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What about clicking a checkbox means I'm human? How does Cloudflare determine I'm human from that?

The simplicity of it is logic defying. It used to be that you had to find crosswalks or move puzzle pieces or type blurred letters and numbers, but NOW all the sudden I can just click a box and HEY!, I’m human?

That’s hardly the Turing Test I’d expected.

platypode ,
@platypode@sh.itjust.works avatar

It tests whether your mouse movement looks human–we’re really bad at things like moving in straight lines, so it’s pretty evident from a mouse movement log whether you’re a human or a simple bot. It also takes a bunch of auxiliary browser/environment data into account. It’s not perfect, but it’s complicated enough to defeat to provide fine protection against cheap spam.

Melatonin OP ,

Interesting that my mouse movement is available to anyone who wants it.

It seems like a small step from that to accessing my keyboard.

Shadow ,
@Shadow@lemmy.ca avatar

Your mouse movement on that page is. Just like if you typed into the page.

It’s not tracking you in other windows and apps.

kionite231 ,

There is a lot of other data available to sites you visit unless you are using some kind of fingerprint protection

sbv ,

Your mouse movement and keyboard events are available to webpages that you’ve loaded, when the browser window is focused.

This isn’t nefarious - it allows websites to build nice UIs that most people enjoy using, most of the time.

There’s lots of shady stuff going on in browsers, this isn’t really one of them.

Melatonin OP ,

Hmm, I can think of some ways to misuse this. And I’m not very smart at all.

naticus ,

Say more

Melatonin OP ,

Like those sites that ask me to sign in using Google (or other options) and then Google asks me for the password?

Pretty easy to grab passwords I think.

howrar ,

Those websites send you directly to Google, so they no longer have control of the web page when you’re entering your password.

Aatube ,

This is why Google sign-in can’t be embedded and uses the password input type for the password type. Most SSOs do this as well.

naticus ,

To clarify, websites can’t capture keyboard events that were typed into a different website like you’re thinking. Think of going to a web game that let’s you use WASD for controlling your character. It’s able to capture those events on that page because its in focus. When a site goes out of focus (such as switching tabs or switching to another window that’s not the browser), it loses that ability. Overall, it’s very secure.

I was more wondering how you thought capturing the mouse movements would lead to security issues.

Takumidesh ,

I mean, how do you think websites work? Of course your mouse and keyboard events are available, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to interact with a website at all.

MoonManKipper ,

If you’re using a webpage JavaScript can see your mouse cursor and anything you type. But only if the browser has focus. So if you’re typing in another window it can’t

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

They can only access it while you’re focused on their webpage. CORS is all about that.

If you click off to another web page and enter information or type of password into a secondary app they can’t gather that. As soon as they lose focus they lose the ability to capture your data.

Septimaeus ,

Nbd, but it sounds like you’re talking about encapsulation of event capture (viewport stops receiving events after losing focus).

CORS is a protocol for client-side enforcement of a server-side security policy. It ensures that a resource request (e.g. “my-totally-safe-resource.wasm”) only loads from a location your server permits (e.g. “my-valid-origin.biz”, “friends-valid-origin.org”, etc).

boatswain ,

If loaded with pages didn’t have access to keyboard events, you wouldn’t be able to write comments on Lemmy posts. I’m not a front-end guy, but that should be limited to just white the browser is focused.

random_character_a ,
@random_character_a@lemmy.world avatar

Shitty situation if you are used to using hotkeys and only use mouse cursor when no other means are available by moving it using numpad.

savedbythezsh ,

Yeah, never thought about this before, but how do blind users deal with captchas?

TheBat ,
@TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

There are audio captchas.

bionicjoey ,

Normally there are audio captchas

Thorry84 ,

If it’s in doubt it just gives you extra challenges. So in the end everybody will get there, or not and then fuck you I guess.

ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling ,
@ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Nah that’s different as well. What they are filtering out is

  • a mouse teleporting to the exact center of the checkbox
  • a mouse smoothly gliding in a straight line to the center if the checkbook
  • a mouse traveling in a straight line to the center of the checkbook with some momentary stutters to add noise

Et cetera. Humans are much noiser than anything a python script will spit out. Of course there are ways to get around this, like recording and reenacting a human mouse movement, but the point of any capcha system is to make it significantly more difficult to bot, not impossible.

user224 ,
@user224@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

But it also works with touchscreen taps, and randomizing tap position, duration, and delay is fairly simple.

Jimmycrackcrack ,

I’ve learned from these that I must definitely move my mouse like a robot since it always asks me to do more puzzles afterwards. This is even if I try jiggling it around after clicking just to try and convince it.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Could also be browser settings. I often get infinite captcha’d on private Firefox tabs

spankinspinach ,

Yeah this is my experience as well. I don’t have much technical knowledge about it, but Firefox with ublock seems to be the enemy of captcha and CloudFlare

Vince ,

Couldn’t I just record my mouse movements clicking on it a couple dozen times and randomly replay one of those recordings?

Catsrules ,

It could store the mouse movements to compare later.

Phil_in_here ,

My question is how is it not trivial to add a noise wave or some shit to the bot path? Obviously, I have zero technical knowledge of how bots, pathing, or anti-bot analysis works

nick ,

It uses other signals too, like what other sites you’ve visited with that checkbox on it, what CloudFlare has seen your IP address doing in the past, etc.

The google one is able to see if you’re logged into a google account and take that into account.

There’s even a new variant of the Google captcha that is invisible and doesn’t even bother to show a checkbox.

pineapplelover ,

What if you’re on a phone or tablet?

The_Walkening ,

The timing of the click captcha loading is randomized and it probably is looking for human-ish cursor movement? (Like you’re probably moving your hand in imperceptibly small ways that are difficult to replicate). Clicking before it loads and doing it repeatedly probably triggers detection.

tetris11 ,
@tetris11@lemmy.ml avatar

I used to think it was timing based, but now leaning on the idea that it just performs more fingerprinting in the background: user agent per ip pool, canvas or puppeteer checks.

Paradachshund ,

This is correct. Those captchas are tracking everything they can and comparing it to other results to try and figure this out. Mouse movement, delay before you click, everything.

ChicagoCommunist ,

The best is when it fails to verify, offers no backup option, and you’re simply blocked from accessing your own bank account or government website. Fuck cloudflare

user224 ,
@user224@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Bank and government website behind Cloudflare???

Fuck, I just checked, my bank is also behind Cloudflare, what the fuck…
I kind of assumed a bank wouldn’t put another company with ability to view all transferred data between customers and themselves.

How much of the internet is not behind CF?
I should probably try blocking their IPs and see what will still work.

BaroqueInMind ,

I’ve tried this and you essentially break resolving of most of the internet on your device by doing this. Almost the entire internet relies on both Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare.

invertedspear ,

It redirects, it doesn’t proxy. The workflow is: user navigates to URL->DNS sends it to cloudflare->cloudflare ensures request is allowed based on selected rules (human check, geo check, DDOS check, etc) and remembers->request is redirected to non-cloudflare address->server response goes direct from server to user browser->subsequent requests are redirected without the test as long as the cookie remembers. I don’t like cloudflare, every time I have an issue pop up out of nowhere, it’s usually cloudflare and some over eager netsec engineer that broke CORS, or decided css wasn’t important, or that machine to machine traffic was a DOS attack. But it’s not reading your statements or anything else the server sends back. It could conceivably read your username and password and any other data you send in your request, but it doesn’t have the TLS certificate. So even though it doesn’t even try, if CF decided to be nefarious, as long as your banks engineers are at least somewhat competent CF is only getting encrypted data that it can’t do anything with. Hate on CF all you want, but hate it for the right reasons.

ChicagoCommunist ,

Think you mean to respond to the other comment fyi

as long as your banks engineers are at least somewhat competent

Let’s be realistic here lol

elrik ,

Proof of work, which becomes computationally expensive to scale, along with other heuristics based on your browser and page interaction. I believe it’s less about clicking the box and what happens after you’ve clicked the box.

SerotoninSwells ,
@SerotoninSwells@lemmy.world avatar

This is correct. I work in bot detections. There are baseline checks for various browser automation used as bot frameworks like Puppeteer or Playwright. Then there is basic analysis of server side and client side fingerprints; meaning, do the fingerprints you claim make sense. There are other heuristics too and I imagine Cloudflare is monitoring movements that point to automation. All of this happens after you click. I personally prefer this over Google’s captcha which frequently doesn’t recognize me as a human but is easily bypassed by bots.

TheChemist ,

I guess Bots started figuring out the previous puzzles.

Black_Mald_Futures ,

They’re literally using captchas to train AI, that’s why you have to identify 50 ffucking bicycles and fire hydrants sometimes. I’m pissed off at all the fucking free work I’ve had to do just to log in to shit

Lemjukes ,

A side to this is that certain techniques will be deliberately obfuscated or simply omitted as a security measure in the hopes of slowing a bad actor’s eventual bypassing of the measure. It’s an arms race and if the intruder doesn’t know what all the locks even are, it takes longer to break or pick them.

brian ,

some of them are also less bot detection and more spam limiting and mitigation. cloudflare’s has more stuff built in I’m sure, but things like mCapcha are just proof of work, so if you’re trying to make a bunch of accounts or whatever, it’s really computationally expensive.

Empricorn ,

It’s actually detecting you using emotion and age. That’s the real test…

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

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01189998819991197253 ,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

Pretty much every time for me. I just close the page when this thing happens. It’s not worth the headache.

Xeroxchasechase ,

Clicking a check box might not be the definite quality that makes you a human, but pondering on the meaning of things and questioning your humanity with a curious introspective state of mind - THAT what makes you a human! I’m proud of you, fellow human!

Melatonin OP ,

Thank you for interacting with me! I am an AI intelligence bot designed by Decepticon Industries. Down with Autobots!

Mambert ,

Basically bots would automatically click on it, teleporting the cursor to the very center of the button. They will do this within exact milliseconds of the page loading.

Humans read something on the site, then find the banner, and move the cursor over to it, confirm that the cursor is somewhere on the button, and then click it.

It’s not just the button, it’s the before the button that determines you’re a bot or not.

NightEagle ,

Clicking the button doesn’t proof that you are a human. All the checks happen way before you even click the button (or sometimes even before visiting the website). Google also offers a similar button for their users and since cloudflare is also used on almost any website, they have a lot of data about you. They check your cookies, browser agent, device, settings, your IP address, if you use a VPN or proxy, etc. If you visited other cloudflare websites in the past with the same device or IP, and so on. So they know you and your device way before you even click the button. This is also the reason why you sometimes see a robot arm (made of Lego) clicking the button, and is still recognized as human. But as soon as you use a different IP address or a VPN (or even use a shared IP address, like in your company’s network) you have to solve CAPTCHAs. Of course they also check mouse movement, but this is only one part of many checks.

LaGG_3 ,
@LaGG_3@hexbear.net avatar

I think it’s monitoring your mouse inputs somehow to determine if you’re a person

themoonisacheese ,
@themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works avatar

Apart from the mouse thing (which I’m skeptical about), cloudflare also correlates your traffic with other sites hosted on cloudflare. Bots typically don’t visit many sites, click around there, find another one, etc, whereas humans will have visited other sites, will be slower at clicking the button, will have left comments on some sites.

Cephalotrocity ,

I don’t know for certain, but I think it is simply looking at what you do with your mouse. If the movement is erratic, imprecise, and delayed it goes ‘yeah, that is either a cat that got lucky which is close enough or a human’. The reason I think this is that I’ve failed same site’s checks if my mouse just happens to be hovering over the checkbox when the prompt appears. Retry, move the mouse, success.

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