Cloudflare dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, moves to hCaptcha as free ride ends (and something about privacy) Cloudflare on Wednesday said it is ditching Google's reCAPTCHA bot detector for a similar service called hCaptcha out of concerns about privacy and availability, but mostly cost. The network services biz said it initially adopted reCAPTCHA because it was free, effective, and worked at scale. Some Cloudflare customers, however …
I think the register should adopt a more modern javascript based comment submission system to help filter out non-sentient entities that execute random behavioural routines without the comprehension level of the humans who normally frequent the comment section of articles aimed at a technically cluefull audience.
Or they could just change their attack settings in the cloudflare control panel to always challenge every user, should be easier but probably won't be as effective at the secondary goal of also wanting to block spam bots.
Weird. I was going to post with title "WTF is a sidewalk", or possibly crosswalk. Any Why TF do I always have to do it more than once??
Anyway, fixed it in my current website. The contact form justs asks the user to answer a very simple (technical) question, and there are several valid one-word answers. Anyone who's on the website and wants to contact me will know the answers, and I don't want to speak to anyone else.
And, similarly, when it asks you to select images of taxis, why can't I see a black cab in any of them?
(Unless some of them are hidden behind those yellow cars that often seem to get in the way?)
PS: I had to re-read "botherders" as I couldn't work out what a "bother-der" was...
The problem with any CAPTCHA system is they will need a default dialect. That is inherent in the method. For English it could any of a number dialects depending on where the developers are from. And everyone who does not speak that dialect will have problems with the system.
Audio has it's problems too - I love Burnistoun but my wife needs the subtitles.
We have been trying to export 43 million emails from G Suite. We've had our email backups/eDiscovery in Google's systems since Postini, so pre Google Apps. That means they've made a huge, huge amount of money off of us.
So get this. Google Vault, their current eDiscovery system, stores your generated email export files for 15 days... from the time of starting it. That means if you happen to export more in one batch than Google can handle, it will delete it mid-export after 15 days. We spent weeks arguing with underpaid Indian support reps and never once spoke to anyone from their internal IT—not even anyone above Tier 1.
End result was that we had to run multiple exports until we found the magical filesize that would complete and allow us to download it before the 15 day cutoff, and had to do this countless times for the TB's of emails we had.
Google Support is atrocious, and I'm glad we will be rid of them soon.
First, they started serving files for many websites from their CDN, then they started a DNS-over-https service, now they add a Captcha service (with added tulip-bubble blockchain compliance, yaay!), what next....?
Say, that's a lot of potentially identifying data you're gathering in a single organisation there, wouldn't it perhaps be nice for the financials if there were, say, some kind of way to, you know, monetize it...? (Or maybe a couple of people in smart suits and dark glasses might also come and knock at the door?)
(If Cloudflare are, and will remain, genuinely better and less shifty than that, then my apologies, but I can't help but be a little suspicious as to what sort of empire-building is going on here...)
There is a site I need to access for work. Every time I go there, from the same computer, I am presented with as many as ten puzzles one after the other.
Cloudflare has some very smart people, I am surprised they don't build their own solution versus foist HCraptcha on people
Several of the many 2FA apps seem like a reasonable way out if this - even one with an anonymous Capcha style mode.
“CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart)” .... Alan Turing will be spinning in his grave his legacy has been attached to this usability fail bag’o’shite.
"it plans to begin charging for reCAPTCHA, a service it has previously offered for free because the answers people provide improve its services and machine learning systems"
So, Google is making people pay for a free service that improves its own learning systems ? You're already getting a benefit, so now you want money too ?
God it must be great to be at the top.
Oh, and for the bot herders : send their complaints (and IP addresses) to the FBI. I'm sure the feds would love to have a chat and listen to their woes.
"improve its services and machine learning systems.
...there's no charge for reCAPTCHA unless you exceed one million queries per month or 1,000 API calls per second."
Surely those sites generating so much "learning" for Googles systems should be getting paid by Google for providing such a huge service?
I cannot recall seeing a reCAPTCHA when registering on the Play store on an Android phone.
I see apps on the Play store with hundreds of fake 5-star reviews, with dozens new being added daily. Like this beauty which charges you around USD 90 per week for wallpapers - after a 3 day free trial: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wallpaper.photon
Reporting the reviews as spam or unhelpful does not help. Google just ignores the reports. Same goes if you report the app itself. I imagine the people at Google receiving the reports laughing really hard and loud before clicking on Delete.
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