[crazy][personal][rambling][wrong] defeating captchas

Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many gmkarl at gmail.com
Sat May 13 00:02:38 PDT 2023


today, the internet is out, and my android phone is crippled by the
vendor so that although it will run a hotspot it won’t route packets
received via the hotspot, and it’s hard to configure ssh and git to
use a proxy

so i’m running tor on my phone’s hotspot, and this gives me dense captchas

now, around 2005, once, i signed up for an amazon turk job to do
something like identifying captchas or something, i don’t really
remember. of course i tried to write code to do the job for me, and i
did this, and my code made me around $100. this was a lot of money for
me at the time! i’d never had much of a job then and there was no
cryptocurrency boom yet. then i went to cash out and something went
wrong and for months it wouldn’t cash out and i never saw the money.

there was a moral overtone. i’d cheated on amazon turk, and couldn’t
get paid. it left a funny feeling around hacking captchas. but i
wasn’t some indentured spammer, i was just a college kid … one could
describe it a lot of ways. but anyway the landscape is very different
now.

so, nowadays, tor is so thoroughly used that the captchas that google
shows when accessed via it are not really doable by a human being.
this has been the case for some years now. they’re so dense you could
pretty much only complete them with a robot.

google shows an “inverse captcha” to tor users: prompts that only a
computer could complete.

meanwhile we’re at a point with public tech where it seems anybody
could write code to solve these captchas. they’re just image
identification.

!


More information about the cypherpunks mailing list