cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10158671
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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There's a reason captchas have moved mostly image identification systems. These text-based captchas have all been defeated for years.
Yeah because whomever "owns" the data needs humans to train their bots, not because the image based bot detection is better than other methods.
The images are not actually the captcha. They've used other methods and tools to verify your authenticity, then they force you to help train their image recognition AI under the guise of it being the actual captcha. Its Distributed Forced Labor, and Google has been using captchas to do this for decades. Remeber the picture-of-two-words captcha? One word was always squiggly and the other was not. The squiggly word was the real captcha, the other word was from a scanned book and you were helping to train their OCR algorithms.
I remember that Jdownloader could crack some CAPTCHAs back in the 00's.
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.
They are legit, I use them for my bots
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.
Yeah, at this point, most forms of image identification catches have also been defeated, not quite 100% success yet, but they're getting there
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.
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.
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.
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.