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Comment by Siira | Hacker News Reader

How do you know they are real humans? I imagine bots doing 2FA would still be cheaper.

I know this because in our forum we have LOTS of "spam" users - https://forum.cloudron.io/users . These users will go into posts and actually make "helpful" comments. Like, "Oh I tried this solution but I found that my disk my full. Deleting data fixed my problem". It almost seems genuine but they build reputation and once they have some votes, they go back and edit all the comments to have links.

Banning entire countries helps a lot. I don't want to name certain countries, but let's assume it's one where it's common to see human corpses floating on a big river.

That doesn't help narrow it down. I live in Seattle and the first think I thought of was a popular tiktok of teens finding a corpse in the river last month.

The word you missed was "common."

Apart from the fact that banning an entire country from contributing to their code would be antithetical to the Wikimedia foundation, if you're implying the country which I think you're implying (which is also where I live, btw) you'll:

1. Ban a burgeoning tech industry which has produced over 20 unicorns,receives billions in funding from across the world and produces world-class tech talent; 2. Ban millions of other OSS developers from contributing; and 3. Just lead to SEO spammers picking out other impoverished countries to spam from, which means finally you'll end up with only people from the "west" being able to contribute in any way.

Many bots are likely still powered under the hood by humans.

On my backlog of projects to do is to make a browser extension that solves the more obnoxious captchas for me, as I'm regularly behind vpn and fall into ridiculously long solve loops.

On the most popular api i could find, $10 buys you a shockingly LOT of solves (not that I've tested it yet). It is automatable but ultimately still powered by humans.

It’s incredibly sad how the open web is being destroyed by google’s recaptcha.

I'm totally in that camp of opinion, although I'll acknowledge the escalating abuses carried out by both "sides."

In the meantime, i hope to have the savviness to program my own way out of unsolvable captchas.

I'd argue that it's equally sad to see the open web get destroyed by massive DDoS attacks and malicious actors. How would you keep your own website up if it was constantly being attacked?

Without google's recaptcha, do you think there would be less spam?

Personally, I suspect there would be more without at least some speed bumps to raise the cost of spamming. I would absolutely love for there to be better options than recaptcha that meets the same needs around bot-detection, price, implementation effort, and accessibility. It is, sadly, the best option I've seen on offer.

You're right. The scenario we're in is incredibly sad. It would be wonderful if the individual actors involved had better options to meet their needs.

You're barking up the wrong tree. Bad actors create abuse and spam which they can do because of fundamental weaknesses in the design of the internet. People trying to solve that reality with Recaptcha (and Cloudflare for that matter) aren't the ones destroying the internet.

I don't think it's so much the wrong tree as it is but one tree in a forest to be barking up.

All the maturely developed bot filters frequently throw me in an endless battery of tests that have me giving up in frustration before finally making it through to content I'm requesting.

> aren't the ones destroying the internet

IMO they are every bit as much destroying it as the abusers they're claiming to fend off.

Already exists: https://github.com/dessant/buster

Edit: on re-read, you meant solving using humans. Buster uses speech-to-text APIs to solve.

Every lead to spice(e:solve, lol gboard) my problems is probably worth a peek. I'll take a look, thank you.

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