google recaptcha on bitcointalk

[hashman]

Lets remind ourselves of the reasons that google "recaptcha" needs to be removed from this forum completely: 

1)  This eliminates any connection to the forums from China, the most populous country in the world, a country with more English speakers than the United States, as Chinese officials have declared google's predatory strategies a danger to the internet user and blocked all google urls by ip.  Bitcointalk is currently not accessible from mainland china without a VPN or proxy. 

2)  This service is the slowest and most commonly complained about captcha service available, requiring repeated waiting and clicking in medium in which services have been shown to consistently drop users who are required to wait and click.   

3)   Giving some people linked to communications monitoring and surveillance agencies the login metadata of all users of a financial forum like this is not a good idea.

4)  It doesn't work anyway.  At best captcha services provide whack-a-mole level security.  If throwing a speed bump up for would-be script kiddies to attack the site is the idea, then why not use one of the many other captcha services which don't offer problems 1 - 3. 

Thanks for your consideration, lets keep this forum alive please.     

[bluefirecorp_]

Build a better (hopefully open source) captcha system if you don't like it.

Then come bitch about the current solution.

[TryNinja]

I hate reCaptcha as much as you. However, theymos made a poll back in October asking users "What do you think of the forum's usage of reCaptcha?" and nothing has changed since them.

I probably won't make changes in the near future, but I've been thinking about the captcha issue, and I wonder what people think about reCaptcha.

Where reCaptcha is used now, something is required, and AFAIK all other captcha services can be OCRed and are therefore useless. End-users often like SolveMedia, but those seem really easy to OCR. I actually really like the image classification approach on a theoretical level, though I hate relying on NSA-lite Google, and occasionally on Tor they throw you into some insane black hole of difficulty (though you can change your Tor exit to fix that).

[seven2smoke1]

I hate reCaptcha as much as you. However, theymos made a poll back in October asking users "What do you think of the forum's usage of reCaptcha?" and nothing has changed since them.

I probably won't make changes in the near future, but I've been thinking about the captcha issue, and I wonder what people think about reCaptcha.

Where reCaptcha is used now, something is required, and AFAIK all other captcha services can be OCRed and are therefore useless. End-users often like SolveMedia, but those seem really easy to OCR. I actually really like the image classification approach on a theoretical level, though I hate relying on NSA-lite Google, and occasionally on Tor they throw you into some insane black hole of difficulty (though you can change your Tor exit to fix that).

Same here, I didn't like the recaptcha because it's a bit annoying. We should choose the right picture every time to be able to login in a bitcointalk account. The problem with it, that sometimes it's not well shown, so I make some mistake to choose the right pictures, In result I will fail to login. I don't know the real reason of it, but we should use the right navigator to able to solve the captcha very fast.

[bitperson]

Also, Recaptcha appears to be somewhat badly translated. In one language, the localised version of Recaptcha kept asking me to pick traffic signs but only showed me pictures of street name signs

[hashman]

Perhaps it makes sense to leave google captcha up as a warning that this site is compromised.  

Otherwise, any other service at all is clearly better by virtue of not blocking the site's usability completely for a billion people.  

Of course google decaptcha can be easily bypassed by employing one of the companies (e.g. deathbycaptcha, 2captcha) that uses real people to click through captchas, though there is a ~10s wait time each time you call the api as you wait for the human to make the identification and click appropriately.  Apparently there are other automated and faster defeats of google captcha as well involving cookie manipulation and automated audio recognition (http://uncaptcha.cs.umd.edu/papers/uncaptcha_woot17.pdf).

There are numerous free and paid captcha services already available ALL of which would make this site usable again and perhaps start to recover some relevance in the space.    

  




  

[Baoo]

For me, I didn't like this system (version) of recaptcha because it has many problems such as, there is a few questions which are repeated at each login and with the same images and there are some errors when choosing the correct images... In addition to that, Maybe the recaptcha "theme name" is a better solution and more efficacious than that version.

[green547]

Its for the greater good.  Most of the scammers and shady activity comes from china.  Its why a lot of online games like world of warcraft and runescape had to deal with chinese gold farmers who would illegally sell their digital goods on the black market.

[HashFace]

I don’t mind recaptcha when it is working properly, but my biggest issue with it is that I redo it several times, often as many as 5 to 10, because it is simply malfunctioning.  I will solve the recaptcha, get the green check, but when I click the “submit” button, a message will say recaptcha solved incorrectl, try again, or some such thing.

I’ve googled this problem, and it appears that google tracks you and once you have solved many recaptcha, you get tagged as a likely robot or some such thing, so it ramps up the difficulty and makes you redo them several times....

It seems to be a common problem in the crypto world because everything requires recaptcha.

[dx5]

Perhaps it should be ranked based, where old school members who are more than likely legit do not have to go through the current captcha. Or perhaps a simpler one where one just clicks "I'm a human."