alt Hacker NewsAs I get older, I can see a future where I’m cut off from parts of the web because of captchas. This one, where you just have to click a button, is passable, but I’ve had some of the puzzle ones force me to answer up to ten questions before I got through. I don’t know if it was a glitch or if I was getting the answers wrong. But it was really frustrating and if that continues, at some point I’ll just say fuck it and give up.
I have to guess that there are people in this boat right now, being disabled by these things.
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It's just incredible to me that Blade Runner predicted this in literally the very first scene of the movie. The whole thing's about telling humans from robots! Albeit rather more dramatically than the stakes for any of us in front of our laptop I'd imagine
Not sure if it's just me or a consequence of the increase in AI scraping, but I'm now being asked to solve CAPTCHAs on almost every site. Sometimes for every page I load. I'm now solving them literally dozens of times a day. I'm using Windows, no VPN, regular consumer IP address with no weird traffic coming from it.
As you say, they are also getting increasingly difficult. Click the odd one out, mental rotations, what comes next, etc. - it sometimes feels like an IQ test. A new type that seems to be becoming popular recently is a sequence of distorted characters and letters, but with some more blurry/distorted ones, seemingly with the expectation that I'm only supposed to be able to see the clearer ones and if I can see the blurrier ones then I must be a bot. So what this means is for each letter I need to try and make a judgement as to whether it's one I was supposed to see or not.
Another issue is the problems are often in US English, but I'm from the UK.
>I don’t know if it was a glitch or if I was getting the answers wrong.
It could also be that everything was working as intended because you have a high risk score (eg. bad IP reputation and/or suspicious browser fingerprint), and they make you do more captchas to be extra sure you're human, or at least raise the cost for would-be attackers.
Your boat comment makes me think of a stranded ship with passengers in them, but you can't find each other because the ship's doors have "I'm not a bot" checkboxes...
And the reason for stranding is probably because the AI crew on it performed a mutiny.
As per the Oscar winning "I'm not a Robot" [0], you should also consider that you might in fact be a robot.
The future will definitely include more and more elaborate proofs of humanity, along with increasingly complicated “hall passes” to allow bots to perform actions sanctioned by a human.
One early example of this line of thinking: https://world.org/
Skyrocketing complexity actually puts the web at risk of disruption. I wouldn’t be surprised if a 22 year old creates a “dumb” network in the next five years—technically inferior but drastically simpler and harder to regulate.
The Blizzard / Battle.net captcha if you get flagged as a possible bot is extremely tedious and long; it requires you to solve a few dozen challenges of identifying which group of numbers adds up to the specified total, out of multiple options. Not difficult, but very tedious. And even if you're extremely careful to get every answer correct, sometimes it just fails you anyway and you're forced to start over again.
I have the same experience. My assumption is that if the website serves me the "click all the traffic lights" thing it's already determined that I'm a bot and no amount of clicking the traffic lights will convince it otherwise. So I just close the window and go someplace else.
I'm already cut off from parts of the web because I don't want to join a social network. Can barely ever see anything on Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, or Facebook without hitting a log-in gate.
That's when you immediately stop using the website and, if you care enough, write to their customer service and tell them what happened. Hit them in the wallet. They'll change eventually.
I have twice attempted to make a Grubhub account and twice failed to solve their long battery of puzzles.
Unless I really, really, really need to get to the site, I leave immediately when the "click on bicycles" stuff comes up. Soon it will be so hard and annoying anyways that only AI has the patience and skills to use them.
This is an issue when using VPNs. I always just go to the audio alternative which is much quicker to “solve” (you hear a word played back and type it out)
In this future, we’ll be forced to use AI to solve these puzzles.
> I can see a future where I’m cut off from parts of the web because of captchas.
I’ve seen this in past and present. Google’s “click on all the bicycles” one is notoriously hard, and I’ve had situations where I just gave up after a few dozen screens.
Chinese captchas are the worst on this sense, but they’re unusual and clearly pick up details which are invisible to me. I’ve sometimes failed the same captcha a dozen times and then saw a Chinese person complete the next one successfully on a single attempt, on the same browser session. I don’t now if they measure mouse movement speed, precision, or what, but it’s clearly something that varies per person.