cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10158671
There's a reason captchas have moved mostly image identification systems. These text-based captchas have all been defeated for years.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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I remember that Jdownloader could crack some CAPTCHAs back in the 00's.
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It's a bit weird how that actually works though...
"Which of these pictures are traffic lights?"
I'd hope with all the self-driving-(ish) cars coming out, any AI like that should be able to identify a traffic light, right?
When you "solve" a captcha like that, you're just helping train the AI you're talking about.
The stuff that determines whether you're a not or not is based on browser information, how you interact with the page, etc.
That's exactly what you're doing, training the AIs to identify that.
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Nobody mentioning it got the captcha wrong? That's a p not a P which while admittedly a tiny mistake would still be counted as a fail
Goes to show that it's only human.
After all
Many (most?) captchas I stumbled upon weren't case sensitive.
I've run into a few.
Puts 40yo tech against current tech
How is the current tech possibly winning...
Nowadays there are some really annoying CAPTCHAs out there, such as:
- "Click over the figures that are upwards/downwards" and various rotated bears
- "Rotate the figure until it matches the given orientation" and a finger pointing to some random direction, as well as rotation buttons that don't work the way you would mathematically expect them to work
- "Select all the images with a bicycle until there are none left" and the images take centuries to fade away after you click them
- "Select all the squares containing a bus" and there are squares with the very corner of the bus that make you wonder if they are considered as part of "squares containing A bus"
- "Fit the puzzle piece", although this is the least annoying one
In summary, the CAPTCHAs seemingly are becoming less of a "prove you're not a robot" and more of an forced IQ test. I can see the day when CAPTCHAs will ask you to write down a Laplacian transform for the solution f(x) to the differential equation governing the motion of a mass considering the resistance of air and aerodynamics, or write down a detailed solution to the P versus NP problem.
Those "select tiles with a bicycle" are us training image recognition programs.
at that point i just assume im the one they are keeping out and just close the tab
AlrightThenKeepYourSecrets.gif
I hate the puzzle piece ones, they never actually load the site for me.
Honestly, I'm not mad if AI fully defeats captchas to the point they go away. They almost always fail to be usable via accessibility tools. These things might block some automated systems, but they also block people with disabilities.
What will you replace them with? They won't go away, they will just get harder
"lick this and tell me what it tastes like"
When I ran a public installation of web forum software (more than a decade ago), I got spambot registrations, then I think I just set up a captcha where users had to answer some really simple question; this kept the spambots away.
That worked because you were not personally targeted. Someone could defeat this system if they wanted to
Anything that doesn't involve the user noticing it ever
DRMs and ring0 checkers are not a solution
Got crowdstruck
While everybody's right in saying text captchas are outdated, there are concerning amount of services (especially for small-mid businesses) that still use them.
Anyway, if an AI could control something like Selenium with the necessary modifications (aka not presenting itself as Selenium), I am pretty sure most of the "Click here to confirm you are an human" captchas like the cloudflare one would be defeated too.
I think the most challenging are image-based weird challenges that are difficult even to humans. The annoying ones.
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Most bots out there aren't backed by chat gpt. We had a flood of Russian boys using a sign up for on a site to send spam emails by putting the spam in the names and address fields. Slapping the most basic of captchas on the page solved it.
Aren't captchas used to better train AIs to be able to recognize stuff?
That's the idea of those "which pictures contain bikes?" ones and the ReCaptcha (where you had two words from books). In the book one, one of the words is known and the other is not. They'll present the same unknown word to people until they get a clear answer from many dozens or hundreds of entries, using the known word as a control. Then that other word goes into the known words category.
moldy meme
Meaning, if it's wrong, you're a human?