Comment by ranger_danger

2 days ago

And many proxy/scraping providers now use real browsers that can automatically bypass cloudflare captchas as well, and a bot with a real browser similarly won't be clicking on any invisible links, so... I am skeptical just how long this will make an appreciable difference.

So what you’re saying is that a CAPTCHA cannot actually T C and H A.

  • Telling humans and computers apart was never the purpose of CAPTCHAs, only how they initially worked. The name has been a complete misnomer for at least a decade now. Its actual purpose is, and has always been, abuse prevention. Has it been successful? Some yes, some no, and a lot of collateral damage. Its mode of operation now looks a lot like inscrutable blacklisting for some plus inconvenience and bad rate limiting for the rest.

    • How does a human abuse a website, and how does a CAPTCHA stop a human from abusing a website when it's designed to let a human in? If it doesn't stop humans from abusing the site, then it must stop... computers from abusing the site. And it stops computers by using the CAPTCHA to tell apart a human and a computer? Am I wrong here?

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