did i say mildly i meant want to nuke it from orbit
The irony is that these puzzles, while designed to stop bot spam/fake registrations, are actually used to train AI/computer vision to be better… thus, creating the need for even more infuriating puzzles to be “solved” by humans.
Write a dissertation using exactly 53,285 words on the topic of sprinkler head water use efficiency patterns, discussing at length the difference between residential, commercial, and agricultural use cases. Cite at least 25 sources ordered numerically in APA.
‘OK, I guess I don’t need to comment on this article anyway.’
“Page timeout. Please try again.”
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
With a different report on the same topic, after all its still plagiarism if your copying yourself.
The topics are often super niche and don’t even have 25 papers to source from
They’re not designed to stop spam, they’re designed to stop legitimate customer service requests, like refunds for billing mistakes. Sony uses them.
And bots are already better than us at these tests. Might be better to assume if someone solves too quickly they are a bot. Sorry Mensa peeps
Or just don’t do it? I have really high security setting on my web browser that breaks most sites. If I’m being asked to do something like this I either move to the next site or just pick up the phone and call the company. There really is no reason to feed into this behavior.
Sony makes you do this before they’ll give you a phone number to call.
If you put the right terms in a search bar chances are you’ll find the right one eventually. I doubt the sony support number is a very well kept secret.
The phone? Call the company through my device that is dedicated to mostly doomscrolling? Thanks but no thanks pal!
deleted by creator
I don’t understand the apathy towards the increasing shittyness of internet services. No need for hyperbole, those captchas are getting out of hand.
If a spam bot filter filters me out as well than it’s just a regular filter. For fucks sake.
deleted by creator
At least yours is a low number. I had to do some with numbers like “37”. I had to solve 64 of these to talk to PlayStation billing support. It wasn’t mildly infuriating, it was enraging. They made me do 16 of them, and then just took me back to the same page as if I hadn’t solved any at all. Then I had to do 16 of them again to be told that support was offline. Then the next day I did 16 more to be told support was offline, so I tried it in chrome instead of Firefox and had to do 16 more to be given a phone number to call, which I had to hold on for 67 minutes before I could talk to someone about a refund for a mistake on my billing. That type of dark pattern “fuck you” practice should be illegal. Fuck Sony.
The part of your story where you had to eventually switch to Chrome got me, because that’s me every fucking time. These monsterous companies aren’t just using captcha wrong (or right if they’re evil), they’re also all-in on chromium supremacy because why support more than one standard? And here I am, forty captcha deep wondering if I’m about to pop a god damned hidden achievement for persistence in an impossible task.
For me, when a site forces Chrome, I just use ungoogled chromium, or sometimes vanilla Chromium
oh i had to do 10 of them there were definitely some 24s in there 😭
I was trying to book a trip through a travel website, after the 3rd tedious captcha I ended up using another site. I get it, the bot vs captcha war is getting crazy but if your website is unusable then i’m not going to use it.
90% of captchas are just being used to train AI anyways.
Source: I don’t need a source I have this tinfoil hat
Tinfoil hat is a reputable source.
Yup. This has been their use since the ‘type these two words’ capchas which were used to train for OCR.
I don’t think the average person understands how advanced bots have become at bypassing captchas now. Users will see this and be upset, and understandably so, but I’m telling you there is a big problem right now and devs are having trouble keeping up.
That’s nice, they should think about average people with learning disabilities and how hard it is for them to keep up.
Yeah, but, there’s probably not any way to make this easier while still stopping bots. Either they do no captcha and you can’t compete with all the non-humans using whatever service, or they do this. Pick your poison.
Who said no captcha? This is an asinine argument.
I did. Really, it’s a binary choice. Uncomfortably hard captcha, or no captcha. Ineffective captcha wastes everyone’s time.
Maybe you have an idea for one that will still be effective while being easier, but I don’t, and apparently they, the professionals, don’t either. Until such a system surfaces, this is it.
Numerical processing disorders are fairly common and it will be interesting watching devs handle class action lawsuits when they make captchas so difficult for a portion of the population that they effectively get locked out. This isn’t a difficult concept, and they can come up with something better than this. Your responses ignore the reality for disabled individuals.
and they can come up with something better than this
I bet they can’t. Soon enough they probably are just going to have to accept some users will be bots.
If that’s the reality so be it, but making existing accounts and services inaccessible to those with processing disorders will likely be even worse for them in the long run if they keep turning out these kind of captchas.
The acceleration I’m seeing now makes me think we’ve reached a terminal point. There will be no way to tell humans from bots quickly, cheaply and anonymously soon, and services will just have to adapt or die.
Google’s approach of just monitoring your behaviour in the browser is still the most humane and it pisses me off that you literally have to serve all your data to them so they can even decide to serve you with their ads.
deleted by creator
I personally never met this CAPTCHA, but my friend did during our phone call. It was utterly hilarious to hear him slowly going mad to the point of screaming at the computer. I was laughing my ass off. This is too dystopian to be true.
At that point I’d just do the audio version
I have this problem too. I have Proton VPN on and try to solve a reCAPTCHA. And it makes me do the “click until there’s none left” thing, which is a pain in the ass. I do it. And then just says Please try again. So I do the audio one and apparently I’m sending automated requests. Thanks google.
Wait… am I misunderstanding this or are they asking you to just sit there and roll dice till you get all ones on 5 D6’s?
so there’s the number on the left and then on the right you have to use the arrows to scroll through until you find the picture with the dice that add up to the number on the left so you basically have to do maths like 10 times in a row there’s not a set number of dice, i think - i can’t remember but i think that one was like a 1, a 1, a 2, and a 1 or something.
Ah, okay.
So it’s just a “find the right picture” rather than “roll dice till you get a roll of five”. That’s still annoying, but a lot less insane.
It’s “provide is with reinforcement learning data to train AI’s how to read numbers in an image.”
Remember when captchas were supposed to protect from bots, not train them? I 'member…
It’s not less insane. Some of the puzzles will have huge double digit numbers, and they make you solve multiple puzzles to progress. Sony makes you solve 16 of these before barely moving your customer service request forward and delaying you further.
It’s interesting how some people just can’t communicate concisely
Seriously, what asshole came up with this? Some of us have trouble processing numbers.
and you have to answer like 10 of them
Getting locked out of my accounts by recognition and math ftw
deleted by creator
I’m honestly surprised that image based captchas are even remotely viable anymore.
What type of dice has a mix of pips and numerals?
AI generated type
I assume it’s generated or photoshopped. A proper D6 has opposing sides that sum to 7. Thus you should never be able to see 3 and 4 or 1 and 6 at the same time.
If memory serves the people behind this CAPTCHA are Palo Alto Networks.
Apparently they are the leader in cyber security and use AI everywhere.
So no wonder why these CAPTCHAs are so difficult, they’re probably training AIs.
Where? What’s this for? I might just become a robot instead
the one in the post was specifically from the battle.net account android app but i’ve seen them other places too :(
I recently got one of these signing in to github.
Weird - I see a lot of comments about how this is some evolution in the war of bots vs CAPTCHA, but I have come across this once, and it was many years ago. I just assumed it was a weird small captcha company that was doing their own thing
deleted by creator
That’s definitely a new one in the AI v. Captcha arms race, and it’s only going to get worse from here. Build a better sword, need a better shield.
User friendly CAPTCHAs have been defeated. Current technology relies on extensive fingerprinting but if you want to take out bots using that, you’ll also be taking out anyone not on Windows 10+/macOS with GPU drivers installed and no fingerprint resistence.
“Type these letters” is no longer a good filter. Neither is basic math or recognising words. Even these dice games can be done by ChatGPT just fine once you bypass the “I can’t do CAPTCHAs” limitation that they put in front of it.
We used to be able to make CAPTCHAs just slightly more difficult. Add in some colours, blur the edges some more, use different fonts. That’s no longer an option; CAPTCHAs need to be increased in cognitive complexity instead.
This is a huge problem. As AI becomes more advanced, more disabled people will start losing access to services because they can’t get through the CAPTCHAs. Audio transcription AI is becoming more advanced by the month and I expect audio CAPTCHAs to soon become unusable. These more complex puzzles, which AI can’t automatically describe, will also cause sighted and mentally disabled people to lose access. The days of CAPTCHAs are soon over.
I can see three solutions for this, and all of the suck donkeyballs.
One is remote attestation tied to a hardware key (the thing Google tried to add and the thing Apple has added to Safari). Your access will be determined by your possession of real hardware. If someone hacks the manufacturer of your device and steals the keys, your access will soon be revoked. However, this requires bots to buy real devices, which makes them too costly to operate at huge scales. Running Linux or older versions of Windows/macOS will make accessing the internet impossible.
A variant of this is the “apps for everything” outcome, where websites will stop being useful and tell you to install an app instead. Apps can do a lot more (invasive) analysis of your system, and existing DRM solutions should keep most bots out.
Another is to just put pay walls and accounts in front of everything. No spam bot or crawler will pay a dollar for every account they need to create.
The last one is to centralise on a few hosting providers which can use traffic analysis across many websites to determine bot status. No more VPNs, even more websites behind Cloudflare, but simple, accessible CAPTCHAs.
The non-solution is to try and cling to CAPTCHAs. Soon CAPTCHAs will start excluding anyone under some kind of education level that’ll affect a significant portion of the population, but it’ll maintain the status quo for most neurotypical people.
Many websites already employ a combination of these measures, and it’s only going to get worse. For general accessibility and for keeping the internet free and somewhat democratic, I’m putting my money on option one: remote attestation. Hardware trust can be implemented in free operating systems (many people will get huffy about it but I’m sure they’ll prefer it to not being able to use the internet) and older systems will take a hit, but it’s the best of the outcomes I can see.
Yahtzee!
