Comment by inigyou
2 months ago
A fun fact about Google captchas: they've often decided whether you will succeed or fail the captcha before you do the captcha.
2 months ago
A fun fact about Google captchas: they've often decided whether you will succeed or fail the captcha before you do the captcha.
This seems nonsensical. Care to elaborate?
If Google determines you're an undesirable user, doing the captcha is just an exercise to waste your time.
I certainly experienced this (the vicious try-again cycle) but curious if you have any sources for this?
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That explains why I can never get past Google's captchas! I don't even automate Google searches, I wonder why they don't like me.
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The captcha itself (matching pictures to text) is mostly for ML training data. I think pass/fail is mostly based on heuristics like how you moved your mouse which could get analyzed before you complete the captcha. https://www.techradar.com/news/captcha-if-you-can-how-youve-...
reason why is 1. Google and others really needed the training data, and 2. it probably helped justify the cost of providing the captcha service for free worldwide (old free tier was 1M/mo)
That was Louis von Ahn’s stated goal when he announced it - i think it was his NIPS (now NeurIPS) talk where he basically outlined the training data paying for the infrastructure as a fair exchange.
I implemented something similar for my bot defences. If headless chrome is detected you still get the same anubis-style PoW but even if you submit the right answer you get rejected.