I love how it has taken this long for media to cover this issue. I thought this was common knowledge for about a decade
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/buster-captcha-solver-for/mpbjkejclgfgadiemmefgebjfooflfhl
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/
A useful extension. Works 90% of the time for me.
Holy shit I'm trying this
Edit: it works.
Thanks. Gonna try this out.
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I had to go through seven captcha screens a couple of days ago just to apply for a fucking job.
If I wasn't so desperate for work, I would have said fuck it. I hate it.
It's the first qualification you need to have
I guess so, but I was starting to think maybe I was a robot after about the fourth.
I knew it was training LLMs. I had a just had a feeling that it was, not any specific evidence. I hate being right all the time. -_-
Not LLMs, self-driving cars. Ever noticed how most of the challenges are things you need to recognize while driving?
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You know, I think the best way for the Internet as a whole to stop using people as product, is to have a worldwide publically subsidised Internet, like the BBC or PBS but it is the Internet. The governments pitches in just like with any global programmes.
That would be awesome but I don't see it working in practice. The BBC at least is losing it's independence, I don't know about PBS. Imagine Trump now controlling the internet directly for 4 years.
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The best way is for people to stop trying to make as much money as possible with as little effort as possible.
It's not about keeping the lights on, putting kids through school, or putting bread on the table. It's about living as luxurious a life as possible with as little effort as possible. That's it.
If these people were forced to do more with less, they would because they have no other choice. They have other choices, so that's what they take.
I'm sorry, but people like you are actually helping them by peddling the narrative that they need this money. They don't. Plenty of people work harder than them for less because they have no choice.
We need to stop giving businesses decisions on how to f**k us and just band together with higher standards so they make less profit.
Everyone who gives them money should be seen as a class traitor, because that's what they are.
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People buy magnets and tape them to their body because they think it cures cancer.
Why would these people use free Internet when premium luxury deluxe Internet is available for only .99¢ a month.
And then why wouldn't PLDI, Inc founder not use his influence to get elected president and kill that bad public Internet.
Worse than magnets, "negative ion" wearables are strong radioactive aources
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I always click wrong stuff first to see which captcha is training on my input and which one is actually checking what I click.
how do you tell by doing that?
If you click on the wrong stuff and it lets you through then it's training.
Exactly. Or they gave up on you. But that's unlikely.
It's a free service that's been provided to website makers to easily add a way to reduce bot spam. And for a very long time, it worked
Captcha got tonnes of free training data, and in return website maintainer got an incredibly handy free tool to help secure their site.
Captcha 100% could have charged licensing for their tool, could charged money for developers to use their service.
They didn't, and I think it's perfectly reasonable they got the training data as "payment" instead.
Your favorite free websites you use get to have another part of their architecture stay free.
The website maintainer get an awesome free tool.
Captcha got training data to profit off of.
That's good internet where everyone wins without the need for bullshit licensing and fees and royalties and subscriptions.
Would you have rather your Netflix account cost an extra 15 cents per month or whatever to offset yet another licensing cost for some captcha tool?
Would you have rather your Netflix account cost an extra 15 cents per month or whatever to offset yet another licensing cost for some captcha tool?
Err... couldn't the corporation just make less profit but still provide the service as-is?
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Captcha was never good at stopping bots. It was always used to identify who is a human. In other words exactly the opposite of what you think.
Edit: because I see confusion, maybe a language barrier, here is an example of what people think it is and how it works: https://youtube.com/shorts/rme6PT7-CRI Which is wrong on many levels.
Here is a better explanation of what I meant: https://youtu.be/VTsBP21-XpI
Hope this explains it better than my original comment.
I can personally confirm it very much did help curb botting issues on my website.
Seconded, websites with logins are practically unusable without the tool. We had to disable it once and our database got flooded by unverified accounts. Absolutely awful.
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CAPTCHAs make web sites awful to use, and waste the limited lifespans of billions of people.
There are other ways to manage bots.
I'm not a website administrator so I'm out of the loop. Other ways to manage bots? Like what?
What will be effective depends on the nature of the site and that of the bots causing trouble. For example, a forum can limit posting privileges until an account builds a reputation, a paid goods/services site can restrict access until a purchase is made, a web service can use revocable credentials, and a data download site can use rate limits. (That last one is actually useful in a variety of situations, and can be done at the network level instead of or in addition to the application level.)
There is no silver bullet, but there are lots of small measures that can be very effective when applied thoughtfully, without turning a site into a frustrating-to-use surveillance tool for Google at the expense of the humans who want to or have to use it.
Even a small, locally hosted, activate-only-once, simple image or text-based CAPTCHA would be preferable to the ones operated by third parties.
Thank you for the thorough reply!
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Not easily, and not at the time, no, it really was a very easy way to quickly reduce bot problems at the time.
You'd get random spam for stuff that could flood your forums or etc, and setting up captcha had an extremely immediate and palpable effect on reducing the spam that came in from random bot farms and shit.
I can personally confirm that when I implemented captcha on my forums i maintained 14 years ago, it pretty substantially reduced spammers by a huge degree.
There's no point in arguing what once was. Things have changed. CAPTCHAs are now less effective, far more invasive, and for many people, far more troublesome.
Cling to them if you like. I no longer use them on any of my sites, because I care about my users.
Exactly. We’re all out here licking corporate boots by clicking traffic lights for free, propping up their data plantations under the guise of “security.” Google turned paranoia into profit, and now Cloudflare’s farming our fingerprints like we’re glorified dairy cows.
That $3 settlement? Peanuts to keep us complacent while they mint billions off our collective unpaid labor. The real CAPTCHA is figuring out how to burn this extractive circus to the ground before we’re all indentured to their algorithmic overlords.
It starts with striking till Musk is out of government, otherwise:
If standing around doesn't make him stop we have to be prepared to do the things we all know are required to stop fascists.
How much is rent for one of those fuckers though?
Scientists agree that the human body, at rest, can produce around 100 watts of power on average. This is enough electricity to power up a light bulb. Some humans have the ability to output over 2,000 watts of power, for instance if sprinting.
https://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/nervous-system/human-body-make-electricity.htm
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About 3 fiddy
That’s reasonable.
I got my compensation money from a different lawsuit, it was totally worth the ~$3usd
Hey at least you bought the lawyers in charge another summer home.
Click the squares with your freedom in them: