HN Explorer

Are CAPTCHAs getting too hard for humans?

4 points by throwaway7767 ↗ HN
I regularly browse HN through tor. As a tor user I'm used to having to solve CAPTCHAs everywhere I go, as there's always some assholes using tor for abuse.

In the past couple of days, the CAPTCHAs for HN got way harder, to the point that I can't solve them. It used to be two words where one was an easy control word you could skip, the other a semi-hard word that I'd get ~70% success rate on.

Now, both words are equally hard with additional distortion, and my success rate approaches 0%.

Are CAPTCHAs really still workable if this is what's needed to keep the bots out? If humans can't solve the problem, it's probably not a good metric to determine whether someone is a human or a bot.

I don't have any good solutions here, but this is very frustrating and I'd love to see some discussion about alternatives.

6 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 24.1 ms ] thread
cabirum
I'd love to see some valid reasons for using Tor to browse HN. To discuss solutions, you need to define the problem first. I don't know, use a VPN service or set up your own?
throwaway7767
> I'd love to see some valid reasons for using Tor to browse HN.

Many countries have restrictive firewalls, for example. In other countries things may not be blocked, but people know their actions are being monitored and would prefer to be able to communicate openly without self-censorship.

If you need more food for thought to stimulate your imagination, the tor project has a page just for this: https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en

> To discuss solutions, you need to define the problem first. I don't know, use a VPN service or set up your own?

I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of my post. I am technically inclined and I'm sure I could find many workarounds. But that will not help other tor users. The hope by posting this here is that the HN admins will see it and try to give tor users a better user experience. Other people in the tech community might see it and decide to deal with tor users in a better way themselves.

To preempt the inevitable, I am not saying any of these people have any obligation to serve tor users. But I suspect most of this is not done intentionally and the people running sites do not realize how they inconvenience a segment of their userbase.

cabirum
Tor is not the only tool out there to protect privacy/circumvent restrictions. It has flaws by design, such as all traffic has to pass through limited number of known exit nodes, and you cannot easily filter out unwanted stuff, so a CAPTCHA in one form or another is pretty much the only solution. If you suggesting to just replace it with some easier implementation, it would be automated.

So the solution is on the users' side. Just choose another approach that works for you, such as VPN. You won't get CAPTCHA'd, privacy still protected, problem solved. One way or another, technically inclined users are not the ones experiencing problems with restrictions.

throwaway7767
As I said, this thread was meant to encourage discussion of how websites can better service tor users. "Don't use tor then" isn't really helpful in that context.

To seed this discussion with an idea rather than letting it degenerate further, how about only requiring CAPTCHAs for account signups/logins, allowing read-only access? It would not solve everything, but it would sure make things better.

sarciszewski
> I'd love to see some valid reasons for using Tor to browse HN.

If I don't trust the HN operators (whom are on US soil and subject to National Security Letters) with my real IP, I'm going to use Tor.

seanccox
I don't have a solution, but I would like to echo that I experience the problem almost daily. I don't use Tor for HN, but I do use it to access FB (which is restricted in my workplace) and – since the main reason I use FB is to get local news – I often encounter difficult CAPTCHAs when following a link to an external new site. I haven't detected a clear pattern either, except that my fail rate has gone up dramatically.