I recently had to solve a Captcha to submit a reddit post using a new reddit account I made (because I did not use reddit until now). It was an extremely Kafkaesque experience: I tried the Captcha in good faith and Google repeatedly told me I did my job incorrectly, but did not explain why. This went on for multiple minutes, and I kept being told I was doing it wrong, even though I kept clicking on all the right boxes that contained parts of a bicycle or a motorcycle or whatever. The slow fade-in and fade-out images were the worst, and I consider this a form of low level torture when you are made to do this for extended periods of time.
I admit that I use an extremely unique browser setup: portrait mode, OpenBSD amd64 OS, Mozilla Firefox with uBlock Origin, an external keyboard where I use my arrow keys to control the mouse most of the time. I expect that such an out-of-distribution setup may have led the Captcha AI to be suspicious of me. All this was intended to improve my experience of using my machine and interfacing with the Internet. Worse, I was already signed into my Google account, so it didn’t make sense that Google would still be suspicious of me being a bot.
I’ve decided on a systemic solution for this problem:
I shall never manually complete a Captcha again.
I shall use automated captcha-solvers, or failing that, pay other people to solve captchas for me, if I really must bypass a captcha.
One could interpret this as adversarial action against Google and Reddit, but it seems to me that when dealing with an optimizer that is taking constant adversarial action against you, and is credibly unwilling to attempt to co-operate and solve the problem you both face, the next step is to defect. Ideally you extricate yourself from the situation, but in some cases that isn’t acceptable given your goals.
I expect that people who are paid to solve captchas probably are numb to this, or have been trained by the system to solve captchas more efficiently, such that they may be optimized for dealing with its Kafkaesque nature. I do not expect to feel like I would be putting them through the pain I would have experienced. I still do not consider it an ideal state of affairs, though.
Yeah, my understanding of how bot detection on lots of these sites work is they track your mouse, then do a simple classification scheme on mouse movements to differentiate between bots and humans. So it’s no surprise that moving your mouse with your arrow keys would make the classifier very suspicious.
I recently had to solve a Captcha to submit a reddit post using a new reddit account I made (because I did not use reddit until now). It was an extremely Kafkaesque experience: I tried the Captcha in good faith and Google repeatedly told me I did my job incorrectly, but did not explain why. This went on for multiple minutes, and I kept being told I was doing it wrong, even though I kept clicking on all the right boxes that contained parts of a bicycle or a motorcycle or whatever. The slow fade-in and fade-out images were the worst, and I consider this a form of low level torture when you are made to do this for extended periods of time.
I admit that I use an extremely unique browser setup: portrait mode, OpenBSD amd64 OS, Mozilla Firefox with uBlock Origin, an external keyboard where I use my arrow keys to control the mouse most of the time. I expect that such an out-of-distribution setup may have led the Captcha AI to be suspicious of me. All this was intended to improve my experience of using my machine and interfacing with the Internet. Worse, I was already signed into my Google account, so it didn’t make sense that Google would still be suspicious of me being a bot.
I’ve decided on a systemic solution for this problem:
I shall never manually complete a Captcha again.
I shall use automated captcha-solvers, or failing that, pay other people to solve captchas for me, if I really must bypass a captcha.
One could interpret this as adversarial action against Google and Reddit, but it seems to me that when dealing with an optimizer that is taking constant adversarial action against you, and is credibly unwilling to attempt to co-operate and solve the problem you both face, the next step is to defect. Ideally you extricate yourself from the situation, but in some cases that isn’t acceptable given your goals.
I expect that people who are paid to solve captchas probably are numb to this, or have been trained by the system to solve captchas more efficiently, such that they may be optimized for dealing with its Kafkaesque nature. I do not expect to feel like I would be putting them through the pain I would have experienced. I still do not consider it an ideal state of affairs, though.
Yeah, my understanding of how bot detection on lots of these sites work is they track your mouse, then do a simple classification scheme on mouse movements to differentiate between bots and humans. So it’s no surprise that moving your mouse with your arrow keys would make the classifier very suspicious.