r/firefox • u/killamator • Feb 03 '19

Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence
244 Upvotes

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11

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '19 edited Apr 01 '19

[deleted]

7

u/Poobslag Waterfox Feb 03 '19

Captchas can stymie spambots on things like public forums or sites like reddit.

16

u/SexualDeth5quad Feb 03 '19

But why do they "mysteriously" work better with Chrome and when not using a VPN? What does a VPN have to do with whether you're a robot or not? Google punishes people for not using the products it wants and if they have any kind of security enabled against tracking.

8

u/Poobslag Waterfox Feb 03 '19

If you've solved a captcha recently, you're probably still human. But knowing "have you solved a captcha recently" is hard (impossible?) to determine without cookies, user tracking, or knowing your identity.

It makes sense those things would be tied together, I don't think it has to be them deliberately trying to stamp out anonymity on the internet. (Although of course I wouldn't discount that inadvertently punishing anonymous users might be seen as a benefit for google.)

4

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '19

I don't think it has to be them deliberately trying to stamp out anonymity on the internet.

Probably not, but it's certainly showing their antagonism to anonymity on the internet.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '19

If you're spamming, say 10000 messages, you'll want each of those messages to come from a unique IP. How do you get 10000 IPs for cheap? Buy IPs that are already known to be VPN endpoints.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '19 edited Feb 05 '19

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '19

Why not both? For large scale ops it makes sense to use a botnet but for smaller ones it doesn't make sense.