Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins?

Re:Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? by LinuxBender on Monday January 09, 2023 @01:10PM (#34313683)

Aside from 3rd party code perhaps one middle-of-the-road idea would be a table of a few hundred factoids and then code that makes multiple choice checkbox factoids like

- Select everything that is a color im sure there are more clever open-ended questions

- Red

- Blue

- Monkey

- Violet

- Armchair

People say that bots can learn such things but if every site had their own in-house tool then bots would have to keep track of thousands of site specific puzzles. Each site could even rotate through a dozen sets of different puzzle types and pause the ones that get learned. This would avoid sending cookies to a third party or depending on 3rd party code.

Bonus complexity: Don't use Alpha-Numeric characers. Use something like "figlet" [1] and cycle through a few of its ASCII art fonts.

[1] - https://github.com/xero/figlet-fonts

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Re:Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? by amf12 on Monday January 09, 2023 @01:18PM (#34313834)

> but if every site had their own in-house tool

Costs money to maintain and build correctly, which naturally leads to buying existing solutions.

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Re:Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? by LinuxBender on Monday January 09, 2023 @01:25PM (#34313949)

I've heard that too, but I think it would take a decent developer 1 hour to make a first pass at such a thing. It doesn't have to be complicated nor perfect. I'm not even a developer and I bet I could make one. I'll work on one for one of my sites.

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Re:Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? by waspight on Monday January 09, 2023 @01:30PM (#34314043)

Said every customer

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Re:Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? by Filligree on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:31AM (#34325363)

I've seen a couple sites that do this. One of them just asks for the square root of -1!

And sure, qntm.org isn't nearly as big a website as HN, but I concur that this isn't likely to be super-difficult. The wide use of recaptcha seems like mostly laziness; most websites aren't big enough to get targeted attacks.

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Re:Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? by ghghgfdfgh on Monday January 09, 2023 @04:07PM (#34316081)

I think your idea is exactly what I would want in a captcha, but an issue with your example is that it would only pertain to English speakers, and it would be difficult to translate it into a variety of different languages to accommodate everyone.

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Re:Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? by LinuxBender on Monday January 09, 2023 @06:21PM (#34317989)

I assume the existing captcha services look at the Accept-Language header. That header could be read by the Lua script. Each puzzle set could be translated one time through google translate or perhaps a better translation site. It should probably be proof read by someone from each language used to ensure nothing translates out of context into something offensive. I think I've seen people do this on Github, having people proof read translations. In this case it probably should be a smaller group to reduce risk of leaking the puzzle mapping to the bot code authors.

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Re:Ask HN: Did HN just start using Google recaptcha for logins? by chrismcb on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @12:15AM (#34320818)

I think chatgpt is way ahead of you.

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