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Mildly Infuriating @lemmy.world

katy ✨ @lemmy.blahaj.zone

1y ago

this

did i say mildly i meant want to nuke it from orbit

55 comments

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
- 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
  https://www.newscientist.com/article/2384228-bots-are-better-at-beating-are-you-a-robot-tests-than-humans-are/
- Sony makes you do this before they'll give you a phone number to call.
  
  The phone? Call the company through my device that is dedicated to mostly doomscrolling? Thanks but no thanks pal!

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.
- 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.
- 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.

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

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 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
- 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.

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

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.

It's the only way to be sure.

Yahtzee!

You can just watch the YouTube tutorial on how to do these

- What gives me the creeps is people like you that are apparently constantly thinking about kiddie porn.
- And how do you know what that looks like? 🤨

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