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Cloudflare on Wednesday said it is ditching Google's reCAPTCHA bot detector for a similar service called hCaptcha out of concerns about privacy and availability, but mostly cost.
The network services biz said it initially adopted reCAPTCHA because it was free, effective, and worked at scale. Some Cloudflare customers, however, have expressed reservations about having data sent to Google.
Google's reCAPTCHA v3, used on about 1.2m websites, provides a way for web publishers to present puzzles called CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) that can usually, but not always, distinguish automated website interaction from human engagement. The point of presenting such challenges is to keep bots from registering fake accounts and conducting other sorts of online abuse.
In a blog post, CEO Matthew Prince and product manager Sergi Isasi observed that while Google is an advertising business and Cloudflare is not, Cloudflare nonetheless reconciled itself to Google's privacy policy even if it made some customers wary.
The biz also has also been concerned about the availability of reCAPTCHA in China, given that Google services are intermittently blocked there. China is home to about a quarter of the world's internet users so a significant number of people could be unable to access websites barricaded behind inaccessible reCATPCHA puzzles.
Prince and Isasi note that Cloudflare has had some issues with this in China and elsewhere. But over the past decade, this hasn't been enough to warrant action.
Finally, earlier this year, Google told Cloudflare it plans to begin charging for reCAPTCHA, a service it has previously offered for free because the answers people provide improve its services and machine learning systems.
In an email to The Register, a Google spokesperson said there's no charge for reCAPTCHA unless you exceed one million queries per month or 1,000 API calls per second.
Faced with the prospect of paying millions for a service it offered at no charge to customers, Cloudflare decided something had to be done.
"That was finally enough of an impetus for us to look for a better alternative," said Prince and Isasi.
(Score: 5, Informative) by quietus on Friday April 10 2020, @02:18PM (9 children)
... for us, website visitors. From a superficial overview of hCaptcha FAQ and site, this company aims to simply copy google's authentication method, but with a twist: they'll pay sites that use their service.
Visitors that solve their hCaptcha become part of their HUMAN network, on which you can do realtime-bids to execute a task (i.e. creating training sets for pattern matching aka AI).
The devious thing though is that you, as the owner of a site which uses the hCaptcha service, can configure the difficulty level. Or, in their words:
Most likely effect: we will all be solving many more of the damn things than before.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @02:27PM (8 children)
Probably, but if the puzzles just work properly, that would be a step in the right direction. So often, I've been stuck having to try again and again as valid responses aren't accepted and it just sends me another one after solving the previous one.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @03:06PM
I recently had captcha continuously present me a new challenge, because the password I entered previously was pasted in from a random string. Once I used a hand typed password of "fuckyou", it let me through on just one challenge.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @05:15PM (5 children)
Please.. tell me.. if asked to select 'a sign' .. do you select the whole thing including the pole or just the colored part on top?
I just want to know?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @05:57PM
If you need to know, you must be a robot.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Friday April 10 2020, @10:06PM (2 children)
Personally, I consider the sign to be the whole thing. Pole + signage. The sign wouldn't be there if it wasn't on the pole.
However, it seems the captcha gods don't think that's valid. I get let through more often now that I select ONLY the sign itself instead of the whole pole and sign.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @02:46AM (1 child)
Really it is whatever the majority of people who do the CAPTCHA when it was in the experimental stage agreed on.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday April 11 2020, @05:25AM
I can understand that, but if they want humans to answer these vague challenges, they should let human answers be considered valid regardless of whether the majority of people select one thing or another. If they aren't, they're excluding real people which is exactly the opposite of what they claim to be doing(blocking bots and allowing people to view a page).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 11 2020, @07:48AM
The pole is not part of the sign. You can put up a sign without using a pole (for example, on a wall), and you can put several signs on one pole. While it is true that the majority of signs is put onto poles, that is simply out of practicality reasons.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2020, @11:55AM
Oh shut it Bot!
:)