Thread

1. dgellow · 1790413381 · focus · HN ↗

   At this point I assume the captcha puzzle isn’t the actual check, just a distraction while they fingerprint your browser and behaviour to try to identify if you are more likely a human or not. Just my thoughts, I have absolutely no proof that’s the case, but I don’t believe labeling traffic light is still valuable, we are way, way past that

   1. pjc50 · 1790413482 · focus · HN ↗

      Some definitely fail you if you answer too quickly.
   2. jeroenhd · 1790413723 · focus · HN ↗

      The big sell on reCAPTCHA v3 was that it did all the fingerprinting beforehand. Only when fingerprinting failed to prove your humanity, you'd get shown a puzzle.

      I've tried intentionally answering the prompts wrong and correctness is definitely a factor here (although low bot scores seem to permit you more mistakes). That doesn't mean fingerprinting is not happening while you're solving the puzzles, but it's more than just a distraction.

   3. miki123211 · 1790415518 · focus · HN ↗

      It's a combination of things.

      As far as I understand it, it's fingerprinting + IP reputation + cross-site IP rate limiting + raising the cost of a request by an order of magnitude because of the LLM call.

      The last ingredient is what we forget about. $0.001 or whatever might not seem like much, but there's a difference between "a million requests a day costs you $5 in AWS bandwidth" and "a million requests a day costs you $1000 in VLLMs, $500 in premium bandwidth from residential proxies, + constant toil to update your scraper to keep up with what Google is doing."

      (Figures illustrative).

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