'There is No Evil Like reCAPTCHA (v3)' (thestoic.me) 259
An anonymous reader shares a post: Like many things that starts out as a mere annoyance, though eventually growing into somewhat of an affliction. One particularly dark and insidious thing has more than reared its ugly head in recent years, and now far more accurately described as an epidemic disease. I'm talking about the filth that is reCAPTCHA. Yes that seemingly harmless question of "Are you a human?" Truly I wish all this called for were sarcastic puns of 'The Matrix' variety but the matter is far more serious. Google describes reCAPTCHA as: "[reCAPTCHA] is a free security service that protects your websites from spam and abuse." However, this couldn't be further from the truth, as reCAPTCHA is actually something that causes abuse. In fact, I would go so far as to say that being subjected to constant reCAPTCHAs is actually an act of human torture and disregard for a person's human right of mental comfort. The author goes on to make several points.
I was locked out of two of my accounts.... (Score:5, Interesting)
.
I wonder how much data google is syphoning from the websites that use reCAPTCHA? Does a shopping site let google know what I purchased? How do the websites pay google for that "free" security service?"
Re:I was locked out of two of my accounts.... (Score:4, Insightful)
More importantly, what language is TFS written in?
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I believe it's "rambling idiot", it reads much the same as the linked "article"
Re:I was locked out of two of my accounts.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Second-grade English.
Re:I was locked out of two of my accounts.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I was locked out of two of my accounts.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It’s worse. So you click on “how many images include traffic lights” and are presented with a bunch of images. So did traffic light mean just the light or does it include the entire apparatus of the light. Busses? Well, shit, sailor, there’s a little bit of tire in the image. Should I click that? Captcha is a useless thing that needs to die a horrible, horrible death.
Re:I was locked out of two of my accounts.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, but try solving them if you're obscuring your identity from Google.
You can get an endless series of them. I've spent sometimes 15-20 minutes solving captcha after captcha before giving up in disgust.
Google is an enemy of the internet, except for those who sell their souls to Google.
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Captcha is a useless thing that needs to die a horrible, horrible death.
Except it isn't. Not only does it prevent bot abuse but it is also a great way to confirm a person is at the keyboard while at the same time training AI models to identify crosswalks.
So next time the little happy [theverge.com] Google car decides to not run you over when you're crossing at a crosswalk, you can pat yourself on the back for all those times you successfully filled out a reCAPTCHA.
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It is not my responsibility to go through hurdles in order for Google's car to not run me over. They can pay employees to do their training.
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If what you say is true, can’t they design a CAPTCHA that only humans can solve?
This article has it right: you’re supposed to keep failing and failing these stupid things, because it’s not to validate you, but to train AIs.
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If what you say is true, can’t they design a CAPTCHA that only humans can solve?
Can you show me how bots have solved it, and how it's broken?
This article has it right: you’re supposed to keep failing and failing these stupid things, because it’s not to validate you, but to train AIs.
The article is poorly written rubbish from a mind that I have no doubt has trouble proving it is human. I'm not sure what kind of an idiot actually fails at solving a reCAPTCHA
Better to make use of busywork in multiple ways than to waste human effort on pointlessness. If I can train AI rather than just point out which computer generated numbers came up on the screen then we as a species are all the better for it.
Re:I was locked out of two of my accounts.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure what kind of an idiot actually fails at solving a reCAPTCHA
I'm not sure what kind of an idiot makes the statement you just made. First off, as TFA points out, (poorly written though it may be), just what in a Captcha counts as part of a sign or a storefront or whatever is often more than a little ambiguous. Second, I'm no idiot, and I have sometimes failed several Captchas in a row. Then, when I turn off NoScript for Google, and accept and don't delete Google's cookies, all of a sudden I have much less trouble passing.
I've heard that people who are actually logged in to Google have an even easier time of it - I've never tried that. Maybe you're just in the habit of bending over for Google more frequently and reflexively than are those of us who despise reCaptcha.
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while at the same time training AI models to identify crosswalks.
This is reCAPTCHA (v3). Which ones of these is a red light OR a person? A dog counts, too. It really behooves you not to get this wrong, and BTW: can you hurry it UP already?
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It might prevent bot abuse but it also prevents human interaction.
I just stop trying to use sites that demand captcha these days. Online sellers have lost sales because of this, companies have lost useful feedback, I've used expensive telephone support lines because the cheap online support is locked away from me and more than one CEO has had a direct email because it was the only way I could contact the company without jumping through hoops.
Recaptcha needs to fucking die and I'll happily go to the Google o
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> Not only does it prevent bot abuse ...and yet Facebook, Twitter, and even Google, that all use such tools are full of 'bot accounts.
Recatcha stops 'casual' abuse, but it doesn't stop abuse. It also stops a lot of humans, and as such, may be a poor choice for protecting your website if you value your users. The point being: using anything other than recaptcha should be your default choice. If, and only if, that ceases to work properly should you 'graduate' to more complex tests, until eventually, when n
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On a forum I used to run I instituted my own bot-proofing, with custom topical questions that users would definitely know, but your average bot would have no clue about. Two wrong answers and you got sent to the fiery pits of the bot spam forum. That was often really amusing, as the bots registered as having successfully passed the test and proceeded to spam the hell out of each other.
There were definitely a couple of groups which shared answer lists, because we saw different bots "successfully" answering t
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You're supposed to click what a "traffic light" means to you. Don't try to be technical - if a "traffic light" i
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No, the real problem is when said light includes a small bit on another panel - half the time it works, half the time it fails. I'm guessing Google is trying to determine which way to go.
You're missing how this works.
This is 100% driven by users. Some of the time you get extra ones to click on. Either those or the previous are the training images, where google is trying to build up a repository of correct answers. They do one with existing known answers to see if you're human, then give you a second one assuming you'll likely get most of that one right. Repeat a thousand times, and they've got a nice average of what a correct answer looks like.
So the next time you're struggling, remember to
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I don't think the image recognition is the primary way it validates that you are a human. I think the image recognition is only one of many checks, and not a particularly important one because I know for a fact I've failed it by selecting the wrong boxes and still passed.
The real tests are things like how you move your mouse and any other metrics they can gain from the browser.
That's why it fails badly with things like RDP. In RDP your remote mouse doesn't move naturally apparently. Probably only updating a
Re:I was locked out of two of my accounts.... (Score:5, Insightful)
How do the websites pay google for that "free" security service?
Google is using them to refine their machine-based image recognition algorithms.
They do this by providing users images, and you're supposed to identify something like
the text or "Find all the images with Traffic lights"
Except, the service itself is not confident in what all the correct answers will be to all
the questions.
Sure, you had better get a "threshold" of answers consistent with their data and the responses
of other users to be considered a human --- but in a previous generation of Captcha you were
improving their OCRs of scanned books, and now; given all the road questions - you're probably
helping Google improve their self-driving cars every time you answer a Captcha asking you which
pictures contain Stop signs, or whatever.
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Ah, so that's why they force me to go through 10 of them.
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>Except, the service itself is not confident in what all the correct answers will be to all
the questions.
That' why they're paying you (in the form of a free bot-repellant) to have your visitors do it for them in the first place, isn't it? Have every image classified by several people and you'll either have a fairly solid consensus, or be fairly certain it's an ambiguous image. It does mean that you have to be uncertain of N% of the answers, but the majority can be fairly solidly identified already, jus
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I was presented with an endless stream of "find the..." images.
I hate those ones because they don't explain it and it feels like its broke. It took me awhile to realize that you just have to keep going through the images until there aren't any more of the "object" they're looking for. One of the most obnoxious recapthas that there are.
Re:I was locked out of two of my accounts.... (Score:5, Funny)
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... because of reCAPTCHA. I was not able to get past the login screen because I was presented with an endless stream of "find the..." images.
Actually I've seen this bug, but now I don't remember what I did to trigger it. It was clearly an infinite loop. I also saw a different kind of infinite loop that was taking it back to the top each time around. I was pretty sure it was partly due to an incorrect configuration at the website in question, though I've seen at least one of those bugs on a another website.
However my response is just bye-bye, website. I still didn't find this story interesting, though it did produce some jokes.
nonsense (Score:2)
This guy is on crack
Or on VPN / Tor (Score:5, Informative)
This guy is on crack
Or on VPN / Tor, etc.
If Google (or some CDN like Cloudflare) detect your IP as being from there, they'll automatically fail you a couple of time and force you to solve 3-4 captchas instead of just one single.
(Go on, test it !)
(Also, most good anti-tracker will by design (obviously) disable the feature that Google relies on to detect your human-ness and/or remember you already solved a captcha on some other log-in page, and will cause you to always need a captcha on every login page.)
TL;DR: the progressive worsening of his captcha "experience" might also be simply the symptom of him progressively using better anti-tracking technology.
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If Google (or some CDN like Cloudflare) detect your IP as being from there, they'll automatically fail you a couple of time and force you to solve 3-4 captchas instead of just one single.
(Go on, test it !)
Yeah, I get why Google is hostile to Tor, as privacy is their business enemy, but I do with websites would run a different CAPTCHA on their hidden services.
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If Google (or some CDN like Cloudflare) detect your IP as being from there, they'll automatically fail you a couple of time and force you to solve 3-4 captchas instead of just one single.
(Go on, test it !)
They don't fail you. They simply set a far higher requirement for passing presenting both more complicated images as well as requiring you to complete it in multiple sets.
Re:Or on VPN / Tor (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't. I just close the window.
I tried to order some chicken online for a party. The order was to close to $200. Order it, pay for it, then go pick it up. When it came time to pay, the website tossed up one of these captech things. I'm not going to solve an annoying puzzle to pay you money.
I called the business and let them know why how big my order was and why I canceled the order. The next time I tried to order the annoying puzzle was gone. The only way to be rid of this garbage is to let the people know that use it, that we will not use their services as long as it's there.
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They aren't doing it to be mean to you,
I should clarify the story some. I cancelled the online order and called to let them know why I cancelled it. We actually went to the restaurant and placed the order in person. So the restaurant wasn't out out any business. I just wouldn't be ordering online because of it.
I told them the problem, they fixed it. All is good.
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If they detect that you're using the same IP as a large number of other users, then they will try to identify you as a unique user through the use of tracking and making you fill out captchas.
This happens because people abuse tor and vpn services to perform nefarious activities, and google has no other way to differentiate you from these users. The same thing happens with ISPs that use CGN whereby a large number of their customers originate from the same address. I get exactly the same problem when i travel
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One more reason to avoid any ISP that forces CGNAT upon you...
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If google can't differentiate you from a bot running on an infected machine connected to the same isp, then neither can anyone else except the ISP...
Noone who runs an online service wants spambots filling their systems up with crap, so they have an incentive to block abusive addresses or inconvenience them with captchas.
Having your own static address doesn't give google any more ability to track you in particular, all they know is that your traffic originates from a particular address/addressblock and that
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If google thinks you are harmless, all you have to do is click a button...
If your traffic is originating from an address which is shared with abusive bots then you will have to fill out a complex captcha. That's why it affects TOR, public VPN services and CGNAT users.
For those of us with our own dedicated addressing, it's just clicking a button at worst.
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I don't know if it's v3 or not, but the latest recaptcha is in essence nothing more than the act of clicking a button. It just happens to look like a checkbox.
Only if Google already know who you are. When you're intentionally disrupting their ability to track you and your internet usage, no, it's not just clicking a button.
Such an easy simple and trivial action to prevent so much harm.
"Just give all your data to Google" isn't something I'd class as simple or trivial.
Not geo-limited (Score:2)
Another theory: Google is using some sort of geolocation
I do not think it's *geographically* linked, though
that ties particular sets of IPs to known spam hotspots.
Yup, the Anti-Tor and Anti-VPN "features" of Google are touted as "anti-bots" features.
So if you go to more middle or upperclass network neighborhood where all the users simply watch cat videos or post selfies on FB, then you won't get that mountain of reCaptchas.
You might only be watching cat video, but do you really know what the 2 viruses and 3 botnet nodes running on the same computer are currently doing?
(Do you expect most of the Joe-6-pack "I'm using internet for Instagram" crowd to have any clue about cyber security ?)
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Lots of Slashdot users can't even pass a Turing test.
Re:nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
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You say!
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Lots of Slashdot users can't even pass a Turing test.
Boobs
Better off reading "You are Not a Gadget" (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of this post, that we as individuals should not be compelled to provide free labor (or "content") to the tech giants was rather more elequontly stated by Jaron Lanier in his book "You are Not a Gadget". It's a fascinating, well written book that I would recommend to anyone interested in the effects of digital communications on society.
In addition, I think the author of this rant would be better served by making it less "rant-y". In fact, writing "reCRAPcha" actually dilutes his or her message by going to the lowest common denominator.
It reminds me of posts about DemoRATs or RePUKElicans that make me tune out and totally discount the author's point.
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that we as individuals should not be compelled to provide free labor
Except you're not providing free labour. You are directly benefiting from what you put in through a third party authenticating you as a human actor to a website.
I would argue the opposite. Going back to identifying numbers randomly generated to prove you are human is a colossal waste of human resources that could better be spent improving something (e.g. an AI image recognition model for traffic lights).
Just because Google's model benefits from your work does not mean you're giving them free labour.
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Necessary evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, if it wasn't for all the jackoffs building bots to create fake accounts, post spam, and all the other nefarious activities that CAPCHA's help curtail, we wouldn't need them. And they do help curtail a lot of it. All of it? Dunno.
I'm not sure Google is going to be very forthcoming with statistics regarding the effectiveness of reCAPCHA. I'm not even sure how Google could go about quantifying it's effectiveness.
Now, the article mentions something rather conspiracy-theory styled: Google is just doing this to train this AI's. Uhhh, no. Google is doing this to help ward off the spam and bots. It's just a bonus they can use it to train AI recognition systems too.
I really don't think Google is turning around and selling their AI know-how to spammers/scammers to defeat their own reCAPCHA system. That's why you see things like buses, traffic lights, cross walks, etc. They're trying to improve their self-driving AI. Is that really so wrong? Kill two birds with one stone? Seems pretty efficient to me. Ward off spam, get some AI training as a payback.
And most people don't seem to mind. I've clicked on the buses many times myself, it's not the end of the world. You see, you don't see the 'payoff' for this necessary evil, cuz the whole point is to ward off unwanted spam. If you're not seeing the effect, well, duh, that's the frickin' point.
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The problem, ironically enough, are anti-tracking extensions and anti-fingerprinting protections.
If you don't use those, Google and therefore reCAPTCHA can track your activity around the web and be fairly certain that you are not a bot and you get a simple checkbox.
If you do use them, then Google can't tell you from a million other users, and you get the whole "identify the tiles with boats in them" stuff.
Apple's anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting efforts have effectively made it so that all iOS devices
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Doesn't happen to me at home, i have static addressing with ipv6...
It happens to me a lot when mobile, as the mobile operator uses CGNAT and only supports ipv4, so my traffic originates from the same source address as thousands of other customers.
Re:Necessary evil (Score:4, Informative)
So much this. I ran some small web forums for years, and without reCAPTCHA or other services like it (using the default CAPTCHA that shipped with the forum software) I would get dozens of spam accounts a day. On a small site that was more a hobby than anything else, not a big presence by any means. After reCAPTCHA, I was able to take a break and not mass clean the forum of (unactivated) spam bot registrations every day. I shut down the last of those about a year ago, but I seriously doubt the problem is any better.
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The bots don't have to necessarily be smart, Google only has so many images to feed you and once the machine learns them all the system becomes useless. They can learn them faster than you can add them.
Small site owners need to connect with systems such as Project Honey Pot, it's really the only way to stop these guys. Yes, it requires human intervention if you are the first one hit, but relying strictly on tech means
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Project Honey Pot blocks traffic based on source address...
Large numbers of people are stuck behind CGNAT, so all it takes is for one customer of the same ISP to perform some malicious activity or become infected with some kind of malware and every other customer gets banned too.
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Google is using machine learning to stop them while the machines are learning at the same time, using the same pictures. It's a cat and mouse battle of technology, except that it really isn't, it's an illusion. The bots don't have to necessarily be smart, Google only has so many images to feed you and once the machine learns them all the system becomes useless. I tried captcha, the bots broke through all the time. I required extra items such as social media links, they just added that to t
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People not running sites and servers have no clue the mount of people trying to hack into things, it's simply staggering.
Yup. Put up any popular forum software on a site that gets even minimal traffic and within days you'll be getting so much comment spam and bot registration it would be a full-time job to wade through it without some kind of automation.
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What does work is setting up lists for site owners to share and report bad actors, like Project Honey Pot, which are then blocked.
So what you're doing is blocking anyone who is forced to share an IP with other users... An increasing number of users are behind CGNAT, you might have a large provider with a few million customers behind a small pool of source addresses. All it takes is for one of those users to become infected with malware and you'll get the shared address blacklisted - then all the other customers are blocked despite having done nothing wrong.
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NPR, Planet Money, did a piece on reCaptcha recently, and they certainly report that reCaptcha was, and is, in fact used to train AI image recognition.
https://www.npr.org/sections/m... [npr.org]
reCAPTCHA is a symptom of what's really wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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I pretty much agree, but I do not see any solutions. Curbing greed, the desire to spy on people, the desire to tell other what to think and how to live, etc. are either unattainable or far in the future of humanity. We have just gotten far enough that the independent thinkers (a small minority) can see what is wrong. That is a very early stage.
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Before google it was altavista, and yahoo etc... SEO spammers will always target the most widely used search engines, and will work out ways to exploit the algorithm for their own gains.
americanisms (Score:5, Interesting)
We quit using recptcha over five years ago on our websites
When i do get challenges i often have to decode the amiricanism's crosswalk is one which means something else. Yes i vaguely know what it is but what they look like.
The low res pictures do not help
ps - not an american.
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When i do get challenges i often have to decode the amiricanism's crosswalk is one which means something else. Yes i vaguely know what it is but what they look like.
Be thankful it's not "pick all the squares with water in them" and it is a picture of a bottle of Bud Light next to what you think is an empty glass, but you can't tell because of the picture quality. Do you click all the squares? Do you click none of them!?
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Took me all of ten seconds to pop a new page and enter a search. Surely a nonAmerican can do the same for "crosswalk".
Chrome extension captcha solver (Score:2)
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"We're sorry, we've seen too much traffic coming from your network."
The solvers use the audio version, and far too often Google just arbitrarily blocks it. I guess blind people aren't human.
Just use "Invisible reCAPTCHA" (Score:2)
An easy workaround? (Score:2)
I never bother with any site(s) that implement CrAPCHA's, but I wonder: How does it handle accessibility?
What if I blind person needs to 'login' or whatever the CrAPCHA is blocking? Does it even come up for them? Does the 'audio' version even work (and what if the person is also deaf)?
Seems to be this might be an easy workaround.
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If you're blind and deaf then I think you're down to asking someone to help you with recaptcha.
If you're not blind or deaf then I still recommend that approach.
Ultimate revenge (Score:2)
The reason that people fail reCAPTCHA v3 prompts so consistently now is because Google realised there was no punishment to forcing people to solve more of these 'human verification puzzles' and only more to gain by forcing (yes it IS forcing) people to train their AI for free.
Seem to me revenge is best served cold: just identify anything but the damn traffic lights (or whatever), because it seems it just keeps asking until it's content that it got enough 'training' from you, so you might as wel
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Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
Randall is always on point.
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From TFA:
The reason that people fail reCAPTCHA v3 prompts so consistently now is because Google realised there was no punishment to forcing people to solve more of these 'human verification puzzles' and only more to gain by forcing (yes it IS forcing) people to train their AI for free.
Seem to me revenge is best served cold: just identify anything but the damn traffic lights (or whatever), because it seems it just keeps asking until it's content that it got enough 'training' from you, so you might as well pollute their data.
Well, you have to identify everywhere their automatic suicide cars thinks there MIGHT be a traffic light, but isn't sure. If you select a picture it is sure about, you will fail.
ITT: (Score:2)
RECAPTCHAs and Google's Terms of Service (Score:3)
I'm in a debate right now with TIAA, who added one of those Goddamn things to their website.
I pointed out (a) it's not an absolute guarantee of human activity, AI has defeated previous instances of this and will soon beat this one, too. (b) The TIAA website now makes me subject to -Google's terms of service- by including that. (c) If TIAA was actually serious about security, they'd add 2-factor authentication, like every other financial service I use has done.
Their response:
"Thank you for your email and the details you have provided. I forwarded the feedback provided to our IT department for review."
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Sounds like a very one-sided debate.
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True.
"Corporate IT means never having to say you're sorry." (or responsible...)
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Wait, does v3 make you click stuff too? (Score:2)
I was under the impression that reCAPTCHA v3 did away with the annoying-as-hell "click all the busses" type answers and uses a rating system instead. Are they using this as a fallback now?
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I was under the impression that reCAPTCHA v3 did away with the annoying-as-hell "click all the busses" type answers and uses a rating system instead. Are they using this as a fallback now?
They only do away with it if Google has succesfully tracked you and know exactly who you are and what you have been doing..
Click this Google! (Score:2)
Delusional submitters and editors (Score:2)
This submitter labors under the self-imposed delusion that he's an articulate wordsmith; he's not. The first two strings of punctuated words masquerade as sentences; they are not sentences.
To add injury to the insult, the hapless editor tasked with reviewing this drivel and assessing its worthiness also labors under a delusion of competency; neither is she competent. She approved this drivel as suitable for global readership; it most certainly is not suitable.
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Maybe they're both bots.
Anti-spam (Score:5, Interesting)
If they can do it, why can't reCAPTCHA? The short answer is that they most certainly could, but that would mean not mining humans for free AI training while making them frustrated and angry.
Poor, poor "the author" (Score:2)
The author goes on to make several points.
Unfortunately, he is making them to his dog.
His dog is not sure he is human.
Fido asks him which photos have fire hydrants in them.
What "right to mental comfort"? (Score:2)
"The author goes on to make several points." (Score:2)
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When your government requires reCAPTCHA (Score:4, Interesting)
Opting to just do without is sort of difficult when your government requires citizens and residents like you to satisfy reCAPTCHA in order to exercise your right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." This has been the case, for example, in public comment periods associated with copyright rulemaking, as reported in "The U.S. Copyright Office requiring proprietary software in DMCA anti-circumvention study" by Joshua Gay [fsf.org].
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Opting to just do without is sort of difficult when your government requires citizens and residents like you to satisfy reCAPTCHA in order to exercise your right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." This has been the case, for example, in public comment periods associated with copyright rulemaking, as reported in "The U.S. Copyright Office requiring proprietary software in DMCA anti-circumvention study" by Joshua Gay [fsf.org].
A government website looking for public feedback might be one of the only acceptable venues for reCAPTCHA.
I really don't want the handy work of one idiot savant and his bot writing skills to determine the future of public policy.
I'd rather click on a couple fucking store fronts or some shit.
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Unfortunately, Recaptcha excludes users with disabilities or language barriers. which is unacceptable for government-public interactions.
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Unfortunately, Recaptcha excludes users with disabilities or language barriers. which is unacceptable for government-public interactions.
Nice try
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>just pay for the cable that *doesn't* have ads I didn't know ignoring things solved them. I must have solved the kardasians and EAgames by now.
Not on the whole but if you ignore them do they bother you? If no then yes, you have.
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I don't think evil means what the author thinks it means.
There is small, persistent evil that is committed over and over again and accumulates. There is larger, isolated evil, probably what you are talking about. There is also really large evil like starting a war or establishing totalitarianism. But funny thing, the first and the last one are those that cause by far the most harm.
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There is small, persistent evil that is committed over and over again and accumulates. ... those that cause by far the most harm.
Just so. I'm reminded of Good Omens, wherein Crowley covertly takes a hand in the design of London's M25 and thereby ensures daily misery for tens of thousands of drivers.
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Given this shit is more likely to cause me to flip and go on a murderous rampage than anybody's skin colour, yeah, this is truly evil.
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My bank requires reCAPTCHA.
Change bank. Let them know why.
Various government services require reCAPTCHA.
Use their telephone service instead. Tell them why.
this is becoming all but unavoidable, especially if you want to comment and not just read
Only if you stop avoiding it. Avoid it. Sure, it'll prevent you commenting on some sites but fuck them, they didn't want your thoughts anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
You probably live in a first world country, where you have ipv6 or your own dedicated ipv4 address...
Many people in other countries are stuck behind carrier grade nat and sharing a single ipv4 address with thousands of other customers. All it takes is for one of those customers to be infected with spam-sending malware and google will require everyone originating from the shared address to submit captchas.