Thread

CAPTCHAs don't prove you're human – they prove you're American (2017)

92 points · 90 comments · theanonymousone

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. 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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