https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/21/proton-captcha-censorship/?guccounter=1
Proton, the Swiss company that develops privacy-focused online services such as email, has developed its very own CAPTCHA service to help discern between
Google's recaptcha is used to help train image-recognition programs (like all those ones having you identify signs/bicycles/stoplights help Google's self-driving cars)
They used to have the 2 words, where one word was the control and one word was from a physical book that Google was trying to digitalize
same deal with the ones with matching the orientation of something with a given direction being pointed at; it's training 2d-to-3d AI image generators
How does that make it acceptable? I’ve had to do like 6 minutes of free labor in the past 10 years. Google owes me like $6-10 for that bullshit.
Since i started getting in to online privacy, I've been stuck in captcha-purgatory a lot...it just keeps loading a never ending stream of new captchas for me to solve.
Yeah, there was a chunk of time where there was some spat going on between them and VPN providers, and whenever I would wind up on an exposed VPN server every single captcha would take over a minute of clicking through different prompts. Happened so frequently for the fastest server that I just switched to Firefox and DuckDuckGo because I couldn't stand getting hit every single time I googled something. Not just every session, but literally every single search.
The worst was when it would test me for several minutes straight, and then have the gall to tell me to start over again. Google's really been racing to the bottom lately.
Yeah I noticed now that Google maps has little icons for traffic light positions. Years of our work and AI learning for....fuck all. I CAN SEE THE FUCKIN LIGHTS IRL
Does lemmy signup use reCAPTCHA? Because I’m starting to think I’m a robot when trying to sign up new accounts. lol. I’ve never had such a hard time getting it right on the first time. Or maybe my eyesight is just getting bad.
This isn't a problem of security, this is a problem of deciphering between human and non human users.
Encryption is generally "open source" and that's what makes is strong. Security does not come from people not knowing how things work, but by having properly designed things that work whether people know how they work or not.
It doesn't seem to me like encryption is comparable here. With encryption we have known algorithms that are harder to reverse than initially run. This is a completely different problem, where many inputs are taken and some algorithm has to decide if they are human or not. What digital task can a human do that a robot can't in the same way, especially if the robot knows exactly the measures it should aim for?
exactly what recaptcha does, for example. Knowing that you have to type a word because a computer failed to identify which word is it makes creating a program that does that no easier. Same with the image ones. While criptography is a different problem, the argument is the same: you want something that can be verified to be hard to break otherwise someone will eventually figure it out
If you have a known algorithm for generating those hard-to-read images, then it really wouldn't be that difficult to generate a large enough set yourself to train a custom ML model to solve them. The same would apply to audio challenges.
Only one person would need to do it then they could share the process, potentially automating others being able to bypass as well.
I like the idea of captcha being open, but unlike encryption as far as I know we don't have a starting point on something that is actually easier for humans when all information is available. Until something like that exists, open sourcing to implement and improve it doesn't make sense if you want an effective product.
The text is not generated. It's from photos of books that failed ocr. The photos are then distorted to make it even harder in order to become that captcha. 2 words are used 1 is a control (to know if the response is correct), the other is one they what to know what says (to add to the pool of words and finish digitizing the book).
This company can't stop starting new projects and putting their current ones on the back burner. Their services are all spread out between multiple operating systems. Want proton drive app? Better use Windows. Want the new proton mail app? Better use iOS. Want anything? Better not use Linux.
Welp they only need a search engine and ai tool really. And they are percived as a good guy ( for a good reason,probably the best free vpn out there and just overall )
Yeah, its super annoying.
Port forwarding with the VPN on Linux was an adventure because all the docs are outdated and I had to scour github issues for how to do it.
Android mail app becomes super slower over time. No snooze. Wish it could do POP3/IMAP for send/receive from other accounts like my school one. Can't delete aliases I made before proton pass aliases came out.
No contact syncing as a bi-directional provider with Android.
Someone recently added Proton Drive to rclone if you want to sync in Linux. Worked for my small test but I've since moved to Backblaze for my backend storage while waiting for a solution and it works really well for less than a $1 a month.
The android app is so bad I just straight up stopped using them as a service. Very frustrating.
This is something we really need competition on. In fact, proton are doing strong solid work as a whole.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“As we investigated available CAPTCHA options, we weren’t satisfied, so we decided to develop our own,” Eamonn Maguire, a former Facebook engineer who now heads up Proton’s machine learning team, wrote in a blog post.
This is usually presented to the user in the form of a visual or cognitive challenge, one that is relatively easy for a human to complete but difficult for a machine.
CAPTCHAs, while generally effective, come with trade-offs in terms of usability, accessibility, cultural biases, and annoyances that businesses would prefer not to impose on their users.
This is why companies such as Apple and Cloudflare have sought ways to tell the difference between humans and bots automatically using alternative mechanisms, such as through device and telemetry data.
And while there are other alternative CAPTCHA services out there, given Proton’s core raison d’être, it clearly does make sense to develop its own — as resource-intensive as that may be.
“In this manner, a botnet that can bypass the initial proof of work but struggles with the visual challenges will be met with increasingly complex computations.
The original article contains 642 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
In the future, we may also consider making it available for third-parties who care about privacy via an API.
Wait, it isn't even available for other services?
Ah! They do an audio puzzle apparently. For Google captchas at least.
Some used to have an audio button where they read the letters in different voices / accents and there’s a ton of weird background noise and static. It was super annoying.
I know that hCaptcha has a system where they send you an email containing a link to a page, which will set a cookie in your browser telling the CAPTCHA to auto-flag you as verified.
Of course, good luck if your browser blocks third-party cookies, you don't browse in incognito mode, or if your screen reader can interact with the CAPTCHA to get the link in the first place...