this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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Do you guys intentionally half-ass your capchtas or am I the only one?
eg. when Google asks me to recognize traffic lights, I intentionally make some errors to decrease the quality of data they harvest
The noise you add won't even register. No two people are going to half-ass it the same way, so if you average everyone's responses, the correct answer comes out.
I know :) that's why I was asking if anybody else did it instead of campaigning for more people to do it
I'm saying that it makes no difference even if everyone did it. Denoising is trivial.
Captchas are there to track you. Websites can detect who is looking at this page just by mouse movement and your captcha is even better in recognizing you specifically.
So because they dont know who you are over a VPN, then they will figure it out. Tracking is what they love and sell
Easy: Stop using sites that require captchas
(Otherwise you just have to accept it 😓)
Nice try robot!
You can try Buster, but I've never been able to get it working: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/
There are also various captcha solving services out there, however they all reek of shady "we steal your data" type services.
Buster works fine for me, but it don't really solve the image Captcha, but the auditive one, it's a modified speech recognition. But I think that currently Captchas absolutely obsolete, they can't avoid bots anymore since long time ago, because with the existing AI out there, a bot can resolve these better than a human. To avoid spam bots there are way better methodes (eg.Honeypots). Captchas are currently only data collection apps.
Not only they're obsolete, they hinder humans and don't stop bots.
The easiest way to stop spam bots (and also spammers), I saw in the past in an Forum, where simply on creating an account, the activation mail was delayed for an hour. So a bot or an spammer, which always work with an disposable mail, which last normally less than half an hour, never recieve it. A normal user for sure can wait for it. The Forum never had problems with spam with this time filter.
I started doing the audio instead, the little headphones icon. Way easier
Look less suspicious. Be fingerprintable easily. Look unique but in a normal way. Be logged in. Look like a "normal" web user not using a hardened browser. That's what tends to trigger them and what tends to escalate them to demanding more work to get past them.
There's no turn-key solution that fakes all of this flawlessly I'm afraid.
Captcha's are the same as ads. We develop a way around them, and they build a better captcha, ad infinitum. Realistically, use a VPN which is less crowded by people, and you'll have less of a problem.