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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Someone will get rich turning this into a browser plug-in.

You can already buy captcha solves through browser plugins. The only difference is they currently use clickfarms full of underpaid workers from third-world countries

These sites like 2captcha and deathbycaptcha let anyone sign up to be a worker and start solving captchas for $$. If you can run AI that solves captcha just as well, you can literally print money.

2captcha gives you $0.50 per "1-2 hours". Is that really worth all the work?

deathbycaptcha does not let anyone simply sign up to work.

> 2captcha gives you $0.50 per "1-2 hours". Is that really worth all the work?

That's rough, but you could scale it up I guess. Didn't know that about dbc, thank you.

Nope, the moment this becomes a viable solution then spammers will pick it up, making captcha useless amost overnight.

Websites will very quickly pivot to alternative solutions like payment card verfification, etc.

Or to the next unsolved problem in machine learning. The whole point of ReCAPTCHA, at least, is to convert all this human labor into training data.

Solving captchas is pretty rare nowadays. Now you usually just press a button and then it does some sort of fingerprinting to determine if you're a human.

Try to use VPN. You will get captcha with tons of bicycles to click...

Why is the UI such a pain in the ass, when it's designed to be used by humans?! Why do I have to click 8 individual boxes and can't just drag-select an area. I hate those captchas with a passion.

And does the post count as traffic light?

And the infuriatingly slow fade out and in when it changes pictures. It seems designed to frustrate humans.

If you make zero attempts toward privacy maybe. Just turn on a commercial VPN or Tor and you'll find that your quality of life can quickly become severely damaged by captchas. I cant even do a Google search without a captcha so I started using Mullvad Leta as a proxy.

I block ads and stuff but you're right that I don't use VPNs or Tor.

A lot of bots also use VPNs and Tor so captchas being a pain in the ass is probably working as intended, that way most people won't bother using services like that? This is different from regular internet users, there is no reason to make their life more difficult than necessary.

I can confirm. uBlockO, PrivacyBadger, Firefox without any kind of memory and you will get CAPTCHA from time to time, maybe not every day but it's common.

IPv6, 3G/4G/5G or public Wifi can increase that to about every 10 queries on Google for a CAPTCHA. I guess VPN too increase the probability to get a CAPTCHA.

The spammers can already do this with captcha farms. The fact that captchas are still around means that the cost of captcha farms are still high enough to discourage enough spammers to be worth the annoyance that website operators cause for human users.

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