Hacker News Reader

Comment by big_chungus | Hacker News Reader

The reason I hate recaptcha: it's not just a rate-limit for one site, but for the entire web. Run a google dork? You'll have to find three more fire hydrants the next time you're signing up for a service. Install an ad blocker? Six more fire hydrants. Log out of google? Twelve more. Heaven forbid if I _actually_ scrape something. Hitting one site harder than an average user shouldn't force me to fill out captchas on every site until my "reputation score" or whatever is back up. Feels like social credit for web sites.

View on HN

Yeah, I'm getting incredibly frustrated with it as well. I block tracking on the web, so I'm constantly doing multiple pages of free identification for Google.

If I were building a bot for a site that uses captchas, I'd just use one of the many paid services that solve captchas. Last I checked, it was ~$0.003 per solve, hardly a blocker. To be honest, I wish I could easily use one of these solvers in my normal web browser...

As someone who actually needs/wants to visit about 50% of the recaptcha-using sites: Do the audio challenge. Type something close, the audio challenge barely cares what you type, it has fewer repetitions than the image challenge and is just generally easier.

I've increasingly had reCAPTCHA refuse to give me an audio challenge.

I was having fun with recaptha the other day on Dan Harmon's (of rick and morty fame) site called Channel 101.

His sign up page was all sarcastic and the recaptcha test asked

{ Image of distorted random letters and numbers } "Are you human?" [text box] Prove it...

And I kept trying answers like.

"Okay blood's drawn, where do i send the sample?"

"uhhh so I'm blind..." (no voice alt test)

"a robot testing a human for humanity? (this is going to go nowhere good quick...)

"Morty, its your grandpa Rick! Let me in Morty. belch"

"I identify as a pro exclusionary Cylon. My prefered pronouns are su, pid 1, root, or if you prefer just refer to me as Zuck" (okay i didn't get to enter that last one in. too long)

"Isn't putting random numbers and letters the kind of answer a ROBOT would make. It's only an answer written in THEIR language! o.O

Unfortunately Mr. Harmon's test had a fatal bug or something because I never could get past the sign up page. :'(

Or maybe I'm not human or i'm just missing something? idk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com