• MehStrongBadMeh@programming.dev
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    2 months ago

    There’s a reason captchas have moved mostly image identification systems. These text-based captchas have all been defeated for years.

    • ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Yeah because whomever “owns” the data needs humans to train their bots, not because the image based bot detection is better than other methods.

      • node_user@feddit.uk
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        2 months ago

        There used to be hoardes of sites offering free downloads, quizzes, porn etc etc. You would have to solve a captcha to get through, but they were ‘stuck’ in an infinite loop. I always believed it was being used by spammers/hackers to bypass actual captcha elsewhere on the web. Its kinda genius, offloading the work to randoms looking for free stuff…

        • hinterlufer@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I also remember services you could pay to get your captcha solved via a browser extension. You could also register as a captcha solver there to earn a few bucks stupidly solving captchas. Although I’m not sure if they were actually legit.

        • Terrasque@infosec.pub
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          2 months ago

          I remember back in the day this automated downloader program… the links had a limit of one download at a time and you had to solve a captcha to start each download.

          So the downloader had built in “solve other’s captcha” system, where you could build up credit.

          So when you had say 20 links to download you spent some minutes solving other’s captchas and get some credit, then the program would use that crowdsourcing to solve yours as they popped up.

    • breakingcups@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Funnily enough, the reason they switched to those was to use the data to train machine learning (AI) models, just like Google’s recaptcha was originally pictures of words from old, scanned books so they could transcribe all of them “for free” and train their transcription algorithms.

      • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        Man I miss the times when Google used to trick us into helping make knowledge more easily accessible to everyone. Now we just train fucking AI for luxury cars.

      • MehStrongBadMeh@programming.dev
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        2 months ago

        Yeah, at this point, most forms of image identification catches have also been defeated, not quite 100% success yet, but they’re getting there

    • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      If they add audio captchas for the visual impaired then those image captchas can be circumvented. There is a Tampermonkey script on GitHub that can defeat Recaptcha by solving the audio captcha.