Why Captchas Keep Getting More Complicated | WSJ Tech Behind

[@wsj]

When did Apple’s Notes app become an extension of our brains? on.wsj.com/3YZHDjx

[@RaceCarLogic]

ahahaha xevil

[@kneelesh48]

It did not. I use Notion.

[@Psycandy]

please. a mac can't even talk to an ipad. you must be thinking of windows

[@PWingert1966]

When did our brain become and extension of Apples AI technology being used in notes!

[@flamencoprof]

Much later than writing, and the pen and notebook I used for decades.

[@user-cs9by8jd6l]

"You haven't selected all the bridges" THAT IS NOT A BRIDGE!!!!!

[@brianwelch1579]

that's because the second captcha you do is for verifying someone else's... I always feel a bit creative at these times. I mean, what IS a bridge, really? That tree there, is a bridge from the underground to the sky...

[@user-cs9by8jd6l]

@brianwelch1579 wdym second captcha? I always get that verifying images thing but not text or whatever that is. Tbh I don't remember if it was a bridge one that didn't let me go through unless I selected ones including a wrong one cuz they say either "you haven't selected all" or "here, try another one", but what I certainly remember is that either way I failed the bridge one which I believe the one that showed a roof of a gas station or tunnel or something was considered one of them. The solution I figured out is to just dart a glance at them and not think too much.

[@katrinabryce]

@@user-cs9by8jd6l The solution, it seams, is to download a plugin that does them for you. Because, you know, computers do a better job than humans at answering the tests. I mean, maybe they aren't actually better at giving the right answers, but as it is mostly computers answering them, then they are better at giving the same answers that other computers give.

[@Novastar.SaberCombat]

"THERE... ARE... FOUR... ... *LIGHTS!!*" --Picard

[@mezu-e]

​@@brianwelch1579I get like 5 sets on a bad day

[@user-hg4jk2q]

At this point, I have just accepted I am a robot.

[@bob_412]

:D :D :D

[@ValidatingUsername]

@@bob_412Did… it… just become conscious?

[@j0nrages851]

Robot or NPC?

[@axa897]

Yes it was nonsense with pictures and letters. I was human but pc made me ai 🙈🤣

[@LionHeartSamy]

beep boop

[@ezequielmochkovsky]

I’m surprised they didn’t mention that Luis is also the founder of Duolingo.

[@Imraphael_]

Thought he sounded familiar!

[@toniCbenn56]

Literally, I was thinking the same thing that he has a very familiar face and voice and that I saw him wearing that same shirt in another video😂

[@jaysmith1408]

Which has certainly gone downhill. Used to love it, now it’s the new FarmVille.

[@zumabbar]

he invented the murderous serial killer of a green bird????

[@RunaroundAtNight]

@@zumabbar I just spoke to the bird and he wants to know if you have time for a short practice?

[@flamencoprof]

Once I noticed the CAPTCHA images were all traffic-related, I assumed they were probably selling our responses, essentially getting us to train self-driving software for free.

[@cubicred]

That's because they are.

[@Daniel15au]

I'm pretty sure it was used as training data for Google's self-driving car project, now known as Waymo.

[@mezu-e]

As the video said, Captcha was used for free data training as far back as 2007

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

Possibly, but by the same token there is a massive catalog of that out there and it's typically public information that doesn't require getting permission to use the way that most other data sets do.

[@donerskine7935]

@@SmallSpoonBrigade Waymo cars live in a world that consists entirely, and solely, of traffic lights, motorbikes, bridges and fire hydrants

[@jerrywood4508]

I hate Captcha so much. I once had a website that just kept loading up another set of images for me to respond to. Over and over and over, and, stubbornly, I decided to plunge forward, even though I sensed that it would never end. And then I realized that my behavior, while terribly human, was probably exactly what a robot would do. I hate Captcha like Madeline Kahn hated Yvette in the movie Clue.

[@billwilson7745]

That happens when your VPN is on. Many spammers use VPNs for malicious activities, which leads to their IP addresses being blocked for spam.

[@TheCatLady65]

"I hate her with a burning hate"😂

[@tortilla4779]

Just click on the headphones below, write down the content of the audio being played (spelling doesn't matter) and you're done.

[@amasuri796]

Same, had this happen a few times. Didn't even use a VPN, I'm just currently in a developing country

[@nibornnyw3185]

​@@billwilson7745 It happens to me all the time at work when I don't have time to do it. We don't have a vpn either.

[@itsmeprasad1987]

Finally someone raising awareness

[@eltopo71]

Are you a Robot?

[@lellyparker]

@@eltopo71 Robot identified. Only a Robot would say "Are you a Robot?".

[@shoujahatsumetsu]

@@lellyparker Are you a Robot?

[@lellyparker]

@@shoujahatsumetsu Robot identified. Only a Robot would say "Are you a Robot?".

[@Novastar.SaberCombat]

People constantly comment "are you a bot" to my replies. I've been a content creator on YT SINCE IT'S INCEPTION IN LIKE 2005 & 2006. 💪😎✌️ Obviously, I am entirely electronically generated.

[@ChuckSwiger]

The arms race between sites and bots is like a gigantic experiment in generative adversarial networks each side forcing the other to improve and get better and better at their respective goals.

[@luminsky]

That's a good way to put it

[@-Kerstin]

There's a few other related arms races that are interesting like crackers and DRM, cheaters and anti-cheat. Whenever you're trying to make computers fail at something then someone else will make the computer better at it.

[@darihor]

Haha great explanation. Except now with recapatch, the entire goal is to see how smooth the operator is at acting human when trying to click the button... So we are just accidentally going to train a general AI that's entire life goal will be to click buttons whilst hiding among the humans. 😅

[@ChuckSwiger]

@@darihor once script I wrote to scrape prices from a site that was trying to enforce human only use involved random Poisson distributed time delays in filling out the fields - worked great.

[@bahamutbbob]

If I'm sitting down and a website asks me to get up and move around, I'm closing that dumb website and never using it again lol

[@jessg2128]

The only thing I can think about is the population that can’t see or can’t use a mouse. How is someone who can’t see or has a hard time seeing or who have dyslexia, etc., supposed to be able to read text that is made difficult to read and bypass that or people who have to use voice to text to click a box or boxes. With Dragon you can tell it to go to a certain spot on your screen. It’s going to be the most direct path.

[@riaanlouw1874]

The more modern ones, has a "read it" function, to change it to a Voice. But then, there will always be a demographic that it cnanot satisfy.

[@scarletevans4474]

@@riaanlouw1874 Does this function even work now? I hope they fixed it? I remember that few years ago, whenever I tried it to read captcha for me, it was almost always absolutely unintelligible! Sometimes some gibberish mixture of sounds, sometimes some electronic modulated screeches that were impossible to make sense of... out of maybe few dozens of different captchas that I had it to read over a course of a year or two (I was getting captchas in relation to something I was using, then I stopped using it), I understood maybe one or two... What's even the point of having it being read, if it's still impossible to even understand :d

[@choppergirlfpv]

As a blind person for 5 years, I absolutely loathed this guy. Captchas are the bane to all visually impaired people. The other bane is any user interface that defaults to black text on a white background. Most Operating System installers, application installers, phone apps, and webbbrowsers. It's like a staring into the sun. You can't see the text at all... the bright white that surrounds it blows it out and it becomes invisible, so your face is 2 inches from the screen and it's so blazingly bright, it's burning a hole through your retinas.

[@karagi101]

You can switch to night mode in most operating systems.

[@tortilla4779]

Just click on the headphones below the captcha window, write down the content of the audio being played (spelling doesn't matter) and you're done.

[@choppergirlfpv]

@@tortilla4779 Yeah, I tried that, have you ever heard it. It's absolutely unintelligable. In fact, sometimes humorously so. Captchas need to d l e period. They serve no purpose. Ditto for password requirements. The rules to make a password being known, by simply reading the rules on the screen... they reduce the number of potential passwords a brute force attack has to guess.

[@choppergirlfpv]

@@karagi101 Most operating systems do have a dark theme, but getting to the point you switch to it from a blank disk through an install... with a white themed background... is an absolutely hellish nightmare. Even once the OS is installed, assuming you can click through all the menus... drilling down to the right control panel, changing the mouse pointer to the size of a US quarter so you can actually see it... and then drilling down to the control panel to change it to a dark theme... a hellish nightmare. How can I describe it. Imagine your face is 2 inches away from a blazing light bulb, and you are staring right into trying to see a mouse pointer that is so indiscernable and tiny it's not there. The "light bulb" is the white background. The lens in your eye is clear like a piece of glass. You can shine a flash light through it. On a blind person, the lens is frosted like a piece of wax paper or a frosted car window. You shine a flashlight on it, it lights up like a glowing white wall, and you see nothing behind it.

[@karagi101]

@@choppergirlfpv I hear you. The good thing is u only need to do it once. It’s not like you will be installing operating systems on a regular basis. And perhaps next time you do someone can do this menu navigation for you.

[@PatHand-og9yd]

Google acquired captcha: now I understand why captchas have become ridiculous.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

I think it does have more to do with the fact that the systems that they're trying to defeat have just gotten a lot smarter. But, the whole thing is probably in violation of various legal protections for the disabled as they also make it impossible for some groups to get past at all.

[@billyjoejimbob75]

Their email rejections are pretty dumb too.

[@Koofteh]

Nightmare for accessibility, should be illegal. Seriously, it's a much discussed issue. The creator is like "haha even I can't get it to work right xD" as it puts disabled people at a disadvantage so big tech can save bandwidth and train their AI for free. Screw this Luis dude, this isn't funny.

[@mewantsnax8885]

What irritates me about captcha is when it gives you a single image to isolate a particular object (like a bike). You select the parts of the image with a bike, but it still tells you you're wrong. Even if you try to be conservative in your next attempt, you're still wrong.

[@memetboki]

Agreed, thats the worst captcha model imo

[@markplain2555]

Knew about this about 10 years ago. I had fun with the Captcha image thing and pick wrong images on purpose. Made it a favoured pass time.

[@erikwigelandiestad2270]

Scary thought that the “correct” answer is the one that the majority of respondents has decided upon…. Ref the traffic light test

[@herp_derpingson]

Truth is decided by the majority. There is no algorithm for truth.

[@catalindeluxus8545]

I couldn't really find a red traffic light test that would have smth to do with the majority opinion, mind explaining that please

[@RealGrouchy]

The captions (not captchas) don't match the audio after about halfway through. Please fix, it's very difficult to follow and distracting!

[@ValkyRiver]

Fun fact: humanity wastes about a total of 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs.

[@anifreak9454]

Reminds me of John Mulaney joke. "We spend most of our day telling robots that we're not robots, just to look at our own stuff."

[@mal2ksc]

That sounds impressive until you realize the same humans probably waste 500,000 years a day on what's behind the CAPTCHA.

[@callyral]

Source?

[@mvmlego1212]

If it prevents the Internet from being overrun by spambots, then it isn't a waste.

[@SorakaOTP462]

That's not a correct fact. Most captchas are solved by Chinese people who work for 10 cents per day, so that's not really a waste since they're getting rich.

[@ivanuski15]

if there's no wrong answer for the image captchas, why do i fail them?

[@TGCid01]

I think what the narrator meant by that is that they’re coded to accept whatever a certain % majority of users click. So in those weird situations where you’re wondering if a particular box counts as part of the image, as long as your choice to include/exclude agrees with what the majority has chosen, you get it right.

[@shiijei2638]

Because you're answer isn't the best not wrong answer :)

[@katrinabryce]

@@TGCid01 And the majority of "people" answering the question are bots, so you need to answer like a bot.

[@Psycandy]

but it doesn't tell humans and computers apart, and in fairness, it's a gateway that doesn't need to be there. It's an automated login which can only verify your answer if it has worked out the solution itself, thus defeating the purpose. That's why we have logins.

[@Floatingaroundonthenet]

Every other day , I see a post about encryption , data theft , dangers of AI , IT scams and what not ......but nobody is telling me what to do to reduce the chances , how to stay ahead of this ....

[@GCKteamKrispy]

1. Change passwords regularly (once a month) 2. Use password generators for random password that contains different characters and letters 3. 2 factor authentication (when sign-in: password + text message or email with code) 4. Don’t open random links (yes, hard to know what link is scam and what is not, but there are websites to check if the link is legit)

[@Wolfie_Desu]

I recommend Bitwarden as a password manager

[@ProbablyOsmium]

@@GCKteamKrispy 5. Always be suspicious of what you see online. Ask yourself how information that's being requested of you might be used against you. 6. Think carefully about any media or messages that you want to upload or post. Ask yourself if you would care whether the entire world sees that message/media. 7. Have more than one email address. Use the second address for important things like finances, don't give it away otherwise. 8. Use a password manager, and don't allow the browser to save passwords for you. 9. Your voicemail has, or should have, a password/PIN. Make it longer and more difficult to guess. 10. Your answer to a security question should be completely unrelated to the actual answer to the question, and it needs to be stored somewhere safe, like your password manager or a physical vault. 11. Panicking leads to mistakes and oversights, and hackers know this. If a person/email/popup is telling you something scary, stop and take a breath. Make sure you can think clearly before making a decision.

[@rodh1404]

@@GCKteamKrispy For 3. it's a lot better to use an authenticator app than email or text messages. Text messages are surprisingly easy to hack into if someone really wants to and has enough money and/or connections.

[@mvmlego1212]

You might be interested in the organization PauseAI. Its goal is to delay the advent of AGI until the safety concerns of the technology have been addressed. They'd be very happy to have more volunteers. As an aside: if you'd like a rigorous explanation of catastrophic AI risks, then I highly recommend Robert Miles' channel. He's also been a guest on several episodes of Computerphile.

[@randallthomas5207]

The problem with things like which squares have traffic lights, or signs, is that as a Civil Engineer, my definition of both of of them is greatly different from that of most people.

[@halloweenengineer6283]

Really? How do civil engineers define traffic lights and signs? Do some not count?

[@HobbyHoarder]

Yes, but that doesn't matter. The right answer, in this context, is whatever the majority picked, not what's technically correct.

[@bbartky]

@@HobbyHoarder That was my favorite part of the video since I think it explains why I do so poorly on them.

[@randallthomas5207]

@ Street lights are lights, traffic signals control vehicle traffic, are mounted on the arm, and in some location low post mounted or mounted on the side of the pole supporting the mast arm. Pedestrian signals control pedestrian movement, and are sometimes mounted below traffic signals below on the pole for the traffic signals, and/or mounted on their own pole. Traffic signs, are the white, red or yellow panels. Green and other informational panels are just signs.

[@jenniferlawrence9598]

Frustrating that the question in the thumbnail “does this count” isn’t answered, as that was the only reason I watched.

[@DominikJaniec]

wasn't 3:18 +15s enough?

[@Ayrshore]

The traffic lights one is really unfair - no cyclist will ever pass that.

[@Tom-sg4iv]

The worst thing is that they don't say upfront if they are not going to let you in, but just keeps going in a loop. If you click the headphones, they will say no way Jose, we are not letting you in.

[@SSJIndy]

Yesterday I had to go through FIVE tries in a row to get past the robot test on a site.

[@samuela-aegisdottir]

Last week I got in a loop of captchas, answering like ten and not being let in. I tryed on a different browser and it worked for a while and then got me in a loop again. (The website let me in but after a while it inssisted on fillling in the captchas again. And again and again and then it started to refuse my answers and just told me my answer was wrong every time, EVEN THOUGH I am sure can recognise a couch perfectly all the time (it considered armchairs to be couches too and after a while it took all my answers as wrong). I could not stop using the website because I use it for my job.

[@Soulzzzzz]

google acquired it to help with machine learning, and made the users do it. this was way before the AI standards today, back when you had to input the data yourself. so ya it will keep evolving

[@Kayzewolf]

False. They acquired it before machine learning, to be at the forefront of spam reduction and gave it free to acquire more data to tune their own systems. Machine learning is a much newer thing that likely uses this data now, but not at all the intention prior.

[@Soulzzzzz]

Ya I'm saying it was way before today's tech.first text recognition which was fairly easy to program but then pictures recognition which had tons of data to process..the tech was just following the input data and patterns to give output, dev had to do it back then.. Google made the users do it for them, very smart decision.. I remember we used to lough at the idea of facial recognition thinking it will be decades before it become usable, but then Facebook came out and we all know what happened afterwards.

[@RandomDeforge]

the over all claim that "robots" are getting better at solving these tests is because the users are feeding these robots the very data only makes sense if Google is absolutely awful at protecting it's gathered intelligence ion how humans solve these puzzles (which is unlikely), or that google turns around and resells the data it learned from its users to other parties that actually use it for breaking through by solving these puzzles. the latter seems more likely as it creates a perpetual problem/solution service for itself to sell to both sides of the root issue.

[@ayoCC]

It's because there's software you can use for computer vision and just run it on your pc like blip. Idk how it's trained but they probably have to get the labelled data somewhere But i think that's not really the reason, it's just that google has reached their goals with that particular type of training data, so they're switching it to something else that is useful

[@My_Old_YT_Account]

It's the latter and it's not even hard to see, they openly sell access to their image recognition software

[@Uerdue]

Even if they were not selling it... You could technically just create your own CAPTCHA-solving AI and train it via the feedback provided by CAPTCHAs themselves. This would admittedly take orders of magnitudes longer, but ultimately still result in your AI being able to pass the test.

[@collectorguy3919]

Tracking your browser history, mouse movement, and phone sensor data to determine whether you're human? Many humans would block that invasive surveillance if they could.

[@simontay4851]

They already do. There are browser extensions to block it.

[@InformationEngineer59]

Consider this approach, the bot wants to accomplish something. Usually, what the bot wants to accomplish is to do a certain task a gazillion times. If rather than assure that there's a human at the other end, we assure that whatever is at the other end doesn't get to to do their thing a gazillion times per second, whether they can get past captcha is beside the point -- they still can't fulfill their purpose. This method has been used successfully in preventing bruit force password hacking. Not allowing a second password to be tried for a long time (from a computer's frame of time) disables bruit force password hacking. Bottom line, don't prove it's not a computer, disable the ability for the computer to accomplish its goal of speed.

[@parad0xheart]

That works when there is one bot doing a gazillion things a second, but the bot runners already know that. It doesn't work when someone turns up with a network of thousands, or millions of computers, and they achieve the same goal in aggregate by having each bot go slowly to dodge the simple rate limiting, but together doing a gazillion things a second. We are of course adding more and more tools to the toolkit to mitigate the ever growing kit of tools that bots have, but the bot makers are also always doing the same, and not every website has the latest greatest defensive toolkit yet.

[@googleaccountuser3116]

Captchas often don't work for humans, especially when you use anti tracking &privacy tools to scrub and manipulate identifying metadata. For me captchas have been dead for a long time and the only way to pass them is with a good plugin.

[@kowaihana]

fr tho, i kept checking boxes in captcha and i couldn't get past it 💀 had to quit signing in and live without that acc

[@ppploan7625]

Oh no 😂 they aren’t that hard though 😂😂

[@kowaihana]

@ppploan7625 it was one of those where i had to select parts of an image

[@piumiu3587]

Nice try robot

[@ultimateidiot2344]

Are you sure you aren't a robot?

[@monicarenee7949]

Not beating the robot allegations

[@mandolinic]

We DON'T all have mobile phones. AI researchers all have mobile phones, and hence make the unwarranted assumption that the whole world has them. My particular worry is that new forms of CAPTCHA will inadvertently exclude groups of people, such as some disabled, or some elderly, or the visually impaired. As a British user, I'm tired of seeing CAPTCHA images featuring US based traffic images, some of which I find particularly difficult to interpret.

[@carultch]

You mean like a captcha asking you to identify the sidewalk, when you'd call it pavement?

[@mandolinic]

@@carultch That sort of thing, but also "crosswalks", or items we don't have, such as visible fire hydrants (ours are all hidden beneath the surface). None of these are an issue for me, but I worry about visually impaired or physically disabled people being excluded from some sites.

[@bahamutbbob]

Websites are smart enough to tell if you're browsing on desktop or mobile. It'll load the correct captcha type based on your hardware. Now, I don't want my phone to tell me to get up and walk around while I'm sitting comfortably, browsing something...

[@mandolinic]

​@@bahamutbbob Unfortunately, there are some sites that will only allow access via a particular device. I tried to set up phone banking on my Samsung Android pad and it wouldn't let me! iPhone or laptop - no problem.

[@arthilas_]

I'd like to see someone pick up their water-cooled full tower PC and tilt it to solve a motion captcha... 😀

[@tardistrailers]

I don't really see how spoofing a phone's motion sensor data would be that much harder to spoof than human mouse movement.

[@Uerdue]

I guess selling mobile phones yields more payoff than selling mouses?

[@bikeny]

I wanted to watch this video, but that background music isn't so backgroundy. Please, do not use any music on top of your dialogue track. Playing music while you are talking to us is a distracting practice. Thanks.

[@a-yon_n]

Google just uses these so-called CAPTCHAs to train their AI for image recognition, it doesn't matter if you select all the right pictures.

[@scottmcshannon6821]

this year ive gone to many concerts, over 10. now ticketmaster doesnt want to sell me tickets, they are claiming im a robot. i buy cheap tickets, one per show, im there for the music and i dont want to be blown out. im not sure what they are worried about.

[@PetroicaRodinogaster264]

If it wants to know if I am a robot then I generally give it a miss unless it is essential to proceed.

[@Chris_Cross]

That is one of the worst acronyms I have ever been forced to witness

[@EB-nz1qv]

Me too. And I work for DoD.

[@HariSeldon913]

Soon only bots will be able to prove they are human.

[@Haseeb2k08]

The main reason why I have switched over from google to bing. Captacha kept on showing up every time.

[@__________________________bub0]

Get firefox

[@John-Smith02]

Privacy respecting search engines: Qwant, DuckDuckGo, Brave, SwissCows. Privacy respecting browsers: hardened Firefox, Mullvad Browser, Brave Browser.

[@gavinathling]

@@__________________________bub0 Firefox is not a search engine...

[@Noname-67]

​@@__________________________bub0 Firefox isn't a search engine.

[@monicarenee7949]

Yeah now they’re just using it to train AI. In a way it helped because I used OCR at work and it really is revolutionary

[@JohnGeranien]

I am confused. If users’ inputs are used to train big tech’s bots, whose bots are ‘attacking’ big tech’s that make things more challenging?

[@semanticks]

Google's evil twin, Ogel

[@bltzcstrnx]

Big tech often release their papers or software as open-source. People use this knowledge and software for their own purpose.

[@katrinabryce]

The people doing webscraping, which is mostly operators of search engines and people gathering AI training data. Companies like Google.

[@My_Old_YT_Account]

They sell access to them

[@synthwave7]

Very interesting video - thanks WSJ

[@ableite]

Just put words that normal people cannot understand correctly but the computer can. Now the to pass the test you need to fail. Lol

[@toldt]

A losing battle, yea. I don't want to be a slave to some algorithm monitor the tilt and acceleration of my phone before I can check the balance on my bank account. It's just like the idiots that designed 'automated' faucets and paper towel dispensers that require you to spend more time and effort waving your hands around than you would have if you just turned on the water.

[@boahneelassmal]

if we take captchas into the physical world, we will create barriers for disabled people. some people may have a phone but are paralyzed from the neck down etc... So if we take that we also need to implement a way to avoid physical captchas which then will make these themselves redundant again.

[@AllanPeak-ye5qs]

Yes! I ran into a captcha problem when I needed cataract surgery. There was no f**king way I could pass the test.

[@Man2th806]

0:47 A full 25MB of email storage??? What a steal! 😂

[@TorreFernand]

the captions from the 5th minute on are completely broken. Please check them

[@publiusvalerius8934]

AI generated

[@rezwhap]

5:08 You’re just going to glance over the privacy invasion of ‘looking at your internet history’?

[@brokencat2662]

Internet has no privacy. And the sooner you learn that, the better.

[@ZeyLogger]

that's nothing new, even extensions do it

[@jstephen]

I spent over an hour on captia trying to set up a steam account. I finally gave up so no Steam for me.

[@ghyslainabel]

A company like Google may have maybe a dozen people working on a captcha system. For each company designing a captcha system, there are at least 1000 people trying to defeat it. It is not really about a fight humans vs AI, it is a fights between a few dozens people vs many thousands people.

[@RefreshingShamrock]

I haven't paid taxes in a year simply because the IRS website has too many factors of authentication.

[@animepabu5526]

Ah yes the whole battle I had to have with Steam captcha just to get into my account 💀 had to use my phone and cellular data instead of my computer because I just kept failing it and when I got it right it just didn’t accept it

[@GeorgeGeorge-yb2sz]

You can avoid any site! None are important enough to allow someone to manipulate you into wasting your precious time that you can never recover. Ask yourself what would I do if I had only one day to live? Would you waste any time with a stupid captcha? Same difference when you waste that time! it doesn't matter if it is before your last day or on your last day; you can never recover that time. I personally refuse to use any website that pops a captcha up control me. I can't find the left button on the mouse fast enough!

[@ColinWatters]

If a website uses an image type captcha I frequently go elsewhere. I'm not wasting my time trying multiple times.

[@xcoder1122]

Captcha makes no sense as even if you come up with a captcha that no computer can ever solve, then bot operators will just hire people in very poor countries that solve hundreds of these captchas a day for $5 a month.

[@notRealCapedBaldy]

The first time captcha was introduced, I strongly believe that they are also used to train bots or AIs that time.

[@nullObject_]

Best method is asking yourself: Do the squares you selected help to guide a drone strike? Works 100%.

[@mike8055]

I remember the good old days of the word captchas from Yahoo 😅

[@PLuMUK54]

I've given up on certain sites as I can not prove that I am not a robot...

[@BangkokBubonaglia]

There are some sites where you have to solve a captcha just to enter your password and log on. In one particular site that I frequent, the captchas are so difficult that despite knowing my password, it usually takes me 4 or 5 attempts to actually log in. Honestly this has gotten out of control.

[@GeorgeGeorge-yb2sz]

Why do you put yourself through that? Nothing is that important. Just remember, it wasn't that long ago no one used computers and we got along fine. I refuse to participate, they can put the captcha where the sun don't shine!

[@UserName-q4i5d]

You still can do rate-limiting and use the browser for a compute intensive task to make automation difficult.

[@junkboxxxxxx]

I love it when they tell me I'm not human.

[@greenleafyman1028]

There are more innovations in detecting robots than an innovation in creating robots.

[@bulletflight]

That's like saying "There should be more innovation in creating the Torment Nexus rather than preventing the Torment Nexus."

[@phrous]

Luis also founded duolingo

[@PWingert1966]

I keep thinking about Decker and the Voight Kamph test for androids.

[@larsord9139]

First off: we all DON'T have mobile/smart/cell phones.

[@flamencoprof]

we don't all

[@Not_First_Of_His_Name]

fascinating!!

[@paulevans9307]

I had one - hcpatcha I think - that loves transport, and would always ask two sets of questions. I had it ask me to identify boats - cue thoughts of "is that one technically a boat or a ship?", before realising that the system wouldn't care about such detail. Then the next question came up. Choose all the ships.

[@katrinabryce]

And most humans wouldn't know the difference either, and it probably depends on regional dialect etc.

[@moderncontemplative]

Glad to know that the creator of CAPTCHA fails it all the time too. Haha. It seems harder now but we need new architecture for the newer AI agents that can pass this test nowadays

[@darsdm]

CAPTCHA was designed to tell humans and machines apart. Now humans use machines to solve CAPTCHA for themselves 🧐

[@stevenirby5576]

Software engineer here who deals with bots all the time. The biggest thing now is just simply slowing them down and stopping dumb bots. Think of the locks on your house's door and windows. Will this 100% stop a professional thief who *really* wants in your home for something specific? Nope. But it's good enough to stop some random sketchy people walking up and turning the handle in the middle of the day. So you might as well add an alarm as well, with motion sensors. This will discourage and keep away most would-be thieves.

[@zenastronomy]

let me guess. bots are getting smarter than us

[@blackrookgaming]

Image capcha's are just ridiculous. Sometimes I have to go through at least ten panels of busses, fire hydrants, stairs etc before the capcha is solved. Extremely frustrating!

[@GeorgeGeorge-yb2sz]

How does it reel to be a sheep?

[@TonyP_Yes-its-Me]

I remember some comedian saying that Captcha is one of the reasons to have a robot. To solve stupid problems like Captcha tests, to save you having to do it.

[@VakarisJ]

Microsoft's captchas are some of the most inscrutable things in existence. We needed to deal with a Microsoft account in a store, to get a laptop to work. Three adult men tried to solve captchas for 30 minutes only to give up, because it was impossible. It didn't show letters to recognize, but some possibly-AI interpretations of what a letter would be in 4D.

[@Ezcte]

i cant wait for "Solve the robix cube" or "Please open your cam to prove your not a bot"

[@derekgrubbs4754]

This is one of those "bear proof trash can" type situations. The challenge of designing a trash bin that can be accessed by humans but not by bears is that when it becomes complex enough to be 100% bear proof, it becomes too complex for some people.

[@nawwk79]

2029 Captcha: Solve this quantum calculus differential algebraic topology question to prove that you are not a robot.

[@jorns6678]

In the future: Why proving you are not a human is harder then ever

[@subday5811]

I sure hope that in the age of self-driving cars ai is able to visually detect traffic lights and crosswalks

[@flamencoprof]

Note that all the CAPTCHA images are traffic-related. I suspect they are getting us to train the self-driving software for free.

[@oM477o]

Pro captcha tip: it's not about correctly guessing if the rider is part of the bicycle, it's about how much it looks like you've got parkinsons as you move the cursor across the screen

[@vctrsigma]

I always tell people: the goal isn't to get the correct answer on a captcha, it is to answer like an average human would. So just go with your gut / first reaction to what you should click on. A long time ago that took all the "stress" out of answering captchas for me and improved my passing rate.

[@samuela-aegisdottir]

When the right answer is the incorrect one, then this word is really f@cked up. (And that would actually explain a lot).

[@VampireSquirrel]

In old books there is a long S whoch looks like f with no slash. The captcha started thinking it was an f, so if you wanted to pass the captcha, you had to mark it as f, now ocr is convinced s is f.

[@a68k_de]

Some website operators go too far and overdo it with their captchas. Pointless and unsolvable captchas, as shown here, then totally pixelated images where you can hardly see anything, and then the single images reload and load more and the reload gets more slowly. How deluded are some people?! Unfortunately, simply avoiding such sites is not always possible. But it shows what kind of people the site makers are. Stupid little poor script children who let off steam. What helps with the pictures shown here is that simply clicking "Skip" often works until you have to click on 3 bikes again.

[@GeorgeGeorge-yb2sz]

You can avoid any site! None are important enough to allow someone to manipulate you into wasting your precious time that you can never recover. Ask yourself what would I do if I had only one day to live? Would you waste any time with a stupid captcha? Same difference when you waste that time! it doesn't matter if it is before your last day or on your last day; you can never recover that time. I personally refuse to use any website that pops a captcha up control me. I can't find the left button on the mouse fast enough!

[@mrdan2898]

Good, I'm not alone here on these dumb tests. Also gotta love when there is a bug in the system, such as their server being down and no matter what response is chosen, the answer is always WRONG! 🤯😠

[@Krmiby]

So this is the guy responsible for my *mild* annoyance

[@The.Kid.From.Daycare.]

Free AI training from us measly humans.

[@flamencoprof]

Yes, note the pix are all traffic-related, for training self-driving software, I suspect.

[@SandruStout]

imagine a "autocaptcha bot " watching this video???

[@BusyMEOW]

They'll just start using facial recognition in Captchas if they're not already doing it behind our backs, like when you look away from your screen when watching a YT video and suddenly an ad plays.

[@PlutoniumDG]

The best part is when they say "select all squares that include: bicycles" and all squares have only one bicycle or part of a bicycle (I obviously skip then)

[@matthewmiller6068]

Yeah these modern ones we often find ourselves having several humans squint at and debate over to try and figure out what the solution might be and still take multiple attempts to figure out successfully

[@jpting_]

Audio captchas are the only ones I can complete anymore

[@botmsj]

The video doesn't tackle the clickbait question on the thumbnail.

[@MrGenius2]

It says it does count as is what most people click, so not selecting also works, there are more than 1 solution.

[@nhansen197]

I would hate to have to pick up my desktop just to log into a web site.

[@raylopez99]

The best CAPTCHA is the one that simply asks you to click on a checkbox to prove you are not a robot. Apparently if the path taken is not too "linear" then it proves you're not a robot.

[@SuperJudeM]

I feel as though a robot could better prove it’s a person and then I could

[@sankeerthgs6864]

..and that's what makes us more human! :)

[@TommyCraze]

We… we trained books? 🤯

[@swilleh_]

Copy the captcha that requires you to move a puzzle piece left and right. Genshin Impact has it and the amount of users who successfully completed was around 97% as the captcha claims.

[@Cypher791]

We are trying to find a way to prove we are human… but soon we might need a way to disguise ourselves as bots.. in a crowd of bots you don’t want to stand out as a human…

[@SqueakyPhilosopher]

Yep. I was once banned on Google for typing over 200WPM

[@mike74h]

whatever, bot 🙄

[@SqueakyPhilosopher]

@mike74h lol. I'm not saying I type everything at that speed. Just searches I've done in the past

[@mike74h]

@@SqueakyPhilosopher I was just kidding. Wish I could type that fast!

[@lellyparker]

Public Key Encryption. It's time we all learned how to identify ourselves with public keys. It should become the cultural norm.