Comment on Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit | Web puzzles don't protect against bots, but humans have spent 819 million unpaid hours solving them

4grams@awful.systems ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• dan@upvote.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  The original reCAPTCHA from Carnegie Mellon University was helping to digitize books. It showed one known word and one unknown word, and if enough people answered the second word with the same answer, that’d be marked as the correct value.

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  • thrawn@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It’s basically always been outsourcing labor while checking. I guess they don’t want to provide that service for free.

    But now that it doesn’t work, all it does is attempt to source free labor by refusing to show what you want to see. Cloudflare’s verification doesn’t show the puzzle because it’s not trying to make money off you.

    Also, the books one reminds me of 4chan’s attempt to hijack it. Wasn’t a fan of the way they did it, but the intent was interesting.

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    • lud@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      V3 of the Google one doesn’t always show a puzzle to you. In fact it’s designed to not be noticed by users at all. Whether that is successful or not is a different discussion.

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      • thrawn@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        It might well be if it’s being used, but the site itself still uses v2 a lot. I get the picture one a lot when searching things up.

        That actually makes me feel all the more strongly that it’s just there to extract free labor— they have something else, but still use v2 for what seems like most purposes

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• trolololol@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I believe in that for years and haven’t seen any evidence or even articles dispelling it.

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