Anyone who has been surfing the web for a while is probably used to clicking through a CAPTCHA grid of street images, identifying everyday objects to prove that they're a human and not an automated bot.
[...]
ETH Zurich PhD student Andreas Plesner and his colleagues' new research, available as a pre-print paper, focuses on Google's ReCAPTCHA v2, which challenges users to identify which street images in a grid contain items like bicycles, crosswalks, mountains, stairs, or traffic lights. Google began phasing that system out years ago in favor of an "invisible" reCAPTCHA v3 that analyzes user interactions rather than offering an explicit challenge.
[...]
To craft a bot that could beat reCAPTCHA v2, the researchers used a fine-tuned version of the open source YOLO ("You Only Look Once") object-recognition model, which long-time readers may remember has also been used in video game cheat bots.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by drussell on Thursday October 03, @04:44PM (7 children)
I thought that's what you were doing when you "solve" those captchas, training someone's AI model...
Soooo, doesn't that make sense they would be able to "solve" them by now?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Thursday October 03, @05:28PM
Maybe they were developing the self-driving cars to train the bots to solve the traffic CAPTCHAs. Kind of like getting military funding for Skynet to make it better at Call of Duty.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Thursday October 03, @05:48PM
That (using this data for training) has stopped being true many years ago, and it is why Google started charging for their captcha many years ago.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday October 03, @10:37PM (4 children)
Apparently, the purpose is to keep us autistic people out. I definitely am not anywhere near 100%. Sometimes it takes a half hour to work out what exactly constitutes a square with a bicycle.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ncc74656 on Friday October 04, @12:21AM (1 child)
(Score: 4, Informative) by pTamok on Friday October 04, @08:12AM
Absolutely.
It asks me for the squares that contain bicycles, or motorcycles, or buses, or traffic lights, etc.
None of the squares contain any of them. The might contain images of a part of the object in question, but they almost never have a complete picture of the requested object in any of the squares.
So the correct answer is usually none. Which, of course, is adjudicated as incorrect.
And, to be hyper-pedantic, none of the images of squares contain even a part of the objects in question - they contain an image - a representation of the object, not the object itself (This is the point behind Renée Magritte's picture The Treachery of Images, also known as Ceçi n'est pas une pipe)
The usual response when this is pointed out is that people say 'Well, you know what I/was meant, anyway' - but for someone on the autism spectrum, having to work out what people when it is not literal is hard work. Literal meanings are so much simpler. So a simple Captcha becomes an exercise in guessing how other people might illogically interpret things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 04, @02:55PM (1 child)
Some of those are just broken.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday October 04, @10:38PM
Some sure, but it shouldn't be that many in a row. If I weren't trying to get into an account that I needed to get into, I wouldn't even bother.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Freeman on Thursday October 03, @06:55PM (2 children)
Nothing more annoying than failing to prove that you're human to a system that can't actually protect against what it was designed for in the fist place.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Touché) by Unixnut on Thursday October 03, @09:54PM
Yeah, as the captchas get more difficult I am finding myself spending more and more time retrying captchas before I get allowed in. Quite a few times when I see a website with captcha nowadays I just close the tab and look for an alternative.
I am not sure which is worse, the fact I struggle to prove that I am a human to a website by solving their stupid captcha, or the fact that actual bots can now solve it better than I can.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Reziac on Friday October 04, @02:35AM
Like effing Cloudflare. It needs to die in a fire.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday October 03, @07:21PM (4 children)
I'm not really seeing a lot of those traffic-image-captchas anymore, at least not the classic once where you click all the bikes, bridges, stairs or whatnot. Is that an EU thing? I think the most common one I encounter now is to the one where I have that little annoying Cloudflare thing where I have to verify my humanity by clicking the checkmark-box.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Thursday October 03, @08:23PM
I still get those find-all-the-bicycles captchas, and I'm in Montreal.
I don't remember know whether they originate in the EU, though.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday October 03, @08:24PM
Info I didn't include in the summary, but was in the article:
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday October 03, @08:46PM (1 child)
What's really annoying for us foreigners is that the images are very US-specific (traffic lights, buses, crosswalks) so we have to adjust culturally to be able to answer them, and sometimes miss things out. By the way does "all pictures that contain crosswalks" mean "all pictures that contain parts of a zebra crossing" or just "all pictures that contain the whole of a zebra crossing" and even are there other crossings that are not stripey? Am I overthinking this? How badly do I want on this website?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 04, @08:50AM
What's really annoying for us foreigners is that the images are very US-specific
This - a thousand times, this.
Exposing us to the hideous American culture ought to be a criminal offence.
__
You have the right to remain dead - well: we don't want it!
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday October 03, @07:26PM (1 child)
The finally automated it. That means I no longer have to help those websites solve their gnarly puzzles.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by Reziac on Friday October 04, @02:48AM
So when does the browser extension come out?
And one to bypass effing Cloudflare, which at present I can't get past anywhere.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03, @07:37PM (2 children)
(Score: 4, Touché) by Freeman on Thursday October 03, @08:27PM
Maybe I like turtle soup or I'm really hungry?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Thursday October 03, @09:44PM
Now we have an answer [google.com]:
There's more detail after that. if you want to read from the link.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 03, @08:43PM (1 child)
One thing I'm sure the AI can't do is understand when it's being given the runaround. Like Roblox has sometimes done. Roblox asks you to solve this captcha of adding the pips and numbers on the top faces of several dice 6 times, and after you've done that, it then says you have to do it 20 times, and then it tells you that you got it wrong (and 20 times is enough times that you figure maybe you did get one wrong, not at first suspecting that the system is gaslighting you), and your access is denied. You can do it another 6 expanded to 20 times, and you will be told you're wrong again. And again. You try one more time, being extra careful to get it correct, and when it tells you that you got it wrong again, that's when your suspicions that something else is going on become firm. Figure the system is broken. And that's the part I'm sure an AI would completely fail to grasp.
Instead, the AI might start modifying its models, guaranteeing it will never get the correct answer. Oops.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Friday October 04, @08:30AM
I've had that, and it turned out that the web-page was set up to expect to be able to run a particular script when the puzzle/captcha was successfully completed - and I was running an ad/script blocker. So the page silently failed, giving the impression that I had not successfully completed the challenge.
It took me longer than I like to admit to realise what was happening. It was a web-page I needed to use only occasionally, and I could use a different path to do what I needed, which involved me changing the password. Which I needed to do every time I needed to do that thing for quite some considerable time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday October 04, @02:55AM
There, FTFY.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 04, @10:38PM
Also add cryptomining/folding@home JS or similar so it costs them something to keep trying in a way that might succeed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Friday October 04, @11:02PM
No, tired of all CAPTCHAs, even the not boring ones. People get tracked around the web in the most detail possible, but they can't figure out who is a bot and who isn't?