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Comment by Gasp0de | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. The authors of the captcha solving bot papers claim 100% accuracy for reCaptcha and 98% accuracy for hCaptcha.

That google does this is not really a surprise, since they earn money by letting bots through (bots are then counted as humans and google can bill for ads shown to the bot), but hCaptcha at least advertises the fact that their interest is actually detecting bots.

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I personally know someone who has specifically designed bots to defeat both, and also the ones that defeat the "drag the puzzle piece" and similar "bot-defeating" technologies!

at this point I think your best bet is security through obscurity. with the state of generally available AI tools and processing power, is there any general format can't be solved?

surely the best option nowadays is to make your own or find an obscure one, and hope it's unusual enough that ready-made software doesn't exist that can easily solve it. then if and when it gets cracked to the degree it's impacting your content, move onto another one

> with the state of generally available AI tools and processing power, is there any general format can't be solved?

putting in a credit card?

I'm wondering if paid services have problems with bots, or if they mind, since they are being paid.

Ah! Here is the funny thing: Now your issue is card testers blowing up your dispute rates!

Putting in a CC for a trial to access your service doesn't end up deterring anybody because you can just buy a massive CSV with stolen details for relatively cheap. Even if they're frozen/cancelled, the card numbers are still valid numbers. If you want to pay to authenticate each and every one of them, you'll probably run yourself dry.

Can also just use old empty VISA gift cards, ethically sourced from relatives and friends of course.

with that, besides the issues other commenters raised, you're also putting off a very significant portion of legitimate users, who for any number of reasons may not want or be able to put a credit card into your site, even if they completely trust you

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