CAPTCHAs

Discussion in 'Miscellaneous' started by 607, Jun 22, 2023.

?

Are you a robot?

Yes. 8 vote(s) 34.8%
No. 6 vote(s) 26.1%
Maybe. 9 vote(s) 39.1%
  1. I've regularly been getting prompts that I'd never seen before. I don't recall any time since joining EMC that there has been such great variety in prompts. Of course, that only makes them trickier to solve for us. :p But potentially trickier to automate as well.

    Here's one I just got:

    I thought it was talking about colour temperature at first, because both in Dutch and in English the prompt is talking about the image, and not about what's on the image. However, when I saw three images depicting snow I figured they did mean the content, so I didn't select the image second from the top, first from the left.
  2. Lately this puzzle, which I'd gotten before, has been changed by reducing the contrast, applying some sort of haze effect.

    As often with these puzzles, I wonder if AI might have some issues with it, or if it's just to check if you're human by it taking you some time to solve it.
  3. IDK why, but I feel like they just get easier to fail. I know what a motorcycle looks like, I have an e-bike of my own. But I miss ONE single square with like 1% of a headlight and it is an automatic "Please try again."
    BlockHead_56 and Joy_the_Miner like this.
  4. Totally felt, what's worse are these:



    I'm not kidding where I've had a few of these in a row and I get the "Try Again" message regardless.
    BlockHead_56, 607 and HamilaPlayzMC like this.
  5. Huh, I just came across a classic text captcha; those are quite rare these days!

  6. 607, Raaynn and Joy_the_Miner like this.
  7. So, I don't know if you've noticed, but there are - I think - three companies that we have to deal with now.

    hCaptcha - This is newer and I actually find the puzzles easier that the horrible reCaptcha ones. Ususally you can see what they want at the top in the example picture. They have gotten a bit harder, but I rarely get in a fail loop with them.

    Cloudflare - This is very new with minecraft-mp.com. It is super simple as it seems to determine humanness by how you check a box!? I have no idea how this works, but it rarely fails.

    reCaptcha - I HATE this one. They are owned by google. Traffic lights, Cars, Motorcycles, Bicycles, Busses, Stairs, Blurry pictures. They seem to have gotten SLIGHTLY easier to navigate, but I hate them with a passion. Is the person on the bicycle or motorcycle part of the darn thing!? Is the corner of the traffic light part of the traffic light? Is there a car in that blurry picture (or not)!? If a captcha is going to get me in a fail loop it is this one most of the time. They have been at it the longest, you'd think they would be able to do better!

    Just my 2 cents worth :)
    607 likes this.
  8. for reCaptcha, never do them when it is an image partitioned, always do them when it asks to choose out of 9 images.

    sometimes it takes a few reloads to get an acceptable one.
    607 and BlockHead_56 like this.
  9. I thought I'd tell you: These systems use session information to figure out if you are human. By clicking the box, you simply allow to send that information over, after which it confirms that that session information is 1) (roughly) unique, and 2) Similar enough to typical human session information. Basically, if you open a clean and new VM trough some VPN service, open the web browser, go to the website by copying the link over, and then click the box, it will fail. Everything you do that is not that makes it work. I don't know exactly what information is available to them as I don't work in frontend, but your browser gives websites more information than you might think.

    You seem to ask that quite a lot, and there are good reasons for them being the way they are!

    First of all, you should know that most of these tasks are judged not by some ground truth, but instead by what other humans do, collecting a lot more information than just what you click (see answer above). That doesn't mean things that are easy enough to solve by machine learning aren't ever used, or that capcha's aren't beatable (most of them are,) but instead, it means that, to beat it, you'd need to know not the correct labelling, but the human labeling.

    Most of these images are deliberately made to attack networks, and usually you solving them is you doing clickwork for some AI company that is training something. As bare image detection has gotten better, you see a lot of these "attacker" images. If I'm not mistaken, those will usually be generated by the adversary in some adversarial neural network system, where it is using human input to validate its current state, or at least that is what the images look like to me.

    I should also state that there is only so much "machines cannot do this" people care about. At some point, it's cheaper to just hire a warehouse of clickworkers in Kenya, who charge tenths of a cent per completed Captcha, than to do any machine learning to solve it automatically.
    607, BlockHead_56 and Fred_TWK like this.
  10. Thanks for your contribution, I think what you're saying is probably correct.
    I didn't think that these days, CAPTCHA results were still used for training (as they used to be with the original reCAPTCHA), but thinking about it, they very well might be. It's a cheap way to get a lot of (poorly) labelled data.
    Egeau likes this.
  11. These descriptions have got quite weird!
    ultipig likes this.
  12. i bet mark zuckerberg cant beat that 1
    ultipig likes this.
  13. Lately, TopG has been using ones of these form, that require you to think what they might mean...

    You can't even look at what type of object appears most often anymore, as there are also several ducks and several jellyfishes in this one!
    BlockHead_56 and ultipig like this.
  14. i tink it migt be a infiseble item so im guesing the picture of the ocean that tolaly does not contain a camouflage submarine trust me
  15. And only having two correct answers throws me off every time with these. :p Other ones typically have three correct answers.
    607 likes this.
  16. They're now using superimposed written text as an attempt to trick, it looks like!
  17. ah, yes
    sample = pre-image-of(?)-image-content
    gotta love Germanic languages

    but yeah, still haven't seen the text variant.
    I am getting to the point where I loathe the ones that are overly distorted/overlayed with geometric patterns and noise to the point of unreadability (worse than your dolphin one there)
  18. Sometimes I switch to English for the screenshot, but the Dutch (presumably machine) translations can also be interesting. :p
    Edit: Case in point:

    I read this as 'Click the object that was made by man but cannot be carried', and was confused, because a football certainly can be carried, but so can T-shirts... 'wearable' can also translate to 'draagbaar', but it is a lot less common of a meaning for the word, which makes the prompt confusing.
    ultipig and Fred_TWK like this.