- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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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I mean, we literally train them by completing the CAPTCHAs. Why do you think you were picking things like bikes, traffic lights, cars, and busses? The only question now is what’s next…
they embed dark souls into the browser
In order to pay your utility bill, you have to beat the Undertale Sans fight in Genocide mode
Lmao
Prove you’re human: Beat this level of DOOM.
Wait, so if a visitor fails the v3 Captcha, v2 is used as a fallback?
That makes absolutely no sense.Not quite: it’ll drop a v2 captcha for you to solve when a v3 one can’t clearly classify you one way or another.
So if v3 isn’t entirely sure you’re human, it’ll make you do a v2.
And if you fail the V2, it’ll just take your word on it and let you pass anyway.
…seriously? lmao.
Insert hello-fellow-humans meme here.
god I fucking wish
V3 isn’t necessarily more effective than V2, it’s just less obtrusive.
My score is lower.
I never get the first one and rarely the second one. If it says to click all the squares with motorcycles and it’s just the one big picture, am I supposed to click stuff like the tire and mirrors? I always do and never get it right. Then most of the time they ask me to identify motorcycles, they show me motor scooters and what am I supposed to do then? I think I just need to get one of these bots to do it for me.
Fwiw they aren’t really asking about the motorcycle. I mean they are but they are washing your mouse movements and how fast you click through the images. It’s okay to get a few images wrong.
Not quite.
It’s mostly wisdom of the crowd, as it always has been.
As long as you mostly click the same squares most other people click, you pass.
You often at random get 2-3 images because 2 of them are actual checks, but the third is a new image that you auto pass and they’re using it to gather data on what the average clicks are on it.
A motor scooter is a motorcycle in the eyes of the law.
Not everywhere.
Where I am, you need a special license to drive a motorcycle, classified as having an engine of 51ccs or more, whereas a scooter is any motorcycle with a less than 51ccs and doesn’t require a special license.
That’s a moped, a motor scooter is just a style of bike.
Mopeds are similar but have pedals and can be used as a bicycle. The name itself, Mo-Ped" is a portmanteau for motor and pedal.
Motor scooters are different in that they have a cut out for the rider’s legs/ feet so they don’t have to straddle it the same way they would with a motorcycle. Both mopeds and motor scooters do not require a license endorsement here, while motorcycles, as defined in my original comment, do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped
The definition in most countries is less than 50cc and a maximum power output, they do not need to have pedals. Anything over 50cc is a motorbike.
So a moped with a 49cc engine, astep-through design, and no pedals is a moped but a scooter with a step-through design and 49cc engine is a motorcycle?
That’s confusing as fuck lol
I bet you use the word “actually” in conversions regularly.
When it’s asking for motorcycles but it’s clearly a scooter
Worse is when its asking for crosswalks and its clearly a rumblestrip.
Or, like, “there’s the bottom 10% of a traffic light in this one. Do I click that box? Ia that supposed to count?”
What they are doing is comparing your answer and seeing if it is consistent with how it has been answered previously. They realize that not everyone is going to give the exact same answer, so as long as you answer it in a way that enough other people have answered it, it should let you in.
I’ll usually go with the minimum number of clicks that I think will get me through, since I’m lazy and it’ll also at times slow down how fast you can click which is annoying.
I’ll also answer them wrong if I think it’s a mistake that enough other people will make. “Yes… that RV over there is a bus…”
They are also overly US centric.
One of the questions asks you to click on only the school buses. I had to Google how you tell the difference between a school bus and not a school bus.
Also is it a crosswalk if it’s at an intersection or is it only a crosswalk if it’s in the middle of a road somewhere?
The questions either need to be not cultural or they need to be adapted for where they detect the user is coming from, the first option seems easier.
School busses and regular busses look completely different. What do those look like in your country?
Same as any bus
So if you see a picture that obviously a regular bus, alongside a different bus, what would you infer from that when asked which bus is not the same as “any bus”?
How would you know what is a regular bus and what is not a regular bus for a given country?
Well here in, not the United States of America land, we just have busses. I was not aware that busses required a special magic paint job.
I suppose the paint job prevents school shooters wasting their time.
Interesting. Do you not have school buses, or are school buses not distinctly marked? How do kids get to school when it’s beyond walking distance?
You know, regular buses
And, you know, school busses.
Now imagine if they looked this same loo
They are just buses.
I guess the British government just assume that school children are smart enough to get on the right bus without them being individually distinct.
I knew school buses are yellow but I did not realize that they are always yellow. I did not realize that the yellow color meant school. I just assumed that the yellow color was a color busses could be.
The size of the UK verses the exponentially larger size of the US probably has a lot to do with it.
And if you knew school busses where yellow… Where’s the problem?
Does the backside of a traffic light even count? What about these strange traffic lights that have more boarder than light?
How about “do they want just the bulbs or the pole holding it up?”
That tip of a handle bar that makes you wonder if that square counts or not.
Does it count when the AI driving the car clips it?
Or the square with the driver in it: does it classify the driver as part of the motorcycle?
I had one with one of those Motorcycles with the long handles, apparently they aren’t part of the bike, but the dudes foot holding it up is.
I think the reason AI are better than humans is that the AI is just as stupid as the image classifier.
CAPTCHA doesn’t stop bots, and let us be honest, it never really did. It frustrated the hell out of people though, and caused people to waste time doing these challenges. Meanwhile even before AI bad actors and bots could get past it simply by using captcha solver services run by exploited humans solving captchas for the service.
It’s a display of security theater meant to make normies feel safe but in reality doesn’t stop most bad actors.
Well yeah, I’d hope so, that’s the entire point.
Catcha’s data collection always was with the intent for training ai on these skills. That’s “the point” of them.
It’s reasonable to expect that the older version of captchas can now be beaten by modern ai, because they’re often literally trained on that exact data to beat it.
Captcha effectively is free to use on websites as a tool because the data collection is the “payment”, they then license that data out to people like OpenAI to train with for stuff like image recognition.
It’s why ai is progressing so fast, captchas are one of humanity’s long term collected data silos that are very full now.
We are going to have to keep progressing the complexity of catches as it will be the only way to catch modern AIs, and in turn it will collect more data to improve it.
Yeah, my understanding is that these capchas were made to harvest data to use for AI/Autopilot driven cars. That’s why they are always having you identify motorcycles, bycicles, crosswalks, stoplights, busses, etc. It’s all stuff that automatic driving cars have had a hard time identifying.
We are going to have to keep progressing the complexity of catches as it will be the only way to catch modern AIs, and in turn it will collect more data to improve it.
I wanted to use 4chan alot before I came here, but FUCK that slider capcha. I bailed after the first time I didn’t pass.
I wanted to use 4chan
I am relatively confident that you are one of the first people to ever type that sentence out.
I reread his comment three times because I was convinced I must have read it in error somehow.
4chan is more than /b/ and /pol/, you know. The porn boards are pretty good at least
I think I’m good on that, but you do you m8.
Meanwhile I sometimes fail those. I have been locked out of applications because I missed a square of a bus, or perhaps because I like to be efficient in my mouse cursor movements. I ducking hate CAPTCHAs.
the new ones suck so fucking much though
If I see the newer ones pop up at all I just skip what ever the task is that was requiring me to bother with it.
i love when websites (twitter is a really bad example) hit me with like 8 captchas, and then if i get my username/password wrong i have to do another 8. It’s just so obviously gaming for training data on shit lmao.
What is it actually training? Google owns captcha right?
There is a Russian captcha solver bot called xevil that costs under $100 (I think, last time I looked) that has been able to solve nearly all captchas for years. You just have to supply it with relatively expensive proxy IP addresses because Google rate limits solve attempts.
So the title of this article has been true for a long long time. Capatchas are absolutely useless except against poor or uninformed script kiddies.
Technically the “correct” answer is set by the highest percentage of people choosing it. EG: 19 people select Box A and 1 selects Box B, then the machine decides Box A is in fact correct.
That means these AI could be selecting the wrong answers for all anybody knows, if enough of them are answering the prompts, and still passing.
So…if CAPTCHA are already beaten by bots what’s the point if it still exists ? to mock our weakness ?
In the old days CAPTCHA could do its job, but nowadays nah…even crawler/scrapper/meta bots can bypass it easily.
The real question is why do we as real humans still often fail to beat CHAPTCHA? Are we less human? Are we really robots in CHAPTCHA perspective ?Just because it’s possible, doesn’t mean it’s common.
To train Google/Cloudflare’s AI tools, and to double check against DDOS. That’s it.
So now we’re going to have AI training other AIs
Wait, there’s a movie about this …
And yet I can’t beat the CAPTCHAs because reCAPTCHA doesn’t like VPNs lol
I was going to say I’ve straight up just left whatever website I was trying to access because I was stuck in some endless loop of clicking on street crossings, buses, bikes, and street lights.
Captcha these days isn’t even really a CAPTCHA in the traditional sense since most of the work it does is based on filtering of IP and browser fingerprinting, with a certain level of gamification because the goal is not just to keep out the people they fight against, but to waste their time, would work great if it didn’t waste normal people’s time, while real bad actors have easy ways to get around it.
The capchas getting really bad on Mullvad almost made me give up on using a VPN. But then I learned about Buster.
This is my third post in a row shilling for this browser extension lol, it’s so good.
Unless this was something people could use i dont rly see it becoming much of a problem. Most people dont even use adblockers
That’s suspicious - I can’t pass 100%. here’s a new captcha for you: make the user do 100 in a row
- 100% is ai
- <50% is dumb “ai”
- in between is a person
