There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

casualhippo ,

We all knew this day would come, now it’s just a matter of making different captcha tests to evade these bots

jungekatz ,
@jungekatz@lib.lgbt avatar

They were never a test to evade bots to begim with, most capchas were used to train machine learning algorithms to train the bots on ! Just because it was manual labour google got it done for free , using this bullshit captcha thingy ! We sort of trained bots to read obsucre texts , and kinda did the labour for corps for free !

Holyhandgrenade ,
@Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world avatar

I heard Captcha was being used as training data for self-driving cars. Which probably explains why almost all of them ask you to identify cars, motorcycles, bridges, traffic lights, crosswalks etc.

Calatia ,

Both are right. The older ones with squiggly letters, numbers or that ask you to identify animals or objects were being used to train ai bots.

The ones that ask for crosswalks, bikes, overpass, signs etc are used to train self driving ai.

ShadedCosmos ,
@ShadedCosmos@lemmy.world avatar

I thought this was a rumor?

Edit: Nevermind. Looked it up.

pqdinfo , (edited )

Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.

Honytawk ,

The first captcha they already knew the answer to. The second captcha was to build the database.

floppy ,
@floppy@rabbitea.rs avatar

Pretty sure I’ve had “click all bicycles”, with a bicycle drawing on the road.

antonim ,

it would reject invalid answers

Not quite. When I used to care and kind of tried to distort the training data, I would always select one additional picture that did not contain the desired object, and my answer would usually be accepted. I.e. they were aware that the images weren’t 100% lined up with the labels in their database, so they’d give some leeway to the users, letting them correct those potential mistakes and smooth out the data.

it won’t let me get past without clicking on the van

That’s your assumption. Had you not clicked on the van, maybe it would’ve let you through anyway, it’s not necessarily that strict. Or it would just give you a new captcha to solve. Either way, if your answer did not line up with what the system expected (your assumption being that they had already classified it as a bus) it would call attention to the image. So, they might send it over to a real human to check what it really is, or put it into some different combination with other vehicles to filter it out and reclassify.

pqdinfo , (edited )

Removed as a protest against the community’s support for campaigns to bring about the deaths of members of marginalized groups, and opposition to private entities working to prevent such campaigns, together with it’s mindless flaming and downvoting of anyone who disagrees.

jungekatz ,

Yeah thats pretty much what it is being use for now

Draces ,

I’m pretty sure they began as bot filters. That’s what they became

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

Or the other approach, make it even harder for humans

…which is the current trend.

Draconic_NEO ,
@Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve found that a lot of sites use captchas or captcha-like systems as a means of frustrating users as a way of keeping away certain people that they don’t want to access the site (intellectual property owners), though it’s not the only tactic that they use. I mean it works, pretty much all of those sites are still up today, despite serving data that’s copyrighted by Nintendo, Sony, and other parties.

FatTony ,
@FatTony@lemmy.world avatar

New Captcha question: Does pressing a controller’s button harder make the character’s action more impactful?

if answer = yes : human

if answer = no : bot

snooggums ,
@snooggums@kbin.social avatar

if answer = depends on the game and system : gamer

Honytawk ,

If answer = depends on the hardware : engineer

Zehzin ,
@Zehzin@lemmy.world avatar

It’s my fault. I get those wrong on purpose out of spite

Widowmaker_Best_Girl ,

Based

HeartyBeast ,
@HeartyBeast@kbin.social avatar

So that’s OK - you ‘passed’? You’re a bot!

Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

relevant XKCD

kluevo ,

huh

That… Actually seems like not that bad of an idea (at least for forum/reddit/lemmy bots)

Well, if you ignore the infeasibility aspect of getting the humans to cooperate and stuff

saltesc ,

Well, if you ignore the infeasibility aspect of getting the humans to cooperate and stuff

Don’t you fucking tell me what to do!

gets mace

CIA_chatbot ,

Yes silly humans, fight amongst yourselves

Honytawk ,

Is it really such a bad thing when the humans that are unable to cooperate do not get access?

kluevo ,

Sometimes you might need an urgent answer (eg, overflowing sink or a weird smell coming from an appliance problem) and don’t have time to fill out a serious form

Baketime ,

The title text on the comic

And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co- ... oh.

new_guy ,

But what if someone else makes a bot not to answer things but to rate randomly if an answer is constructive or not?

T156 ,

Wasn’t that basically the intention behind the Upvote and Downvote systems in Lemmy, StackExchange/Overflow, Reddit, or old YouTube? The idea being that helpful, constructive comments would get pushed to the top, whereas unhelpful or spam comments get pushed to the bottom (and automatically hidden).

It’s just that it didn’t really work out quite the same way in practice due to botting, people gaming the votes, or the votes not being used as expected.

Greenskye ,

Yep the flaw is assuming that humans would actually select for constructive comments. It’s a case where humans claim that’s what they want, but human actions do not reflect this. We’d eventually build yet another ‘algorithm that picks what immediately appeals to most users’ rather than ‘constructive’. You’d also see the algorithm splinter along ideological lines as people tend to view even constructive comments from ideologies they disagree with unfavorably

d3Xt3r ,

That’s just a flaw in implementation. Look at the system implemented by Slashdot, still works to this day.

davidgro ,

Bots on Reddit already steal parts of upvoted comments and post them elsewhere in the same post to get upvotes themselves (so the account can be used for spam later)

Even with context they can be very difficult to spot sometimes.

superkret ,

online study
not peer reviewed
“published” on arxiv (which is a public document server, not a journal)
study and authors not named or linked in the article

tl/dr: “Someone uploaded a pdf and we’re writing about it.”

CookieJarObserver ,
@CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works avatar

I mean its pretty obvious that nowadays AI is absolutely capable of doing that and some people are just blind or fat finger the keyboard.

Pelicanen ,

I mean, it is The World’s Hardest Game

Zeth0s , (edited )

You are overrating peer reviewing. It’s basically a tool to help editors to understand if a paper “sells”, to improve readability and to discard clear garbage.

If methodologies are not extremely flawed, peer reviewing almost never impact quality of the results, as reviewers do not redo the work. From the “trustworthy” point of view, peer reviewing is comparable to a biased rng. Google for actual reproducibility of published experiments and peer-reviewing biases for more details

Preprints are fine, just less polished

brsrklf ,

Peer reviewing is how you know the methodology is not flawed…

Zeth0s , (edited )

Unfortunately not. www.nature.com/articles/533452a

Most peer reviewed papers are non reproducible. Peer review has the primary purpose of telling the editor how sellable is a paper in a small community he only superficially knows, and to make it more attractive to that community by suggesting rephrasing of paragraphs, additional references, additional supporting experiment to clarify unclear points.

But it doesn’t guarantees methodology is not flawed. Editor chooses reviewer very superficially, and reviews are mainly driven by biases, and reviewers cannot judge the quality of a research because they do not reproduce it.

Honesty of researchers is what guarantees quality of a paper

C4d ,

Yes. A senior colleague sometimes tongue-in-cheek referred to it as Pee Review.

Zeth0s , (edited )

The downvotes to my comments shows that no many people here has ever done research or knows the editorial system of scientific journals :D

C4d ,

There is some variation across disciplines; I do think that in general the process does catch a lot of frank rubbish (and discourages submission of obvious rubbish), but from time to time I do come across inherently flawed work in so-called “high impact factor” and allegedly “prestigious” journals.

In the end, even after peer review, you need to have a good understanding of the field and to have developed and applied your critical appraisal skills.

barsoap ,

And TBF just getting on arxiv also means you jumped a bullshit hurdle: Roughly speaking you need to be in a position in academia, or someone there needs to vouch for the publication. At the same time getting something published there isn’t exactly prestigious so there’s no real incentive to game the system, as such the bar is quite low but consistent.

Zeth0s , (edited )

Arxiv is a pre print archive. Many very prestigious researchers put their pre prints there. It is as credible as any journal (more than many out there nowadays). Its presentation is just less curated and a selection is missing, because there is no editor. Readers of a paper must know what they are reading, and must critically assess it.

barsoap ,

Mostly when it comes to the types of papers I read them being shoddy involves issues of the type “yeah this has good asymptotic performance and even the constants are good but we’re completely thrashing caches and to get it published we cherry-picked the algorithms we benchmark against so we still come out on top, or near the top but can say that our way to do things is simpler”. Or even better “let’s not do benchmarks at all but overload the paper with Greek and call it theory in the hopes nobody ever tries to implement it”.

And I’m not even blaming people for it, the issue being that these kinds of results should be published for the sake of science and not having to duplicate work but people need to jazz it up to get their papers accepted. The metric for “contribution to the field” is fucked: It was a valiant effort, it didn’t really pan out, can’t hit the target without missing a couple of times first and with each try you learn and so did I from reading the paper. “Algorithm doesn’t actually produce the output it’s supposed to produce” is virtually unheard of, at least in a fraudulent manner. It’s after all much easier to get things to be correct than to get them to be fast.

This paper isn’t your usual CS paper though, “having humans do stuff and analyse what they did and what they think of it” isn’t exactly a CS methodology, what happens in those cases is that researchers ask for help from a random researcher down the hallway working in a field which uses suitable methods. Peer review at USENIX won’t check that methodology for sanity because the peers there have no real idea either.

As to the novelty of the claim: Pretty much restricted to “this annoys humans more than it annoys bots”. That captchas can be beat by bots is well-established in the field (both in the “academic” and “wearing a BOFH t-shirt” sense), that they’re annoying is so painfully obvious only psychologists would dare to challenge it, so the claim is indeed restricted to “have they lost 99% or 110% of their value when you value the sanity of your human users”.

Zeth0s , (edited )

Absolutely. One needs to know what is reading. That’s why pre prints are fine.

High impact factor journals are full of works purposely wrong, made because author wants the results that readers are looking for (that is the easiest way to be published in high impact factor journal).

timeshighereducation.com/…/papers-high-impact-jou…

It’s the game. Reader must know how to navigate the game. Both for peer reviewed papers and pre prints

barsoap , (edited )

I suppose it’s this paper. Most prolific author seems to be Gene Tsudik, h-index of 103. Yeah that’s not “someone”. Also the paper is accepted for USENIX Security 2023, which is actually ongoing right now.

Also CS doesn’t really do academia like other sciences, being somewhere on the intersection of maths, engineering, and tinkering. Shit’s definitely not invalid just because it hasn’t been submitted to a journal this could’ve been a blog post but there’s academics involved so publish or perish applies.

Or, differently put: If you want to review it, bloody hell do it it’s open access. A quick skim tells me “way more thorough than I care to read for the quite less than extraordinary claim”.

Kichae ,

Bots picking the questions, bots answering them. They clearly understand whatever the fuck the captcha bot thinks a bus is better than I do.

lowleveldata ,

Ez. Only allow access when they score 70 to 80.

brsrklf ,

“Please complete the next 200 captchas so we can have a reasonably accurate estimate of your success rate”

Blizzard ,

https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/b8f7fb64-2b34-41eb-b0ac-26a0bc3381bd.webp

Themadbeagle ,

“Only human intelligence can solve” gives answer

ItsMeForRealNow ,

Levels of smart and dumb. Facepalm moment.

raptir ,

I think the response is meant to be tongue in cheek.

WarmSoda ,

If that’s chatGPT it’s supposedly programed to stop looking further at a site when it encounters a captcha. So that response would make sense.

candybrie ,

The “requires human intelligence and perception to solve” after having just solved it at least feels a little sardonic.

Buttons ,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

At this rate Skynet will be like “I’m going to nuke the world on X data, I’ve already taken over all the launch computers, but I’m not going to tell you or it would ruin my plans.”

These LLMs “think” by generating text, and we can see what that text is. It reminds me of this scene from Westworld (NSFW, nudity): www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnxJRYit44k

PipedLinkBot ,

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/watch?v=ZnxJRYit44k

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.

T156 ,

In fairness, that style of captcha has been broken for a while, hence why they’re not still in use.

transistor ,
@transistor@lemdro.id avatar

Is this real lol?

Snowman44 ,

ChatGPT just want Mr. Incredible on you.

I’d like to tell you that the captcha says overlooks and inquiry, but I can’t. I’m sorry ma’am. I know you’re upset. I’d like to help you, but I can’t.

dan1101 ,

So is it time to get rid of them then? Usually when I encounter one of those “click the motorcycles” I just go read something else.

T156 ,

It’s a double-edged sword. Just because it doesn’t work perfectly doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

To a spammer, building something with the ability to break a captcha is more expensive than something that cannot, whether in terms of development time, or resource demands.

We saw with a few Lemmy instances that they’re still good at protecting instances from bots and bot signups. Removing captchas entirely means erasing that barrier of entry that keeps a lot of bots out, and might cause more problems than it fixes.

IAm_A_Complete_Idiot ,

Problem is this assumes that everyone has to build their own captcha solver. It’s definitely a bare minimum standard barrier to entry, but it’s really not a sustainable solution to begin with.

C4d ,

I thought Captcha tests were being used to train image recognition systems no?

Odelay42 ,

Yes, but that’s more of a side quest for the system. Primary use case has always been security.

Heresy_generator ,
@Heresy_generator@kbin.social avatar

Maybe. Or maybe it was always about using millions of hours of free labor to tune their algorithms and "bot detection" was just how they marketed it to the people that added it to their sites. Makes me wonder who was running the bots that needed to be protected against. Exacerbate the problem then solve the problem and get what you really want.

Overzeetop ,
@Overzeetop@kbin.social avatar

There is considerable overlap between the smartest AI and the dumbest humans. The concerns over bears and trash cans in US National Parks was ahead of its time.

sramder ,
@sramder@lemmy.world avatar

Still can’t get in to archive.ly ;-)

Rhaedas ,
@Rhaedas@kbin.social avatar

So just keep the existing tests and change the passing ones to not get access. Checkmate robots.

Just kidding, I welcome our robot overlords...I'll act as your captcha gateway.

aesthelete ,

I thought these were designed to make you want to walk into the ocean.

youtu.be/en5_JrcSTcU

The passwords of past you’ve correctly guessed, now it’s time for the robot test!

PipedLinkBot ,

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/en5_JrcSTcU

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.

tacosplease ,

Just encountered a captcha yesterday that I had to refresh several times and then listen to the audio playback. The letters were so obscured by a black grid that it was impossible to read them.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •