Rate limiting

Lol Jdownloader will just solve your captchas automatically as it hits the sites that require it.

Not these ones. They’re automatically generated so the computer that creates them will already know what the string is meant to be. You don’t need human annotations to use these kinds of capcha as training data.

This is just a road block. They’re designed to inconvenience spammers so you get less spam to delete.

it was both

it used to be two screenshots of books, one of which was blurred as fuck, and one of which was usually pretty easy

the easy one was to verify that you were a human, and the blurry one was to train ai

now that they’ve moved on to “select all the fire hydrants” or whatever, you can still see a distinction between the ones the system knows and the ones the system doesn’t know, and if you get good enough at spotting it, you can pass the captcha while feeding it deliberately incorrect information

similarly, the audio test will normally be a short phrase, the first half of which is harder to understand; if you get the second part of it right, you can basically write whatever you want for the first part

also, i’m not sure security theater really exists as a concept in cybersecurity, because the psychology isn’t really the same

bad actors will always be able to just hire people in meatspace to solve whatever shibboleth you throw at them, which is pennies per solve

however, pennies per request is still a cost orders of magnitude higher than what each request would cost otherwise, so the hope is it pushes whatever scam or whatever you’re running into the territory of unprofitability

Capchas aren’t generally case sensitive though.

And bicycles.

Tin foil hat theory: the oil lobby loves encouraging the use of bicycles for captchas because no matter what, there’s always part of the rim of the grainy ass photo just barely sticking into the other square, making you keep locating the fucking bicycles for hours on end, with the hopes that you absolutely hate the sight of them after you’ve developed PTSD from just trying to visit a stupid website to read something. God damn fucking bicycle captchas.