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Ask HN: Just how good are captcha solvers these days?

3 points by arisAlexis ↗ HN
I just fired up a new browser installation and logged in from a VPN while I had another browser logged in Gmail so I guess it would throw some alerts but google made me solve straight 17!!!! captchas with images which I did correctly. If you have to solve 17 I think the tech is dead?

5 comments

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Alphapickel2
Your IP address is overused. Sounds like your Internet is really trash or you are using a massively shared network.

Also you just said VPN next to captcha. It is common knowledge that using a VPN, you will have a shared IP with other users of said VPN. Commonly people run scripts against Google, to scrap intel, and or find victim results to attack; exploit to break in.

It is highly likely an evil human used the VPN to attempt Google dorks for malicious queries. Rather than complain about getting captchas while on VPN, go build your own VPN with your own unique IP address and you will rarely get captchas.

jollyllama
Yes, I wonder about this too. The problem is it's entirely ambiguous what frames the motorcycle/bicycle/etc is in. If there's a frame with just a tiny bit of the object in it, does that count? Usually when I click those it says I'm wrong, and when I don't, it says it's right.
legrande
What bothers me about Google's CAPTCHAS is they have to /know/ the answer beforehand meaning they had to be pre-trained. We're not training them, we're just providing the right answer. It's the opposite of what a Turing test should be.
tredre3
> What bothers me about Google's CAPTCHAS is they have to /know/ the answer beforehand

No they don't, their captcha works like any other crowd-sourced distributed workloads: They present the same data to many people and go by consensus.

throw9away6
Excellent. They solve them in less than a second and are super cheap. Can do all the fancy ones like hcapcha too. Way better than humans just have a slight cost that adds up