertise my own solution in comments.
|
| Such behavior however triggered bot detection. I might have
| behaved like a NPC. So currently a human can be identified as a
| bot, and banned on that premise. Crazy times.
|
| Currently I feel I _must_ act like a human.
| ATechGuy wrote:
| Please don't deploy this on the internet, it may block real users
| and lock them out.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Not all automation is malicious. AI promised us agents that will
| browse the web for us. PoW is useful in that the difficulty can
| be scaled to prevent egregious abuse but still lower the cost
| enough to allow non malicious use.
| lugu wrote:
| It is late and I am thinking out load. How about a reputation
| system where users bring proof that other websites haven't found
| them abusive.
|
| Visit a website that require identification. Generate a random
| unique identifier in your user agent. Live your life on that
| site. Download from that site a certificate that prove that your
| didn't abuse their site. Repeat that a few times.
|
| Visit the site that wants to know if you are an abusive user.
| Share your certificates. They get to choose if they accept you.
|
| If you abuse that site, it reports the abuse to the other sites
| that delivered you a certificate. Those sites gets to decide if
| they revoke their certificate or not.
|
| It is a self policying system that require some level of
| cooperation. Users make themselves vulnerable to the risk of
| having sites they like loose trust in them.
| rcstank wrote:
| Sounds like a privacy nightmare. Also, what one site calls
| abuse, another wouldn't.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Some stuff would definitely either slip through the cracks OR
| tarnish the reputation of legitimate users. What happens when
| someone's device gets compromised by a botnet that silently
| clicks ads in the background or turns that device into part of
| a DDoS army?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why would anyone even expect a perfectly zero false-positive
| and false-negative rate in the first place?
| lq9AJ8yrfs wrote:
| > It is a self policying system that require some level of
| cooperation.
|
| How hard is it to obtain one of these certificates as a bot?
|
| What you are describing though is possibly comparable to
| Privacypass.
|
| Apple seems to be on board with Privacypass, perhaps they'll
| include a digital voucher of some kind with their devices and
| that presumably contributes to old devices getting worse as the
| voucher is spent down.
|
| Just imagine if the whole web can contribute to planned
| obsolescence and you can pay for a fast, hassle free internet
| experience again just by buying a new phone.
|
| And then you can dump the old ones on eBay for cheap as long as
| you don't plan on using them to access online services. Unless
| you are willing to settle for basic economy web experience.
| awb wrote:
| PageRank worked well for Google for a long time. This sounds
| like an adaptation of that that's interesting to consider.
| thatcat wrote:
| If the general Internet was based on torrents, then the required
| upload ratio enforcement would have ensured bots contribute to
| the reliability rather than destabilize the infrastructure.
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