this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Anyone who has been surfing the web for a while is probably used to clicking through a CAPTCHA grid of street images, identifying everyday objects to prove that they're a human and not an automated bot. Now, though, new research claims that locally run bots using specially trained image-recognition models can match human-level performance in this style of CAPTCHA, achieving a 100 percent success rate despite being decidedly not human.

ETH Zurich PhD student Andreas Plesner and his colleagues' new research, available as a pre-print paper, focuses on Google's ReCAPTCHA v2, which challenges users to identify which street images in a grid contain items like bicycles, crosswalks, mountains, stairs, or traffic lights. Google began phasing that system out years ago in favor of an "invisible" reCAPTCHA v3 that analyzes user interactions rather than offering an explicit challenge.

Despite this, the older reCAPTCHA v2 is still used by millions of websites. And even sites that use the updated reCAPTCHA v3 will sometimes use reCAPTCHA v2 as a fallback when the updated system gives a user a low "human" confidence rating.

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[–] mynamesnotrick 96 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Need these bots as a browser addon now. When your using a VPN these things are the bane of your Internet browsing experience.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And I’ll be fucked if I can get them right first time round half the time!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Hmmm… do you float if we throw you in the water?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

I don't use a VPN and they are still highly problematic. I get stuck in a cycle, like with cloudflare.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver

it switches to the accessibility version of CAPTCHA and uses speech recognition to solve it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've never been able to get this one to work, it will say it can't detect speech even though I can hear it being played.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

for me it works most of the time, and I don't hear the speech being played at all while it's being solved. and it the rare cases when it doesn't detect speech, requesting another puzzle usually fixes it.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So the robots are now more successful at proving they’re human than I am.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

The inverted Turing test, it would seem.

Beep boop I am smarter than you... 🎵

Bleep bloop you seem to me dumb as rock... 🎼

img

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago

I need a bot then. I click through 7-8 of those and still don’t pass.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What's ironic is that the main purpose of reCAPTCHA v2 is to train ML models. That's why they show you blurry images of things you might see in traffic.

AFAIK the way it works is that of the 9 images, something like 6 are images the system knows are True or False, and another 3 are ones it is being trained on. So, it shows you 9 images and says "tell me which images contain a motorcycle". It uses the 6 it knows to determine whether or not to let you pass, and then uses your choices on the other 3 to train an ML model.

Because of this, it takes me forever to get past reCAPTCHA v2, because I think it's my duty to mistrain it as much as possible.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You're wasting your time. Your fingerprint is graded and discarded if you're not reliable

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

At least it adds noise to the system. It's better than the people who are happily training the AI.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I'm sure they use the reliability of your inputs for known images to determine whether to use your input to train unknown images.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's good, hopefully we will quit seeing them. Because I've gotten to the point if I see a captcha I just go to another site unless it's something I've got to do.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I literally couldn't pass one for something I needed to access.

I had to switch to the audio thing eventually and it took me multiple tries with that. I should just write a script that uses a fucking bot next time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Apparently someone already did with this extension: https://github.com/dessant/buster

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago

Ok, so can we get rid of them then? They're fucking annoying and waste time

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

"bots trained on tests for years now able to pass them"

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

Mfw AI is better at proving they're a human than I am

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I need a bot because I get stuck in a loop of captchas

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

It's the age old question, does the pole count as part of a traffic light?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Happy Cakeday! 🍰🎂

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Then give me a FF addon that does these for me because I'm nowhere near that successful.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

. . . that's because we've been using these images to train AI for years?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Google has. The Zürich university fella needed his own data classification monkeys.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Recaptcha 4.0.... what do you think about this image....an image of a kid riding their bike without any protective gear on a freeway.

AI: a bike with a kid on it on a road. Perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Emotion provoking images sounds like an ingenious solution honestly

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

"Let me tell you about my mother..."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

It'd be a bit unreliable, though. Not everyone has the same reaction to the same thing, nor do they express it in a similar way.

Someone might think a snake or a spider is cute, whereas another would want to incinerate it on the spot. A third might be concerned because they seem to be injured, etc.

Not to mention that image recognition/emotional analysis has been an ongoing field of research for some time. Making the link is not overly difficult.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

From a UX perspective, those things are cancer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Oh good we finally trained them enough. Can we please ~~get rid of captcha now~~ have the next portion?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

So the bots can now train the bots. About time. Now f off Google with your nasty privacy destroying captcha

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Buster is awesome to get past recaptcha. I use it with my own Speech to Text API key since its free from Google. Using Google to beat Google.

https://github.com/dessant/buster

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 months ago

At recognizing fire hydrants...

What a dumb headline. Not sure why I'm surprised.