Captcha Patent Is an All-American Nightmare

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/captcha-patent-all-american-nightmare

by CTOSian • 5 years ago

115 22 5 years ago

tmpfs• 5 years ago

I for one am happy that the EFF are making noise about the broken patent system applying to software inventions and I hope they are able to change the patent system. A real uphill struggle no doubt, but important work. Thanks EFF.

throaway46546• 5 years ago

If it gets people to switch from reCAPTCHA I am all for it. I have a lot of privacy extensions installed, piHole, etc and reCAPTCHA is a nightmare for me. I often get multiple reCAPTCHAs and my favorite is what I call the "infinite reCAPTCHA" where it keeps on loading in more and more tiles for me to select at a painfully slow rate.

In addition it has been showing up tons of places it absolutely should not be. For example during the pandemic I had to apply for food stamps and unemployment. Both the LA County DPSS website and the EDD website have implemented reCAPTCHA. This is a privacy nightmare. It should be no business of google who is on public benefits, but the state of California and LA county are basically selling this information to google.

0x_rs• 5 years ago

I think you could (can? can't verify now) set fade:none to at least make it less immeasurably annoying to look at. It's one of my first examples when I talk about hostile software, it cannot have been developed the way it is without some degree of ill intentions, due to its extensive usage online also.

sleavey• 5 years ago

I agree this is incredibly annoying, and usually leads me to just close the tab rather than try to get past it. Their loss. Obviously you can't do this for food stamps, so when it is necessary to get past one I keep a burner Firefox profile in my .bashrc:

    alias firefox-throwaway="firefox -no-remote -profile $(mktemp -d)"

This creates a command `firefox-throwaway` that starts Firefox with a new profile located in /tmp. Since it's not got any about:config customisations it usually works with reCAPTCHA (as far as Firefox works at all with reCAPTCHA...).

alisonkisk2• 5 years ago

Switch to what? Patent trolls can sue other Captcha users just as well.

The patent is on Captcha, not on using Google. It even appears to be a patent on image Captcha, and Google is the main provider of non image Captchas.

unishark• 5 years ago

Switch to not using Captchas I'd say. Technology can already beat them a solid percentage of the time, so they're becoming just an obsolete tool for blocking obsolete attacks. With ten years left on the patents, amusingly.

veeti• 5 years ago

Fortunately (?) reCAPTCHA v3 [1] does not seem to be covered by this patent. Instead of clicking endless traffic lights these sites will just share all your browsing activity with Google for automatic black box verification.

[1] https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3

Wowfunhappy• 5 years ago

I would, uh, answer your parenthetical question mark with a huge "no." reCAPTCHA v3 is basically "user tracking, but this time if we can't track them we assume they're a bot."

ac50hz• 5 years ago

It’s time to patent patent-trolling…

jffry• 5 years ago

Halliburton tried it - https://patents.google.com/patent/US20080270152

JoBrad• 5 years ago

Some quick searching led me to believe this patent was likely abandoned because of the Bilski ruling

https://www.fsf.org/news/esp-bilski

alisonkisk2• 5 years ago

Is there any precedent for liability for buying and using a partner product sold by someone else? Seems they are using the wrong people (makes sense, since it's a shakedown scam).

ectopod• 5 years ago

It's not a precedent, it's a central part of patent law, right there in the statutes. You pretty much can't do anything with a patented invention unless you have permission. If you could get round it by saying "oh yeah I bought it off this other guy" then the entire system would collapse. Which would be no bad thing, but that's not how it works.

SMAAART• 5 years ago

(fee) $70,000+ Your company tells DAD to “pound sand,” or the like . . . .

Patent trolls using troll-like language.

interactivecode• 5 years ago

I feel like having a EFF captcha tool would be perfect. A quality and privacy respecting tool benefitting the web. It will remove the need to rely on tools from FAANG advertisers

rasz• 5 years ago

This was especially true back in 2008, before patent examiners should have applied guidance from the Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice v. CLS Bank decision.
AXS Group, claiming that the companies infringed its patent by using reCAPTCHA. Those cases all settled. ...Trevor Coddington

https://www.insigne.law/team/trevor-q-coddington-ph-d/

"Defeated a motion to dismiss on Alice grounds with Court adopting client’s argument. Confident Technologies Inc. v. AXS Group LLC et al., Case No. 3:17-cv-02181-H-MDD (S.D.Cal.) (“The Court agrees with Plaintiff that the invention claimed in the ‘578 patent is not directed to an abstract idea.”)."

Seems Trevor is good at what he does, which must be misleading the court since Google reCAPTCHA doesnt do what 578 patent describes (selecting “one image,”).

jwr• 5 years ago

To be honest, much as I hate the whole patent system and the trolls exploiting it, if this means that fewer sites will use the terrible CAPTCHAs, I'm all for it.

In many corporate environments CAPTCHAs are being thought of as an "industry best practice" — without even considering any rationale for them. Perhaps this will get people to wake up from that silliness.

nullifidian• 5 years ago

So, can I be sued for third party's iframe contents? For what some ad platform is doing for example. This is absurd.

amelius• 5 years ago

These trolls should be billed for wasting everybody's time, including ours.

dctoedt• 5 years ago

The lawyer mentioned in the article apparently took eight years to get his Ph.D in physics from Old Dominion University; he worked as a patent examiner for a year or so of that time. He then went to law school at GW, which is a pipeline school for patent attorneys, during which he worked as a "technical advisor" (usually means a drafter of patent applications) and then patent agent for different law firms. After law school, he held several jobs for a few months to a few years each, before opening his own practice, and then co-founding "Insigne LLC." He got his five-year undergrad B.S. in engineering physics in 1992; that would put him at roughly 51 to 52 years old now.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/drtquick/

rascul• 5 years ago

I don't know much about how this patent stuff works, but it looks like the application was in 2008 [0], while reCATCHPA's first release was in 2007 [1].

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8621578B1/en

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

joshuaissac• 5 years ago

The 2007 version did not have the image grid that the patent claims to cover. But there is other prior art that the article covers, so this is yet another patent that should never have been granted.

Captcha Patent Is an All-American Nightmare

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