I didn't need to login this badly anyway

I tried to sign up for a Blizzard account and they were giving me long-ass math problems and I had to do fucking 16 of them. So I gave up.

Fuck Blizzard and fuck whoever is setting up the Captchas

That seems so backwards. Computers almost are always better at doing math than humans, so how is that proving the visitor is a human??
- It is entirely based on the theory that computers can't understand an array of pixels
- If they do it too fast they’re probably a bot reading text and asking AI for answers
- Maybe the goal was to weed out all the humans and let the bots in. When they start asking TCP questions written in binary, you’ll know for sure.
- It’s training for AI, which currently is about as smart as an 8 year old with internet access. Pretty soon that AI is going to be driving, then getting married, buying a house in the AI verse, etc
I've hated them since D3 came out with always online.
Sounds like maybe you need a math review lol
- Nah, they give you a number and you have to scroll through 8 pages of images of 5-7 dice, getting the total sum on each image to find which matches the number they give you.
  
  And do that 16 times. So you're scrolling through doing the math on upwards of 128 images of dice. FUCK THAT.
Did you know: to cancel a Blizzard account you have to send them a photo copy of your ID card? I've only ever had to do that for some job applications, and government forms online. But for a video game account??

Since I started using a privacy respecting browser and moved to GNU/Linux, my whole life is captchas.

Try using a VPN on top of that.
- It makes sense that VPN users see CAPTCHAs though... By design, it's hard to differentiate an attacker from a legitimate user, and there's a LOT of cyberattacks that go via VPNs.
  
  That's also why banks and online stores don't like VPNs. It's hard to tell if it's you logging in vs if it's an attacker using the same VPN as you.
There are some really awful captchas out there. I miss the days of just typing out some stretched and tilted numbers and letters.
- OTOH there are captchas that you just need to check a box today. It boggles my mind this is not more widespread.
  
  "No, let's make our users play a fucking puzzle for a minute before granting them access".
Firefox and Linux have not really caused any more captchas than I had on windows, using a VPN on the other hand is horrible.
- Captchas is one of the reason why I ditched Google as my default engine because I started having nightmares about blurry low res pictures of motorcycles and busses and pedestrian crossings broken up into squares.
- It may be because I have all history turned off, and I run a pihole + ublock origin.
Even just using a VPN makes google spam me with with captcha after captcha for each search

“Train our ai for us in order to login”

Get fucked.

you're at least a decade late for that concern. why do you think chatgpt is so good at solving recaptcha?
- Not all AI is ChatGPT.
that is what I've just assumed had been happening for at least a decade now.

You have not seen captchas if you have not seen TOR Marketplace logins. Sometimes it takes me 5-7 tries to get in. After that I feel really human.

Those are to keep out cops, not bots.
Could you share more Information? How do these captchas look like and what are the tasks?

I am just curious, as I probably won’t even lurk on these hidden services.
- First rule of TOR Marketplace logins; don't describe TOR Marketplace logins.
- They are a mix of small sorting games with a time limit and visual quizzes that can get really hard to solve. There was one where you have to rotate three small round pictures inside another picture to match the background picture that is basically just noise. Every market has its own multistep captcha system and they change quite a lot. Some are creative, some are just nightmare. The hardest ones are those where you have to solve multiple rotations of miniature „pictures“ that are like ultra close ups of things with an extreme compression and noise and somehow you have to decide if they are houses or bridges. The compression is so bad, you can barely even make out what those rotated 30x30 grey pixel smush are. And there are 6 of them you have to solve in a certain time. I ran into timeouts constantly and have to start over.
Found the robot ^

I wonder how much they get paid for training the model, or if it's free in exchange for the captcha service.

I think it's free, based purely on the way people talk about the service.

When solving a captcha becomes a Myst puzzle, go fuck yourself.

I've gotten a similar type of captcha before, but it was literally impossible. There was no drill on the right side.

Edit: the arrows just shuffled the icons up a slot btw. It's not like the drill suddenly appeared when I changed it.

lol what? “Use the arrows to move the object into the indicated orbit?” There’s not a better way for them to write those instructions? Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.
- Right? And because there was no drill on the right side, I had assumed I was misunderstanding how to do it at first. It was so bad lol.
So, sometimes, captchas and similar aren’t looking at how successful you are at the puzzles, but rather, how you go about failing them.

Puzzles that AI can pass but you can’t do the same job as puzzles you can do that they can’t.

That said… whoever invented captchas can go to a special place in hell reserved for pedophiles and people who talk too much in the theater,
- Unfortunately captchas are basically necessary to prevent mass spam everywhere

Thank God there are others who have found these stupid captchas. I thought i was being flagged as a boarderline bot when nobody knew what I was talking about and assumed something completely different.

I had the misfortune of finding one last week.
- Pretty sad when I'm relieved, instead of annoyed.

Recaptcha will keep giving you problems forever when it has an error or fails you, so that's always fun.

HOW MANY BIKES DO YOU WANT ME TO FIND?!!!
I once went through 8 or so rounds of picking busses...

And then you try the audio one and it's completely impossible. One time we had 4 people trying to listen and guess what the answer was and we all got it wrong a dozen times before we got through.

I heard Yanni.
- Mulva?

You should see how bad the Walmart website can get. They have this "press and hold" thing that basically shows up every page refresh when I'm at the store checking my shopping list.

And it's not a "press for a second", it's like 5-10 seconds... every. single. time.

I mean, if they don't want me to be a customer anymore, find another way to tell me!

I wonder if it's a mobile thing because I have the same issue on my tablet (which I completely gave up using for Walmart) but never on my PC.

Drone training.

ran into that a few days ago. 20 fucking steps and THEN IT VALIDATED my email address I entered previous and said I couldn't use an @duck domain.

which service is it? I want to avoid it at all cost.
It was PlayStation...
- They crank that shit to 11. It took me 25 minutes of 5 tries at this, then a reset, then another 5 minutes to do the temp, then another 5 to find out it was the wrong damn playstation account...

I've gotten this a single time before. When I realized it was 10 questions, I just backed out of that bullshit

twitter loves that one, I'm glad the artists I follow are all making bluesky and misskey accounts.

I use an VPN and its way worse. It is actually slightly better when I switched to a dedicated IP VPN. So, it would ask for the CAPCHA once and then never again. For those wondering, I use Torguard via wireguard on my PFsense.

Reminds me of that pokemon episode where ash and everyone was at school lol.

A jigglypuff seen from above
- That's the one haha.

So at some point I was to afraid to ask (on Reddit) but, uh… the mildly part is sarcasm right? Cuz’ fuck that shit!

Either probably, but luckily my title was not sarcasm. I indeed did not need to log in this badly and gave up when I realized it's gonna be ten of these.
- 10??? That’s got a violate some kind of unpaid labor law.

I think there's script somewhere in internet that can bypass captcha

I use the bots to defeat the bots that defeat bots

Maybe I'm the crazy person, but those types of captchas don't bother me. I'll gladly take them over doing a normal captcha on TOR while trying to log in to certain services, only to have entered the wrong password and wasted maybe 5-10 minutes of my time per attempt (usually 2 or more attempts needed).

I think they are tougher for people with poor spatial reasoning. I don't know what it looks like to them, but all the ones I see people complain about look just as super obvious as all the other ones to me.
10 captcha tests is a little ridiculous imo for any situation. I'd just leave the service if I saw that.
- If I'm trying to log in to a site or do something on virustotal, you bet I ain't leaving because I early have things I'm trying to do. That, and I'll bash my head against a wall until something happens. I can be pigheaded at times.

We need a YouTube tutorial

I only ever get these things when using auto fill or remote desktop now that the input is on the phone and sends everything you typed all at once.

Most of the time it's just the single checkbox one.

4chan has captchas for posting. It's pretty insane.