This was for querying package delivery status. I finally got one right after many attempts. The layout, layers, colors change after every attempt so good luck on figuring out which letters count.
i’d go with WXU86
Shh don’t tell the machines
woopsie!
Yeah but it’s still obnoxious. I would bet it fucks with dyslexics as well.
Looks pretty obvious to me.
I’m more infuriated by the “abnormal activity from your IP”. It seems pretty much everything is abnormal to these CDNs, including using Firefox on Linux. On the stack/exchange/ask networks I get that shit every fucking time. And no, I’m not using a VPN/Tor.
Considering the amount of traffic from LLM bots nowadays, everything human/“natural” traffic seems to be abnormal as it doesn’t behave like the majority of requests
Especially when it’s a website that requires an account but they want to use SMS-based or Google Authenticator style 2FA in 2025. “Magic links” are stupid as hell too if you’re not a moron and use a decent password manager — I have no clue what random email address I generated for you since I can’t trust any company not to sell off my PII.
How hard is it to implement FIDO2 then let valid users make requests from whatever IP address they want? IP-based blocking is pretty fucking stupid if you’re already doing secure account-based authorization.
Saying all this as a heavily privacy-conscious web developer. All my traffic looks “suspicious” because how dare I not want your shit hole website to put its grubby little hands all over my IP address.
OK, that last sentence made me laugh!
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the problem isn’t captcha as a concept, it’s how it’s executed
there are good captchas that aren’t obviously making you train an AI model and which seem like they’d actually be effective at identifying humans, like dragging a circle over a specific feature of an image.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
I receive bots from just about every Brazilian consumer ISP.
Greetings. Brazilian here.
I can confirm that a lot of websites unexpectedly block my access with a pretty opaque “403 Forbidden”. No Captchas, no Anubis-like man-in-the-middle, just an invisible and ruthless Gandalf digitally yelling “you shall not pass”.
I have read similar stories about how Brazilian IP addresses seem to be infested with bots. It’s often Brazil: it’s odd how people rarely complain about other countries on this matter… Not pointing fingers towards you, specifically, but I wonder how much of geofencing against Brazilian IP addresses stems from prejudice and xenophobia of foreign webmasters.
It’s worth mentioning that bots have no borders and aren’t restricted to a specific country, but the vast majority of Brazilians (myself included) are restricted to an entire biological existence within Brazilian territory, with hundreds of millions of people never having set foot on an airplane or cruise ship.
Webmasters of the world should think about this before geofencing entire countries. Not just Brazil, but any country out there. Because living beings can’t choose where they’re born and humans often can’t even afford to travel and/or reside elsewhere.
(My sincere apologies for my outburst, but it resonates with the community’s name: being blocked from websites just because of nationality is not just Mildly Infuriating: it can be totally infuriating sometimes, and this exact phenomenon happened earlier today while I tried to access a psychology website)
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I deal with this a lot since I do most of my browsing through a VPN.
As great as VPNs are, there probably are a lot of bad actors using them and sometimes I’m the next person using that IP.
That hand is facing the wrong way, bot….
How so?? It looks like he’s looking at the back of his hand?
No accessibility options in the captcha? I guess they don’t care about people with vision disability.
That would cost money silly!
FЦᄃK ƬΉΣ BᄂIПD
what vision disability would prevent someone from seeing a monochrome image?
Blindness?
Furthermore, we kind of have rules for accessibility.
forgot about that one
Okay as stupid as this is, it’s pretty funny lol
captcha: please click on all the stairs
stairs: literally every box
captcha: incorrect
I hate those the most. I get it wrong every single time. Well excuse me for including the rider as part of the motorcycle. I’m trying to save them from self-driving cars clipping their arm or leg on public roads.
Here’s the kicker. You’re not getting it wrong, you’re just being forced to train AI on another one because greedy corpos gonna be greedy.
Wrong in the sense that the machine thinks it is right (or enough people disagreed with your judgement).
How would they even know when they’re using it to train bots?
The same image is shown to a lot of people. If a majority of people click on the same things, that is assumed to be the correct answer. And it is added to the training database. Occasionally you’ll get one that hasn’t been shown to enough people yet to know for sure. For those, they’ll usually accept any answer, even wildly incorrect ones. The thing is, you as a user never know which ones they already know and which they don’t.
Steam uses this, and I swear I’ve been sober and awake when attempting them, but…
If you do the first too fast, it will just show a new one and nauseum. Or that’s my experience anyways.
Its just busy work. The computer uses the time to check for extraneous packets running to your address.
it’s really astounding EVERYONE isn’t just using hcaptcha, it’s the only one that actually fucking makes sense and works
It’s WXU86 or I don’t need this website after all.
Name and Shame.
The only way this is going to stop is when the organisation is either forced by legislation or embarrassed by public pressure into change.
Legislation only happens due to public pressure.
Legislation only happens due to public pressure.
Or a few wealthy people who want something bad enough to throw money at.
Actually, in neoliberalism, nearly exclusively that.
Voter Support for a Bill Has Near Zero Influence on Whether It Will Become Law
Thanks, I remember reading that a long time ago but hadn’t been able to find it again since.
It’s ironic, because AI would have less trouble with this than humans.
Are you sure you’re not a machine?
This means you’re a Cylon
It doesn’t look like anything to me.
Bizarre grammar there: “Our firewall detects abnormal activity from your IP”. It does? When?
These “verify you are human” things should be made illegal at this point. They were training OCR scanners, then self-driving cars, now they’re designing them to be anti-AI and we’ve gone full circle where captchas are on the defense.
They were always abusive and exploiting free labor, and more so now. If you dumb companies can’t figure out how to filter fraudomation/AI/whatever, just go out of business.
Tech industry, stop using us.
I liked it when it was used to digitise books. Beyond that… nah.
Thank you!! I’ve been saying this for years. I have always said that I shouldn’t be forced to train Google’s trash software just because I want to go on some random website. It’s infuriating.
I don’t see the problem. It’s WXU86.
Id imagine it’s the forward most set of characters.
Much better when they have the little “vision impaired? click here!” button :(
