hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

https://www.hcaptcha.com/post/hcaptcha-now-the-largest-independent-captcha-service

by fab1an • 6 years ago

605 362 6 years ago

alexnewman2• 6 years ago

Curious what people think about hCaptcha?

mtmail• 6 years ago

We switched a couple of months ago. Integration wasn't more or less difficult, works alright with our test suite. Some users feedback "Why do I have to identify boats?" but otherwise we found no difference number of blocks or user behavior.

DoctorOW• 6 years ago

Personally I find it much more difficult than recaptcha. The tests themselves aren't much worse but since I have a Google account HCaptcha shows up more frequently.

californical• 6 years ago

Small price to pay to prevent Google from having tracking scripts and metrics on users of every major website. hCaptcha at least somewhat values user privacy.

jtbayly• 6 years ago

Far, far superior to reCaptcha from a user's perspective using Tor. I can solve a few puzzles with hCaptcha and I know I'll get through and see the content. With reCaptcha I might solve 3 puzzles and then get denied anyway, or I might solve 10 puzzles with no end in sight and give up.

seisvelas2• 6 years ago

On the other hand, many Tor users disable Javascript. Out of curiosity, does anyone know a good CAPTCHA that doesn't use JS?

CodesInChaos• 6 years ago

Not sure if I'm seeing patterns in noise, but with recaptcha I felt that timing and mouse movements are just as important as clicking the right images. It feels like solving the puzzle quickly and using minimal mouse movements has a higher chance of being denied compared to waiting some time between clicks and adding some superfluous mouse movements.

_tbjr3• 6 years ago

But also far superior to reCaptcha from a bot's perspective using Tor. Don't get me wrong: I also hate solving a gazillion captchas only because I'm using a VPN or get outright denied because my IP address happens to be a Tor exit node. At the same time you have to acknoledge that captchas don't stop bots, only slow them down or increase their operating costs. People in third world countries happily solve one image recognition challenge by Google or hCaptcha for far less than a penny. If Google's goal is to drive the costs up for malicious bot operators, then they're definitely doing the right thing. In the end, it won't stop them either since buying a couple thousand infected computers is probably not that expensive, but it is yet another stepping stone for anyone trying to bypass their captcha.

eznzt• 6 years ago

I don't like it because Buster doesn't work on it.

Also since only cloudflare uses it, and I dislike cloudflare, I have this irrational hatred of it.

_tbjr3• 6 years ago

because Buster doesn't work on it

Assuming you mean Debian Buster: Then get a newer Firefox version from backports. This is more related to Firefox ESR than Buster.

Edit: Nevermind... After reading other replies, I think eznzt referred to https://github.com/dessant/buster

innocenat• 6 years ago

For me I find hCaptcha harder and more ambiguous than what I have experienced with reCaptcha.

The ambiguity might be because my phone is set to Japanese. I got asked to identify 電車 (Densha, electric train), but there were also images of diesel train. Is it translation error, or is it really asking me to identify electric train? (The correct term for train in general in Japanese is 列車 ressha)

fab1an11• 6 years ago

Great catch. If you'd like, you can actually submit a better translation via a pr here: https://github.com/hCaptcha/hcaptcha-i18n

nekoashide• 6 years ago

It's been terrible, when Cloudflare switched to hCaptcha it not only broke our app but it seems every time they make a change it breaks something else. We might be a special case but it's hard to say since all they say it's "quirks" and they keep making changes without announcing anything.

slig2• 6 years ago

Dislike it, to say the least. Since it doesn't seems to remember that I'm a human (reCpatcha did), now I have to constantly solve captchas on CF sites.

eatbots7• 6 years ago

With hCaptcha (enterprise ver) this is entirely under the control of the customer.

We're not "remembering" in the same way, but have good enough instantaneous scoring to correctly guess whether or not a challenge is required most of the time.

Some customers may disable that option to meet their requirements. Not much we can do about that :)

meibo• 6 years ago

I really don't like it. They are generally harder and if I visit a CF site multiple times, I have to solve them multiple times. Even if this is up to the customer, it's annoying and should be discouraged.

I didn't mind solving a reCaptcha once, I mind forcing myself through these every 10 minutes.

maple3142• 6 years ago

It is more annoying than reCAPTCHA if you don't aggressively block tracking. because I rarely need to solve it manually in reCAPTCHA, while it is not the case with hCaptcha.

ve554• 6 years ago

Worth noting that this title is primarily due to Cloudflare having switched to them from ReCAPTCHA, and Cloudflare is... well, relatively popular, to say the least.

I'm curious what kind of data may exist on the experience of switching for larger providers; do the users like it? how much more/less time do they spend solving? do they care, let alone even notice that it's not Google's ReCAPTCHA?

Regardless, as ReCAPTCHA is not only terribly annoying but also built for surveillance from the ground up, I still view this as a good improvement.

QUFB2• 6 years ago

Honest question: How do you view it as an improvement? The same data is being shared, and the only difference is that Cloudflare isn't immediately behaving in the same evil ways as Google. But once you concentrate power in an entity, perhaps bad things might happen?

... If there was an on-premise captcha implementation that actually worked, that would be great.

fab1an11• 6 years ago

Unlike Google, hCaptcha isn't running an ad network "on the side" of their bot management business :) joking aside, hCaptcha is an extremely privacy-conscious operation, Google is not.

identity0• 6 years ago

hCaptcha works on Tor, sometimes.

judge20202• 6 years ago

For site operators, they don’t like the change since users are more likely to complain to the website than directly to CF. The following community post has 20k views and >100 replies asking Cloudflare to move back to recaptcha in some form.

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/stop-using-hcaptcha/15896...

TechBro86152• 6 years ago

Maybe the user should have the option to choose which CAPTCHA to solve.

elaus• 6 years ago

To be fair it doesn't seem to be _that_ bad on this thread: There's the very vocal OP as well as a "discussion" between various users that ranges from "please switch back to ReCaptcha" to "please keep hCaptcha".

For a change that affects "15% of the internet" this seems like very little negative feedback in a period of 8 months.

sxt2• 6 years ago

hCaptcha is making cloudflare money by earning them Human Tokens on the Ethereum blockchain
Most people do the convenience from Google CAPTCHA, although they sell some kind of info, but they won’t hurt you

I can't even...this is the Cloudflare forum wow.

I've personally had a few hiccups with hCaptcha quite some time back as I "wasn't sure what I was looking for" and consistently fail on VPNs. But in recent months these there's definitely been substantial improvement , and needless to say I hope to see hCaptcha be the majority provider

OJFord• 6 years ago

Worldwide? And since when? I've never hit one of these, I get reCaptcha'd to ~death~ anger all the time.

Although having said that, maybe I am hitting it and that I've been unaware and uninterrogated is high praise! Hm.

gaieges2• 6 years ago

Disclaimer: I've been an engineer at hCaptcha for a few years now building out the service. I'm just as interested in you as hearing about customer and user success/pain stories!

Worth noting that this title is primarily due to Cloudflare having switched to them from ReCAPTCHA, and Cloudflare is... well, relatively popular, to say the least.

That's definitely a part of it, but we also have a number of other large sites and services that use hCaptcha to protect against bots, and more that get added every day because of our more advanced bot detection special sauce.

I'm curious what kind of data may exist on the experience of switching for larger providers; do the users like it? how much more/less time do they spend solving? do they care, let alone even notice that it's not Google's ReCAPTCHA?

From what we've seen, the integration process is generally smooth, especially if you're a previous reCAPTCHA user, since we keep the interface and workflow largely the same.

Solving is roughly the same although we have a number of other protections that irritate bot maintainers and get activated when we detect them.

Not sure if the majority of people are aware of the change, I'm sure some technically savvy people pick up on it more than not.

Regardless, as ReCAPTCHA is not only terribly annoying but also built for surveillance from the ground up, I still view this as a good improvement.

That's actually one the top reasons we've had a lot of customers come over to us; we put a heavy emphasis on user privacy / security, including adopting/supporting privacy-preserving protocols (PrivacyPass, Tor), and minimal retention of data (see our data privacy policy on our site).

disgrunt2• 6 years ago

Your CAPTCHA accessibility leaves much to be desired. You require screen reader users to register an account to create a magic cookie that itself requires Safari users to disable security protections in their browser in order to use -- and then it doesn't actually work.

Please do better. You're blocking off a non-trivial amount of the Internet to blind users. You will eventually be sued for this.

ve554• 6 years ago

Love the response, happy to see that it's going well then! After reading a lot of feedback I got from 'You (probably) don’t need ReCAPTCHA' (https://nearcyan.com/you-probably-dont-need-recaptcha/), it started to seem pretty obvious to me that there was an open market space for some better competitors, so I'm glad hCaptcha got around to being adopted with such success sooner rather than later. Hopefully the challenges of the future go just as smoothly as things are going in the present.

hedora6• 6 years ago

I usually just bounce when I see a captcha (if I get one, I usually get a string of them, so I don’t bother).

However, I checked secondary markets where you can pay a human to solve a captcha.

It takes a professional captcha solver 70 seconds to solve an hCaptcha but only 15-20 seconds to solve a reCaptcha. Is that typical? That seems horrible.

The market rate for a captcha solution is 1-3 cents, which is clearly worth it, until you think of the ethics of paying someone slave wages so you can browse the internet slowly, but at least without breaking concentration.

Have you considered a more ethical approach, like micropayments that go to charity or something?

fab1an11• 6 years ago

OP here, and full disclosure I work with the hCaptcha team. Yep, Cloudflare is a big part of this, but you'll find our enterprise offering (BotStop.com) running on many many other large sites and apps. If you've used the internet in 2020, you almost certainly interacted with our products :)

drusepth2• 6 years ago

do the users like it?

This is completely anecdotal (and seems antithetical to the typical HN response to hCaptcha vs ReCAPTCHA), but I feel like I end up spending at least twice as much time trying to solve hCaptchas successfully because they have a lot less consistency in the objects you're searching for. I always have to zoom in to the modal and carefully search through each image, which invariably breaks whatever flow I'm in (moreso than other captchas).

For example, here's a screenshot from the hCaptcha website's "try it out" section [1] -- I barely recognized either boat in image #1 because it was so small. I missed image #3 because I didn't realize it was a huge cruise-esque boat (so big you can't even see any water) and I spent a good amount of time deliberating on #4 because, well, it looks like a car + windshield but... on the water? If it's a boat, I can't really tell, but I marked it as one solely because of the water in the background. Not sure if it was right or not.

It also seems to occasionally provide "find all the X" challenges without there actually being any X, which feels super cognitively weird ("am I just not seeing it?!").

I'd say ReCAPTCHA's main problem is deciding whether mostly-consistent objects being partially in-frame is enough to "count", whereas hCaptcha's main problem is actually recognizing the widely-varying objects in the frame. I think the former is a little more frustrating when you get something wrong, but the latter is mentally "harder" and takes more time on average, for me at least.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/uyqvs5u.png from https://www.hcaptcha.com/

hda26• 6 years ago

Do the users like it?

Absolutely. Having to solving only one captcha every few days beats solving 5 or 6 on each page visit. hcaptcha supports privacy pass but Recaptcha doesn't.

blindm• 6 years ago

I think it's great. So many sites sit behind Cloudflare now and Cloudflare now uses hCaptcha, which is a big win. And the hCaptchas themselves are easy to complete. No more wondering if you actually clicked on 'all' the traffic lights anymore, yay!

I inspected the source code of Google's reCaptcha offering and was disgusted at how many bits of information they were collecting. They also seem to be fingerprinting users so they can't keep registering new accounts on a platform, locking out anonymous users who are usually the best types of users on the platform, as IMHO anonymous voices are (usually) the best voices, or at least the more interesting of voices.

Google's reCaptcha code seemed to be very keen on knowing my 'cadence' or the way I used my mouse and how quickly (or how slow) I completed the captcha. It also looked at things like timezone, screen resolution, battery charge level etc So they could determine if it was 'you' who was using the captcha, soon after, in a separate session (even on a different device!)

dheera2• 6 years ago

reCaptcha has also gotten increasingly annoying lately.

I forgot my password to one site and tried about 2 or 3 different passwords and in-between each it asked me to do about 7 or 8 of those labelling exercises. I finally just gave up and left the site.

Not only that, but the labelling exercises weren't clear. It wanted me to label a "公交車" which means more like a public city bus and there were also school buses which would normally not be called that in Chinese so I didn't label them but Google thought they were part of that class, and wouldn't let me proceed without me labelling them, and furthermore, punished me with more "hard" exercises like that. I guess they are trying to turn me into a stupid bot.

dsabanin2• 6 years ago

Recently Google's captcha asked me to mark all the traffic meters on the photos, and amongst the choices was a photo of a mailbox. It didn't let me through until I marked it as a meter as well.

Good luck to whatever self driving car they are training using this data.

gaieges2• 6 years ago

Google's reCaptcha code seemed to be very keen on knowing my 'cadence' or the way I used my mouse and how quickly (or how slow) I completed the captcha. It also looked at things like timezone, screen resolution, battery charge level etc So they could determine if it was 'you' who was using the captcha, soon after, in a separate session (even on a different device!)

I'd bet a good amount that they store that along with all the other personally identifying info they have on you (and google of course has a massive amount of that); which is basically why after a single reCAPTCHA solve, you wont see them prompt you again for ages - they know who you are.

lumberjack• 6 years ago

That's no secret, ... that's exactly how it is supposed to work.

topynate• 6 years ago

Just looked on Takeout and there don't seem to be any reCAPTCHA data there. I wonder what a GDPR request would produce.

shakna2• 6 years ago

which is basically why after a single reCAPTCHA solve, you wont see them prompt you again for ages - they know who you are.

If only. If the same site has reCaptcha across more than one page, within mere minutes of having to slog through multiple screens of one, I can guarantee I'll be doing it again.

And I'm never sure if Google has served me either a very long sequence of reCaptchas, or whether they've decided I'm not a person and are serving me an infinite reCaptcha.

freeqaz• 6 years ago

Just turn on "Resist Fingerprinting" in Firefox and you'll find ReCAPTCHA _really_ annoying! I have to solve 3-5 "panes" of a ReCAPTCHA on _every_ page... It's very annoying that preserving privacy comes with this cost.

I almost want to just add a "DeathByCaptcha" extension to handle these for me and pay a few cents for every page I visit, lol

wintermutestwin• 6 years ago

I've had hCaptcha recheck me repeatedly and fail to work at all on VPN. I much prefer ebay's simple slide the puzzle piece method.

ldjb• 6 years ago

That's annoying. Have you tried using their accessibility feature?

https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility

dylz• 6 years ago

The slide is just as, if not more invasive as recaptcha in terms of privacy, cross-site tracking and fingerprinting.

boneitis• 6 years ago

Yes.

hCaptcha is not easy as is being claimed here. I have lost a lot of time and been blocked from much content due to hCaptcha.

modzu2• 6 years ago

well the slight improvement in usability is a win, but is it really any more anonymous than recaptcha?

fab1an11• 6 years ago

Unlike Google, which is making hundreds of billions with ads, we have zero reasons to track users - customers pay us to stop bots, and that's the product we provide.

frakkingcylons• 6 years ago

I’m not particularly fond of reCaptcha either but I disagree that it’s an obviously good thing for someone to be able to repeatedly make new accounts with no restrictions. Abusive users use this to bypass account bans.

ornornor• 6 years ago

I love this extension: https://github.com/dessant/buster

It won’t solve the privacy issues but at least you’re not working on google’s training set anymore and captchas are automatically solved for you.

fnord77• 6 years ago

Is there a way to delete collected reCaptcha data from google accounts? I looked around and I don't see a specific setting for that.

raspyberr• 6 years ago

Lots of websites sit behind a single company which has now changed to use its own captach is a good thing?

landerwust• 6 years ago

It's not ideal but it is an improvement.

hedora6• 6 years ago

Creating a monoculture makes it easier to implement systems that automatically bypass the captchas, so it’s good for end users, especially people that are visually impaired, or otherwise unable to solve captchas.

BMSmnqXAE4yfe15• 6 years ago

And you are also contributing, without pay, to G$$gle AI and their plans of world domination.

lowlevellimbo2• 6 years ago

Using hCaptcha is also contributing to some ML model for different companies serving unknown (to us) purposes.

forgotmypw17• 6 years ago

As a nojs browser, I only think it's great in the sense that I don't have to waste my time with sites which don't care about accessibility.

deepstack• 6 years ago

yes we need captcha that supports browsers like links. NOJS browser ought to make a comeback. display image, text and video. For many sites that's ALL we need.

For sure enable javascript to get the fancy stuff, but mostly we just want to read the text, view the picture and see the video.

abhinav224• 6 years ago

I really hate all these captcha codes

Why can’t they do something like a reverse SSL where we have to authenticate ourselves as humans?

For example if I have an Apple account on my Apple devices, why can’t they figure out a way to authenticate me as a human from that information?

This doesn’t work for all scenarios (eg throwaway accounts), but it could work for the majority?

mathnmusic2• 6 years ago

Webauthn may make it easy because it supports platform authenticators like Touch ID / Face ID. Two good demos are at http://webauthn.me/ and https://webauthn.io/

It's now supported in all major browsers but platform authenticators are likely not supported on all OS yet.

abhinav224• 6 years ago

This makes a lot of sense - exactly what I was thinking

hombre_fatal3• 6 years ago

Well, the point is to avoid automated abuse.

Your Apple account on your Apple device doesn't stop you from unwittingly being part of a botnet, for example.

abhinav224• 6 years ago

Why wouldn’t it? Unless they hack my account

Genuine question - I don’t know much about this field

mindslight3• 6 years ago

Forget adding more draconian identity requirements. 95% of CAPTCHA use is simply unnecessary and could be straightforwardly removed or replaced with rate limiting login attempts per IP. Never mind sites that use it to prevent scraping. If serving static pages is that much of a burden that you want to discourage automated means of retrieving information that you're trying to publish, then work on your website performance instead of adding more user-hostile roadblocks.

abhinav224• 6 years ago

That’s exactly what I’m thinking too! Lot of it is to prevent scraping and a lot of it is unnecessary

hombre_fatal3• 6 years ago

could be straightforwardly removed or replaced with rate limiting login attempts per IP

This is very outdated intuition. Fresh IP addresses cost peanuts.

For example, your solution still allows an attacker to run a 50k item /login combolist against one of your users with $5 of botnet time, each IP address trying a single uname/pass combo.

Here you pay $18/GB to multiplex your abuse (cred stuffing being classic non-volumetric abuse example) across 72 million residential IP addresses. https://luminati.io/

jjav• 6 years ago

Exactly. The vast majority of captcha usage is completely unnecessary. Just remove it. As you say I've even seen captchas for static content, which is pure nonsense.

I run several long-lived (decades) sites with mostly static content but also some dynamic pages and a commenting mechanism. Here's what I do to prevent abuse: nothing. It's fine.

If you run a massively popular site or something politically controversial then you'll be targeted for abuse. If you're specifically targeted, I don't know how much captchas will help.

For the rest of the 99.9% of sites, just stop it. You don't need it.

t0astbread2• 6 years ago

Maybe there's a good solution somewhere there but the problem - as far as I can see - with this is that you either have a central party that knows who signed up for what or you have every account tied to a permanent super-identity. Both of which aren't great.

kaycebasques3• 6 years ago

This sounds kinda nitpicky but I think it's an important distinction. We're talking about the web, not the internet, right? Or is hcaptcha also used for iOS apps, Android apps, etc.?

fab1an11• 6 years ago

hCaptcha runs anywhere, even works on Telegram groups: https://github.com/hCaptcha/telegram-bot

paxys2• 6 years ago

That distinction is already blurred beyond recognition. There's nothing that makes a phone app more or less "web" than a SPA, for example.

kaycebasques3• 6 years ago

The distinction between iOS apps built in Swift and distributed on App Store (for example) and a website built in JS/HTML/CSS and distributed via the web's decentralized architecture is pretty clear IMO. Case in point I don't see hCaptcha/reCAPTCHA on iOS apps as frequently as I do on websites. The way I was taught in my elementary networking class was: the web is an application of the internet. The internet as a concept is much broader than the web.

markosaric• 6 years ago

That's great to see! At Plausible Analytics, we had a wave of spam attacks two months ago or so and hCaptcha saved us. Great product and great service both for companies and for users. We're very happy with how it works. And great to have a quality de-Googled alternative for this use case!

dvduval• 6 years ago

I appreciate at least having a good option that doesn't involve putting a Google product on my website. We tried to use our own captcha back in the day, and then used some third party, and they just weren't good enough. I'm glad to see them getting this market share because it means that they will get the opportunity to improve based on a large set of users similar to how Google is able to make their products so good.

TechBro86152• 6 years ago

I vastly prefer hCaptcha to recaptcha because it doesn't treat me any differently just because I'm using Tor. Recently (last year or so), Google has started to explicitly refuse service to me when I use Tor (only after forcing me to solve a CAPTCHA for 3 minutes).

Question for dang -- why does HN continue to use recaptcha? It's impossible to signup via Tor, and Google is a user hostile company.

One thing I will note, is that hcaptcha seems to be more loose in what answers it accepts. Sometimes I click random images and it still lets me pass.

amasad• 6 years ago

We've moved to hCaptcha from reCAPTCHA after Google surprised us with their pricing (blog[1], hn discussion[2]), and couldn't be happier. We use it in invisible mode and it does a great job at finding bots while getting out of users' way.

Also top-notch customer support. The CEO was personally in the slack channel helping us. Highly recommended.

[1] https://blog.repl.it/anon

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25004476

judge20202• 6 years ago

We use it in invisible mode and it does a great job at finding bots while getting out of users' way.

Interesting didn't realize this was a thing hcaptcha did[0]. It's basically recaptcha in terms of tracking which sites you visit then, no?

0: https://docs.hcaptcha.com/invisible

fab1an11• 6 years ago

I think parent means hCaptcha enterprise in passive mode, where hCaptcha is detecting bots in the background using ML: botstop.com

eatbots7• 6 years ago

Compared to reCAPTCHA v3, our approach does not depend on tracking your visit history. (disclosure: work there.)

Zak• 6 years ago

I dislike the widespread use of captcha regardless of provider.

I realize anything connected to the internet will be subject to automated abuse, and it's impossible to run some types of services without taking some steps to defend against it, but it seems to me there's usually a way to handle that without invading the user's privacy or wasting their time. The exact details will vary based on the type of service, of course.

One particularly egregious misuse of captcha in a service I use presents one after I enter a correct username and password. An incorrect login says so without presenting a captcha. The potential reward for an attacker who successfully gains access to an account is high, so it seems almost certain anyone running a targeted attack would defeat this by handing it off to a human upon detecting that they had a good account.

jsnell5• 6 years ago

There's a good reason for what you're identifying as misuse.

If you show a captcha after a failed password, you need to show a one after a correct password as well. Otherwise you leak information. You can have other solutions, e.g. in a login flow that splits the username and password entry, it's advantageous to put the captcha between those two steps. But even in those solutions the display of the captcha must be independent of password correctness.

aleph1• 6 years ago

That's not what's happening:

An incorrect login says so without presenting a captcha.

aftbit3• 6 years ago

There's a lot of arguments against captchas, but I do not agree with this one. You will always leak whether or not a password is correct based on how your app behaves - a correct password will grant entry to the application. If you only ask for a captcha when a user account exists but fail to ask if they use a made up username, that's an information leak.

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

If you show a captcha after a failed password, you need to show a one after a correct password as well. Otherwise you leak information.

Presumably, if the person has entered the right username and password they're going to get access to the service at which point they'll know they entered the right one. What information exactly is leaked here?

Kalium• 6 years ago

For a lot of people, they want to run a service and not have to spend a significant amount of time and energy investing in anti-abuse. In general anti-abuse work is not nearly as useful as product work, a day off, or a variety of other things.

I agree, there should be better ways to do anti-abuse. Yet I find myself coming up empty when I try to find better options for the common scenario where people would really rather invest deeply in their service than in anti-abuse.

I would love to hear some ideas about how to solve this nasty general problem while also respecting user time and privacy. Unfortunately, I've found that entirely too often the vague sense that there must be a better way fails to translate into substantive better way.

Normille5• 6 years ago

Better way? I'd be hard pushed to come up with a worse way.

The number of things that are "wrong" with reCatcha etc, have been mentioned on here ad nauseam. In fact, I'll quote myself from another debate on the subject, a while back:

  >1: It's never made clear exactly what you're supposed to click on. For example. If I'm told to click on "traffic lights" does that mean just the lights?... or the poles as well?... and what about a square that only has a tiny bit in it? Does that count too, or is it only squares which are mostly filled by the object in question?

  >2: They make no concession to non-US English speakers. I've been asked to identify things before, where I had to guess what the word means because the same thing is called something completely different in UK English.

  >The only thing that approaches the level of rage that reCaptchas instil in me are those captchas where you've got to transcribe what's in a photo of some letters & numbers and where they NEVER fecking tell you whether it's case sensitive or not, or where they use identical characters for zero and letter O, one and letter I, etc.

fab1an11• 6 years ago

With our hCaptcha Enterprise product (https://www.botstop.com), showing a CAPTCHA actually only happens in rare cases (relatively speaking..) - vast majority of bots are caught and stopped in the background (using ML), and most users will never see one.

xur17• 6 years ago

I'm curious what how rare it is / what triggers it. In my experience, at least Google triggers hard mode if you use any sort of privacy preserving technology, etc ublock, brave, etc. It's very frustrating.

rtx• 6 years ago

Do you allow by click type?

BMSmnqXAE4yfe15• 6 years ago

I have a VPN so like ~50% of web sites present a captcha to me ... had to subscribe to a service solving captchas automatically.

slx262• 6 years ago

it seems to me there's usually a way to handle that without invading the user's privacy or wasting their time

As much as I agree with your dislike of captchas, I don't think this is true at scale (unless universal online identities existed, which could and should include anonymous identifiers by design). When you need to accept information from anonymous users (comments, votes, forms, registrations), there's no way to not invade users privacy and not waste their time, unless you are manually filtering / moderating all the input data, in which case you can't really say it scales. You might say emails can solve the problem. Well, they don't really solve the problem against dedicated attackers / spammers, and they do invade privacy for the average user. You can use statistical approaches to try to reduce privacy invasion or others, but I don't know of anything that really solves the problem without manual identity verification at some point.

BMSmnqXAE4yfe15• 6 years ago

One such solution would be a small payment, something like 1 cent for access. That's not too much, because I am already paying 3 cents to a service solving captchas for me.

protoduction9• 6 years ago

I built an alternative[0] that takes a proof of work approach. As a site owner you set the difficulty that makes sense for you: so perhaps you would want 20 seconds of computation before you can submit. The nice thing is that this can happen entirely in the background while the user fills in the form.

Also with multiple requests from the same IP in a short timespan, the difficulty increases.

There are downsides to to any captcha, but in my opinion make a much better tradeoff. Accessibility and privacy are respected, and there are no annoying tasks.

[0] https://friendlycaptcha.com

smittywerben2• 6 years ago

CAPTCHA does not scale. CAPTCHA spams real people with requests and wastes my VALUABLE time, and still labels disabled people as subhuman. It's offensive. It's ineffective. It's outdated.

It's reaching a point where encapsulating a VPN with anti-captcha is something I'd pay for.

3np2• 6 years ago

unless universal online identities existed, which could and should include anonymous identifiers by design

Yes but no. Anonymized identifiers can be deanonymized. They should utilize zero-knowledge proofs in such a way that they can prove "yes, I have an identity verified by entity X (and Y and Z) (based on passport/phone number/...)", without disclosing any of those details.

It could, optionally, yield an identifier unique to each requester and unlinkable to others unless an explicit proof of the link is provided. Though if this is included, there has to be some mechanism to avoid huge ad networks sharing the same "requester entity".

This is a solved problem. All that's left is politics, implementation and alignment.

noja• 6 years ago

I find that when I solve a Captcha too quickly, I get another one. And another one. And another one. So instead, I wait a short time, click a few wrong boxes, then enter the correct Captcha. Maybe this is part of it, but I don't like it.

Normille5• 6 years ago

If the Buster plugin can't solve the reCaptcha for me [It does fail from time to time] then I just don't bother visiting that website. Or if it's a site I need to use, then I'll try again later and see if I either get let in without being asked to jump through hoops, or get a reCaptcha Buster can solve.

I simply refuse to waste my time and drive up my blood pressure by doing unpaid training work for Google's AI, in order to visit some crappy website. I really wish more people would start boycotting any site which uses reCaptcha [or its derivatives], so we could get rid of this blight on the internet.

I've spotted this new hCaptcha junk show up recently on a couple of sites I used to frequent. I don't visit those sites any more. So well done webmasters. Apparently annoying the shit out of visitors to your site tends to drive them away. Who'da thunk it?!

villux• 6 years ago

What service are you using? Some browser plugin I assume?

Normille5• 6 years ago

  >One particularly egregious misuse of captcha in a service I use presents one after I enter a correct username and password

Is it eBay by any chance?

That recently started randomly showing reCaptchas to me when I'm already logged in and have been using the site for some time. When this happens, it descends into a never-ending cycle of more login screens and then more reCaptchas.

But thankfully eBay have taken note of the dozens of complaints about this on their user forums, dating back to 2018 and rushed their best people in to fix it.

[That last sentence was dripping with sarcasm, in case anyone unfamiliar with the company thought eBay ever took any notice whatsoever of their users' concerns]

I'm not a violent person at all. But if I ever meet the person who spawned reCaptcha and all its equally annoying clones, which are a pox on the internet, I won't be responsible for my own actions.

hyperdimension3• 6 years ago

I'm about as anti-Google as it comes, but I didn't even mind the first incarnation of reCaptcha as a concept. You prove that you're human, and you also help transcribe books so that they're more accessible/searchable! Sure, it's in Google's interest in that it improves Google Books, but it at least seems like a symbiotic exchange (to, e.g. humanity in general.)

Contrast that with today's form of reCaptcha where you identify stop signs/crosswalks/et c. for Google's benefit, but at the same time you're also improving...oh, wait, Google again. It almost seems like forced labor, in a sense.

rasz• 6 years ago

eBay
I'm not a violent person at all. But if I ever meet the person who spawned reCaptcha and all its equally annoying clones, which are a pox on the internet, I won't be responsible for my own actions.

be careful, else they start sending you dead horses head and planting gpses in your cars https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/two-former-ebay-executive...

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 years ago

Here's a thought experiment. This one requires some long-term thinking, outside the box and well past recent history and the status quo.

What if the majority internet usage is non-interactive, from so-called "bots", what we may refer to as "automated use". Google and Facebook, among others, rely on the use of automation and "bots". The non-interactive clients ("bots") being used by these companies are not asked to solve captchas. (In turn, after collecting data from public sources, these websites attempt to prohibit the use of automation by their users wishing to access it. What is interesting is that neither company provides any definition of "automated" nor any clearly stated limits on the speed at which a user may access resources or the quantity of resources they may access in a stated time period. One might be apt to find such limits associated with an "API".)

In 2013 an Incapsula report suggested that the majority of internet usage is in fact automated and not "malicious"^1 -- what if public information sources on the internet catered to the use of automation rather than trying to limit such use, e.g., with speed bumps^2 like "captchas". What if servers treated all clients equally, instead of having data forcibly collected by a few large clients that receive preferential treatment, then siloed and protected from "automation". What effects would this have on "centralisation" and levelling the playing field.

"Do not ask for permission, ask for forgiveness." What does it really mean when applied to the internet. Perhaps it means there is an endemic lack of clarity about "the rules". Prohibiting "automation" is far too vague and in many cases it makes no sense. The growth of computers and the internet is the growth of automation. Both servers and clients may have concerns about resource utilisation. Websites do not ask for permission when they decide to use large amounts of the user's computer resources.

Consider that a Google could not exist without being "given permission" to use automation. Does the GoogleBot have to solve captchas. No automation means no company such as this could exist. How useful would the web be without anyone being able to use automation to create an index. Based on the HN comments about web search I have read over the years, I would guess that for many commenters, it means the usefulness of the web would be dramatically reduced.

Imagine an automation-friendly internet. The truth is, I think (the data shows) we already have one, except we are in denial that "the rules" actually allow it. An early metaphor for internet and web use was "surfing". It may be that those who are constantly fighting against automation are fighting against the waves instead of riding them. Time will tell. It stands to reason, IMO, that every internet user, whether a server or a client, should be expected to use automation.

1. https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2013.html

2. An early metaphor for the internet was a "superhighway". Speed bumps would seem out of place on a superhighway.

moron4hire• 6 years ago

And don't spammers just click farm captchas out to Facebook users filling out "what Hogwarts House are you?" quizzes, anyway?

hyperdimension3• 6 years ago

That's a little amusing just to imagine: 'Which Hogwarts house are you? Identify these traffic signals and we'll sort you into the proper house!'

aaronmdjones• 6 years ago

    One particularly egregious misuse of captcha in a
    service I use presents one after I enter a correct
    username and password.

That's nothing.

eBay will CAPTCHA me after I enter my e-mail address, and then again after I enter my password too. Every time. And I'll be damned if I don't "fail" this CAPTCHA at least once a week, with it telling me to try again.

Come on, there are only so many mountains/hills, taxis, traffic lights, bicycles, and cross-walks I can look at before I go cross-eyed.

They even have the nerve to suggest that I can avoid this by using the latest version of my browser (Firefox), which I already am and always do.

matheusmoreira3• 6 years ago

Why can't they just allow automated user agents? I should be able to scrape websites if I want to. Why do user agents have to be browsers?

entangledqubit• 6 years ago

This doesn't mix well with the ad-based compensation model.

Sadly, there still doesn't seem to be much in the way of micropayment infrastructure.

megous2• 6 years ago

Exactly, or be able to just use a text-mode browser.

Or wget to save a set of pages for later.

I understand protecting commenting with captcha, or contact forms. But captcha on regular read-only access to public web pages in the style of Cloudflare is a bit ridiculous.

One thing contact forms should have is a static indication there's a captcha in use. I've filled all too many forms that just sent my written text to void, because I block some domains.

lovegoblin2• 6 years ago

Being scraped isn't free, if it's at a large enough scale.

Plus, it's not just benign read-only scrapers. Have you looked at the spam folder of your email recently? That's what every comment section and user bio and god knows what else would look like if you just blindly allow all automated traffic.

ck2• 6 years ago

It's exactly how email spam filters evolved.

They used to be completely local and even some DIY solutions, evolved to signature updates, but eventually the attacks grew so advanced that only online services could be updated and aggressive enough, which is of course how gmail took over the internet with near perfect spam filter (when was the last time you checked a gmail spam folder).

The last generation of local spam filters were pretty good though. Anyone remember Eudora and Spamnix?

megous2• 6 years ago

Local spam filtering still works quite fine. It just needs a lot of data most users probably don't have when starting out.

I just use bogofilter, and it worked almost perfectly from the start, just because I saved years upon years of SPAM and HAM. 10's of thousands of messages each.

It got slightly worse over years, because I incrementally only train it on new SPAM but not on new HAM, because of laziness.

People probably have HAM archives, but don't usually save their SPAM, to be able to start using Bayesian spam filters right away with great results.

Personally I find it much better than whatever Google uses. I don't even bother with SMTP level domain/IP blacklists, or reverse IP/domain checks anymore. All mail is just passed right to the mailbox and is then pre-filtered by a bogofilter to SPAM folder that I check once weekly, and barely find any HAM there. I receive about 500k mails a year.

fractionalhare• 6 years ago

The potential reward for an attacker who successfully gains access to an account is high, so it seems almost certain anyone running a targeted attack would defeat this by handing it off to a human upon detecting that they had a good account.

Then it may surprise you to know that simply preventing automation makes many types of account takeover attacks infeasible in practice. It won't mitigate the attack if you are personally a high value, named target. But most account takeover attacks operate en masse and are coordinated after large security breaches, so having to hand over accounts to a human operator as part of the auth loop would make the campaign uneconomical. It also introduces another step at which an attack can be logged, recognized, fingerprinted and stopped by an incident response team.

This is something your security team would probably gladly tell you about if you asked them. There's also a bunch of talks about this presented at conferences like Blackhat, DEFCON, USENIX, etc.

Stated in another way: not all potential rewards for successful account takeover are high. The modal account in the modal campaign is low value, which is made up for by volume and particular purpose of accessing accounts. If you model these campaigns economically, you can eliminate entire classes of "low margin, high volume" attacks simply by introducing friction that mitigates automation.

Then there is a natural cost-benefit tradeoff as to how much friction is allowable on a per-user basis to prevent the most common types of account takeover attacks.

Abishek_Muthian• 6 years ago

One particularly egregious misuse of captcha in a service I use presents one after I enter a correct username and password.

I run a problem validation community platform. Couple of days back an individual launched automated spam/DDOS attack by commenting an abusive, demoralising text on every single thread by creating different users.

Fortunately, I had systems in place to identify and mitigate it with Cloudflare. So, in this case even genuine users would have received captcha. I found out soon enough who the attacker was from the firewall, he had earlier created an account with his own name and was using the same IP to attack, after I blocked his IP he tried with couple of other IP addresses incl. Tor; but stopped with his activity after couple of hours.

I generally don't like re-captcha because it takes cultural background for granted(e.g. 'Pie' is not a common food worldwide), Accessibility as a disabled person myself and has no mitigation for captcha-solving farms.

But in nuisance cases like the one I detailed above, captcha is the easiest method available en masse.

MeatBro3• 6 years ago

It's easier for me to switch from google to ddg. Then to actually complete a captcha. I don't understand why businesses don't understand this.

josefx• 6 years ago

Could the captcha be there to keep spam bots from posting? Sometimes it is trivial to get a new or just valid account, so just checking for that wouldn't stop spam bots.

tuckerconnelly2• 6 years ago

As someone who scrapes, captcha's are pretty silly. One of the sites we scrape implemented hCaptcha, and it was a breeze to get around. There are a few things that make my life more difficult, but captchas aren't one of them, and nothing can stop scraping altogether.

alexnewman2• 6 years ago

How'd you do it?

driverdan• 6 years ago

I'm not OP but there are cheap solving services that will fill them in for you. The cost is trivial and they have decent APIs for automatic integration into scrapers.

hombre_fatal3• 6 years ago

Meh, there's always going to be a longtail of targeted abuse so it's not much to boast over. Xrumer software in 2001 could even let you sit at your computer and fill out those common PHP-lib captchas (like on EZBoard) while Xrumer spammed internet forums and blogs. You could even hire a cubicle farm of humans to manually abuse a web service.

Captchas filter out the 90% bulk of automated abuse.

Btw, web scraping is on the nearly harmless side of abuse.

tuckerconnelly2• 6 years ago

That makes sense that there's longtail abuse, thanks. What would you say is more harmful abuse? Spamming endpoints for SQL and other injection attacks?

xapata• 6 years ago

hCaptcha makes money by having humans label things to teach machines. This suggests that at some point, the machines will be nearly as good as the humans at labeling. At this point, until the humans are tasked with a different training exercise, a bot will be effectively indistinguishable from a human via hCaptcha.

If there's value in it, it sounds like a spammer could train an hCaptcha-defeating bot via hCaptcha.

aciswhat• 6 years ago

I think it's likely they'll add new types of exercises as this starts to happen.

trianglem2• 6 years ago

Wait they actually use the labeling for something other than admittance? Well that takes care of my concern about this tech then, gotta go back and change some of my other comments...

fab1an11• 6 years ago

Google uses reCAPTCHA labels exclusively for themselves, and is extracting hundreds of free person years of labor from internet users every single day via this. hCaptcha lets anyone access this type of service, provided they follow certain ethical AI guidelines

pkaye• 6 years ago

This is how Skynet starts.

catovh• 6 years ago

Not keen on hcaptcha because I'm almost always need to solve 2 sets of the puzzle vs 1 with recaptcha. Theres a thin line between privacy and convenience, most of the time I've felt hcaptcha to be on the least convenience side.

abc-xyz• 6 years ago

Only 2? I usually need 5+.. not that recaptcha was any better.

I sincerely hope they, along with all other companies providing captcha services, go bankrupt.

hlava• 6 years ago

I hate hCaptcha, those pictures are messy, they pop up everytime and theres 2 slides of them... Why not just use the honeypot method?

drngdds• 6 years ago

Is hCaptcha less of a pain for users who block tracking (with Brave, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, etc) than reCaptcha is? I'm not sure I've ever solved an hCaptcha, but I find reCaptchas to routinely be incredibly time-consuming, and I suspect it's because I block their trackers.

fab1an11• 6 years ago

Google reCaptcha likely discriminates against non Chrome users, hCaptcha does not. Also, we support and co-develop https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy-pass !

intellirogue2• 6 years ago

I'm using Brave plus NextDNS, and am on a CG-NAT IPv4 address, so reCaptcha absolutely hates me. I always need to do at least 5 rounds of matching before it'll let me past. My record has been 12 rounds.

hCaptcha seems to pretty consistently only make me do 2 rounds, so I certainly prefer it.

seanwilson• 6 years ago

How is hCaptcha for page performance? Google Recaptcha ruins your page speed rankings as it ideally has to load chunk of JavaScript on all pages on page load to continually monitor user behaviour. You could e.g. only load it when someone starts filling out a form but this kind of integration isn't standard.

fab1an11• 6 years ago

You only put hCaptcha / BotStop where you actually need the protection, and it certainly doesn't follow your users around unnecessarily

throwaway1723• 6 years ago

Reading their website:

Presented Challenges:
Comparison - Select all images that match query
Bounding Box - Define bounding area for objects
Categorization - Identify the corresponding labels
..and other simple tasks.

No, hCaptcha, no way am I going to train your neural networks for free, so please join Google on your journey to hell.

rootusrootus• 6 years ago

I'm really starting to hate all the captchas with a burning passion. Partly because the corporation I work for seems to have gotten our NAT addresses onto a blacklist so I get captcha'd constantly, and partly because my close up vision is getting noticeably weaker (pushing 50, that's why) and without hunting down my reading glasses it can be difficult to make out the smaller details necessary to solve the puzzle. Especially when I'm on my phone.

I really wish we could find something relatively foolproof that didn't rely heavily on tracking or really good vision.

chrismorgan2• 6 years ago

Similar deal where I am at present in India: the small ISP uses carrier-grade NAT, so there’s malware and related activity occurring every day from at least one of the who-knows-how-many people behind this one IP address. Last time I was here in 2016 it was actually a lot worse than it is now (then, any Cloudflare site would trigger it, so I’d be hitting dozens of challenges per day), but I still get the occasional hCaptcha here (e.g. the Audacity wiki), and they’re awful. I normally take two or three attempts (quite apart from the regular times when you finish the challenge and press submit, and it just does nothing), guessing things like whether they want to count this particular dark smudge as a motorcycle or not, or whether this fragment of a motorcycle should count or not.

I wish people would just face up to the reality that challenge-based CAPTHCA techniques have failed, and stop using them.

hda26• 6 years ago

Try using privacy pass. It's designed for use cases like yours.

cute_boi• 6 years ago

thanks for making something that has capacity to break google recaptcha v3.

surround• 6 years ago

Almost all of the users that Cloudflare shows captchas to are Tor users. Is there any reason why this couldn’t be done without Javascript?

thewebcount3• 6 years ago

I don't believe this to be true. I've never touched Tor, and am constantly hounded by different Captcha mechanisms. I do aggressively block tracking, though.

koreanguy• 6 years ago

Captcha is a terrible 90s technology, it should have been completely destroyed in year 2000.

it's really annoying.

kevincox• 6 years ago

If it should have been destroyed what is the reason you think it hasn't been? People aren't adding captchas to websites for fun, it is clearly solving a problem for them. So what do you propose instead?

GekkePrutser5• 6 years ago

It's solving a problem for THEM at OUR (the users') expense. We should fight this more heavily just like we do ads and tracking and hopefully this practice will at least stop expanding. The amount of sites now showing captchas is crazy.

Or introduce a law where they have to pay us for using up our 'brain time'.

heavyset_go3• 6 years ago

Don't worry, the next iteration of CAPTCHAs will rely heavily on browser feature detection, ensuring that you're not using an unauthorized version of Chrome that can be automated. Only authorized and trusted browsers will pass the tests.

GekkePrutser5• 6 years ago

Which will mean even more restrictions on the types of browsers we can use, and gathering more information. Not OK either.

GekkePrutser5• 6 years ago

I couldn't agree more, and it seems to be on the rise. I used to get once a week maybe, like for a new signup to a forum. Fine, understandable. Now I get them multiple times per day.

It used to be a minor annoyance and I understood the reason for them in those cases. Now they've moved way beyond the 'pain threshold' and it's moved on to a blind hatred of them for me.

A similar thing happened for ads.. At first they were OK and I was fine with some ads paying for a sites. Then they became more intrusive flash crap. I started getting annoyed. Then all the tracking came in and full-page motion and sound ads and they really started abusing their privileges. Now I hate them so much I will never turn off my adblocker again for any site. They've just overstayed their welcome too much.

The same thing is happening now with captchas. Started as a good cause, but totally took advantage of the users to solve a problem that's just as well solved on the back end in most cases.

TaylorAlexander• 6 years ago

Anyone know why their seems to be military imagery on hCapcha? I don’t want to train anything for the military...

svacko2• 6 years ago

I see the product is offered in 2 plans, though the only paid plan is enterprise without publicly disclosed pricing. Anyone has info whether it's affordable also for small and bootstrapped businesses or it's primarily focusing on larger enterprises?

gingerlime2• 6 years ago

Last time I enquired they quoted starting $999/mo for 10m verifications...

svacko2• 6 years ago

Thank you. That's not a small sum, though they probably have some internal tiers per number of requests so for lower traffic scenarios the monthly price might be more affordable.

kraig• 6 years ago

So we use 15% of the internet for captchas and I lose 15% of my life identifying crossroads, stoplights, and buses to computers. There's got to be a better way

dmtroyer• 6 years ago

you spend 100% of your life on the internet?

xiphias2• 6 years ago

You should take a Waymo while solving the puzzles to get back the time

accounted2• 6 years ago

I don't understand why anyone likes hCaptcha. With reCaptcha, I rarely got more than the checkbox. Now I get a series of puzzles every time I want to look at a web page. When that happens, I'm just closing out, and going to a better website.

thewebcount3• 6 years ago

Because many of us get the same puzzles over and over with reCaptcha, and often get sent into the infinite puzzles zone despite being both a human and answering correctly. The assumptions built in to reCaptcha just aren't good. There are people that don't accept cookies for anything, but who aren't bots. There are real humans using text-only browsers. There are people who's mouse and keyboard events fall far outside the expected range of normal human users, or who use aids such as macro keys that playback canned responses and confuse Google's methods. So I can definitely imagine anyone who's dealt with that shit for years being happy to have something different to try. Even if it's just as annoying, at least it's not the same damn thing!

accounted2• 6 years ago

I would say it's not just as annoying, it's worse. It has all the same annoyances, except now I get the worst outcome every time.

tomjen3• 6 years ago

My favourite failure mode was when I was using a roller as a mouse and it constantly failed. It took me a while to figure out that it was probably failing because my mouse would move in a straight line.

Naturally if I was logged into my google account I wouldn't have much of an issue, because I would be feeding the surveillance machine.

neop1x2• 6 years ago

We need more auto-solver services. Pay a subscription and let developing country workers solve captchas for us. Extra expense on top of internet connectivity plan.

heavyset_go3• 6 years ago

I used to think that reCAPTCHA was bad, but then I had to solve numerous CAPTCHAs from hCaptcha. Now I think that they're all bad.

pieterhg• 6 years ago

My mom and dad's shared IP (somewhere in Europe) repeatedly gets on CloudFlare's IP ban list meaning my mom keeps having to solve these hCaptcha's. hCaptcha's is a lot more difficult to complete than Google's reCaptcha and she has a lot of trouble with it.

Why they get on these IP lists is I think because it's a general consumer ISP and probably a lot of people get bot nets on there.

hda26• 6 years ago

Install privacy pass on their computers. It won't eliminate the captchas completely but will decrease the number of times they'll see them. I believe cloudflair gives you 30 passes for each captcha solved.

MeatBro3• 6 years ago

What service they use have a big implication of if they get captcha'd. Try switchingservices

bastawhiz3• 6 years ago

I've learned that folks end up unintentionally installing software which acts as essentially "proxy server as a service". I've heard of browser extensions doing this, but I would be unsurprised if mobile apps did it. Every holiday I do a sweep of my parents' devices to make sure they haven't installed anything silly (my mom somehow always has three or four different weather apps). I'd suggest giving it a look the next time you can.

drivebycomment2• 6 years ago

Or, it could be that their computers or home network is infested with malware or bots.

Majority of people complaining about captcha need to look at their system first. Of course any detection system has false positive, but the false positive rate is not double digit percentage in vast majority of cases.

EGreg• 6 years ago

Aren't Apple and Google almost obviating the need for this, since they control their duopoly platforms?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...

PS: Anyone have the corresponding Google link?

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

Honestly, I thought hCatpcha was being run by OpenAI in order to provide the benefits of millions of people training AI, but they seem to be completely unaffiliated.

What happened to OpenAI? Do they belong to Microsoft now or something?

Normille5• 6 years ago

Is that meant to be a proud boast?

Because, to me, it equates to someone bragging that 15% of the people they've slept with now have syphilis.

ve554• 6 years ago

The sub-header of this blog post is "You can beat Google by putting privacy first", and at this point it's interesting to think of how many businesses have done exactly this for an entire range of Google products with success.

arendtio• 6 years ago

Their demo even doesn't work for me. It displays an error message in my native language similar to 'Rate limited or network error. Please try again.'. Reloading doesn't change the situation (maybe related to my ad blocker).

Doesn't make the best impression...

Animats• 6 years ago

Anyone have an example of hCaptcha usage?

withinboredom4• 6 years ago

I'd really love these captcha services to allow me to download an extension that allows me to bypass their captchas. This extension could verify my identity and/or device, or just keep an eye on my behavior to validate that I'm human.

mdaniel• 6 years ago

Are you aware of their accessibility cookie? https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility

It's not exactly what you were asking for, but it can make their disease less painful

dathinab• 6 years ago

Honestly captcha seem pointles to me.

Literally every time I'm in a situation where I'm required to use a captcha to access a site it is impossible to successfully solve the captcha in any sane amount of time.

This happens both with google and cloudflare.

Tbh. if they don't trust my connection can't they just tell me so instead of pretending to provide a "I'm not a robot" test which is practically (close to) unsolvable???

(Note that this post only refers to captchars guarden the access of an site if they somehow don't trust your connection, not "I'm not a robot captures" on forms or similar).

superkuh• 6 years ago

15% of the web. And probably only of the commercial web.

jedberg• 6 years ago

"hCaptcha has grown into the largest independent cybersecurity service in the world"

I feel like Cloudflare might have something to say about that, given that Cloudflare is an independent cybersecurity service and uses hCaptcha.

Razengan• 6 years ago

I can’t be the only one offended by the unpaid labor involved in CAPTCHAs (training self-driving AIs or whatever).

I wish Apple would offer a way for sites and services to verify that a client is indeed human via Touch ID/Face ID.

White_Wolf• 6 years ago

tbh it no ammount of captcha will help a popular platform. If you go black hat for around $150 in private proxies + poster bot + spinner + (insert capcha service here because I dont' want to advertise them) you can pretty much spam anything for a while.

That being said it does make it harder to spam if you don't have a budget to start with.

XCSme• 6 years ago

Is there any place where you can just solve captchas from hCaptcha? I was curious what kind of questions/labels it displays.

drusepth2• 6 years ago

https://www.hcaptcha.com/ has a "Try it out" section on the homepage you can repeatedly solve for examples.

vrperson• 6 years ago

reCaptcha is horrible. If you are a business, please stop using it. It feels like working for Google. why the hell should I have to do work for Google when I want to do business with you?

solinent• 6 years ago

While privacy is definitely my main concern here, it's not just privacy that's the issue here--I believe people should be compensated for the work that they offer society and if Google is using a captcha to create driverless cars then it's obviously antithetical to this premise.

I always try to miss some of the obvious items or make mistakes and I (almost) always get through. There's only one service that uses a Google captcha that I continue to use, so it's not really a huge issue for me anyways, and I have decided to stop using it!

It's not too difficult to host your own captcha, I don't see why this can't be an open-source effort.[1]

[1] https://github.com/dchest/captcha

elliottinvent2• 6 years ago

It’s good to hear that alternatives to any Google tech are gaining market share.

For me, all captchas are a stain on the web - in most cases, shifting (and multiplying) the wasted human hours from the company collecting data (eg the owner of the contact form) to the user (the person completing the contact form).

The company is saved from filtering through contact form responses from bots (spam and injection attempts) but simply shifts the work to the user who they hope to pay for their service, losing countless enquiries from frustrated users.

In my opinion, the only acceptable use for captchas is when you’re making a useful, free, no-login-required service available to the public and even then should only be brought in after bursting reasonable rate limits.

throwaways885• 6 years ago

For me, all captchas are a stain on the web - in most cases, shifting (and multiplying) the wasted human hours from the company collecting data (eg the owner of the contact form) to the user (the person completing the contact form).

I run a contact form for a small business. Explaining to them why their tiny website has tens of thousands of spammy requests filled with porn keywords is not easy. Of course webmasters add reCAPTCHA, because they're vastly outnumbered by bots and users.

elliottinvent2• 6 years ago

I did this too. Providing contact forms for lots of websites.

In my opinion, back end filters are the solution to the problem you’re describing. Not making the genuine users jump through hoops.

YetAnotherNick2• 6 years ago

From the privacy policy

We collect the following categories of information:

Information that can be used to identify or contact an individual ("Personal Information"), such as name, email address, and country.... We may also verify the identity of our Integrators and Customers by comparing personal information against third party databases or official legal documents.

Information collected automatically as a result of an Integrator’s or Customer’s use of the our Sites or the Services ("Analytics Information"), such as IP addresses, browser type, Internet service provider, platform type, device type, operating system, date and time stamp of access, and other similar information. Some Analytics Information is collected on our behalf by third parties we engage for that purpose, and some Analytics Information is collected through a variety of tracking technologies, including cookies

In the preceding 12 months, we have shared the following categories of information with third parties for a business purpose:

Identifiers. A real name, unique personal identifier, online identifier, Internet Protocol address, email address, account name, or other similar identifiers. Shared with Service Providers

Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)). A name, credit card number, debit card number, or any other financial information. Shared with Service Providers

Commercial information. Records of products or services purchased, obtained, or considered. Shared with Service Providers

Internet or other electronic network activity. Browsing history, information on a consumer's interaction with an internet website, application, or advertisement. Shared with Service Providers

Note: Fraud risk associated with an individual IP address may be shared with an Integrator upon request.

https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy

einpoklum• 6 years ago

Wait, that's the hCaptcha policy?

Can you link to it on their website?

YetAnotherNick2• 6 years ago

Updated it in end. By the way I am not in anyways related to hcaptcha. Just sharing it because they don't seem to be the saint that everyone else is believing them here.

terrycody• 6 years ago

hydrant car airplane crosswalk traffic light nightmare

ac42• 6 years ago

Just tried the demo and found it somewhat confusing

"enter your name and your favourite vegetable" is to lure bots into responding?

When "I am human", I am asked to select boats and fail because I didn't tick the images with ships.

I would not like to add a Captcha that appears to be smart Alec, has a tendency to trigger the same in the respondents or, worse, makes customers feel stupid. reCaptcha somehow seems better at avoiding this.

fierarul• 6 years ago

Never heard of them before but went to their main site and got served the Romanian version which is so bad I think it could be used as commedy. Also loved how their front page image shows a barrier with their logo stopping some robots but the robots are facing the backside of their logo/stop sign!

Like, hire me for more!

I'm curious how can they train ML models while preserving privacy. Where does the corpus come from?

jokethrowaway• 6 years ago

Is this mainly thanks to getting Cloudflare as a customer?

Congrats, albeit I have to say I had less problems with recaptcha captchas. I experienced a couple of cases of hcaptcha just not working correctly and being unable to access something despite the captcha success, which never happened with recaptcha (in my experience).

gregmac• 6 years ago

I see there's several "captcha solving services" (Google the term, I don't want to link any) that charge in the $1's per 1000 solves. This makes me wonder how effective captchas really are. Do they just raise the bar high enough so only spammers actually making money attack the more lucrative sites?

Can anyone talk about their experience running a (large) service with a spam problem where adding a captcha helped? How about still battling bots/spam/abuse despite having a captcha?

Supposedly these services have humans solving these. I remember hearing about a bypass in use where the attacker would pass-through captchas and present them to users on their own pirate/torrent/porn/etc sites, and then when the user solved it, they'd get at the content and the spammer would do whatever they were doing on the original site. I wonder if that technique is still in use, or if there are people specifically sitting there solving captchas all day being paid fractional pennies per solve?

wraptile• 6 years ago

Captchas are not effective at preventing attacks at all. There are many human and AI powered services as well as secret exploits that attackers can use. Captchas only stop spam, amateur scripts and web-scrapers.

It's a real shame that because of this "safety feature" the web is losing is programability. You can't even curl many pages these days let alone write some programs that connect to the web. This whole bloated scene of browser emulation had to be spawned and now instead of serving 1kb htmls to few friendly bots several megabytes of junk traffic and countless processing cycles are wasted on some menial tasks like retrieving sport match results from the internet.

The problem with these captcha services are _free_ which means people just throw them anywhere. Imagine a world where land mines are free for everyone at the tip of their fingers - you could hardly go outside! Well you can hardly go online now.

drivebycomment2• 6 years ago

A classic case where captcha is essential is ddos attacks. By sheer volume, they are not able to bypass captcha, as they can't solve captcha at million qps. Rate limiting doesn't work under ddos as ddos attack can overwhelm rate limiting itself and also there are still many proxies that simple ip base rate limiting will cause large collateral damage. Captcha is a very effective tool for ddos protection.

For spam/abuse, captcha is mainly about raising the cost of attack, not about eliminating completely, while still minimizing the collateral damage. Captcha is never meant to be a protection against any targeted narrow scoped attacks anyway.

If the attack is small enough that attackers can pay captcha solving service, it's not big enough to matter.

Captcha is here to stay. It is fundamentally a technical mean to deal with the tragedy of commons, and thus won't disappear anytime soon.

newscracker• 6 years ago

I like that this isn’t Google and isn’t tracking people. I tried this on its own homepage. I didn’t find it a whole lot easier (I was asked to choose photos with boats in them), but it was a little more easier than the blurry photos on reCAPTCHA.

What I didn’t like: when I looked for pricing information, I saw that there’s a free tier and there’s a “Contact Sales” tier (for enterprise). There is no intermediate level if you want finer control and just want to know how much that could cost. If anyone from hCaptcha is reading this, I’d strongly recommend adding one or two more tiers or expanding the feature set of the current free tier, at least for some level of granular control.

known• 6 years ago

ublock should include captcha

sriku• 6 years ago

I was a bit surprised to not find a reference to the singularly most irritating thing about Google's recaptcha - that it treats me - the one trying to authenticate - as a free source of data labels for its ML systems. I guess I'm unlikely to be the only one irked by another "identify all the bicycles" challenge.

Do the labels I provide belong to me or to Google? .. when I signed no job contract with them to provide that information.

edit: aha! https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling - that's why it wasn't mentioned. One more labelling service that I won't like.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 6 years ago

I personally found hCaptcha harder to pass than reCaptcha, to the point where I will leave a site that demands one if that's a realistic option (e.g. not really an option if it's my bank, totally an option if it's one of many stores selling an item).

It's possible that I just got unlucky (one of my recent experiences was a site that didn't let me in even after solving it, which really soured me), but I feel like the main reason it's hated less is because people haven't seen it as much yet.

Edit: TIL how offputting a single bad experience can be. From going through my HN history, I found out that this terrible experience was 6 months ago.

bastawhiz3• 6 years ago

I largely agree. Cloudflare requires hcaptcha if you mistype your password a single time when accessing their dashboard. The UX of hcaptcha is not good, especially in a flow where I'm already fixed on goal (doing something in my dashboard). If I need to stop thinking about dns settings or caching to pick out photos with bicycles, that's a really expensive context switch for my brain. And in my experience, you need to do two "pages" to complete the captcha.

By comparison, I've been asked to complete recaptcha exactly zero times day to day (perhaps I'm lucky?). The last time must have been many months ago.

It's hard to speak to the specific UX qualities of the captcha itself, but I find recaptcha generally less difficult. But a captcha that I don't need to complete always wins out over one that I do.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 6 years ago

You're probably leaking lots of data to Google. Browse the Web with strong privacy protection (temporary container addon in firefox, ublock, privacy badger, decentralize...) and you'll see that recaptcha UX is just worse (slowly loading new pieces to identify after you solve them, one after the other). I can't count the number of stairs, hills, fire hydrants, cars, trucks, bicycles, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings... I had to point out just this month.

kpennell• 6 years ago

ugh, the craigslist ones are annoying

dep_b• 6 years ago

I haven't tried Firefox + AdBlocker in a while but I always had the idea that in a very Mechanical Turk way I had to earn my few cents worth income for the machine before I was allowed to have no ads and live outside of the Google Empire.

Uhrheber• 6 years ago

Please die a screaming death. All of you captcha services. I hate you.

neop1x2• 6 years ago

Yesterday I noticed CloudFlare uses it so maybe that is the reason for 15 percent of the internet.

woof• 6 years ago

"hCaptcha now ruins fifteen percent of the internet"

I loathe captchas, especially Googles who seems to punish my use of privacy extensions (ie ublock origin, Ghostery Lite).

Captcha is a ok tool when you have valid reasons to assume the user is a bot (multiple failed logins, unusual traffic, password resets etc.). Used as a default it only antagonizes users.

daveoc64• 6 years ago

Accessibility - I am surprised nobody mentioned it.

We looked at hCaptcha, and the feedback we got was that their approach to accessibility is simply unacceptable.

If you can't solve the challenges, you have to sign up on their website, in advance, and provide them with your email address.

https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility

We just couldn't justify that sort of privacy imposition.

Personally, I think all Captcha needs to go.

mattl• 6 years ago

15% of the web, surely?

johnisgood• 6 years ago

I cannot stand captchas. I cannot even solve them myself sometimes and I think I am human. Or when they show "1/5", then at the 4th they add + 2 because why not... Stop wasting my time. This is actually done by hCaptcha.

hCaptcha now runs on fifteen percent of the internet

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