News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

blackjackfoe

Re:How the Heck does Shazam work? on Thursday April 23, 2026 @12:43AM (#47872317)
No "AI" required!
Re:Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @07:09AM (#45964377)
If your site is only hosted on one server and it catches fire, you can swiftly reinstall on a new server and change the IP your domain is pointing to, too... Still a single point of failure.
Re:The scariest "user support" email I've ever received on Monday October 20, 2025 @10:22PM (#45651762)
I run a small, extremely niche fan site with under 500 users, and I received a very similar email the other day - someone complaining about the "cookie popup" (which my site doesn't have), and then sending me a "screenshot" in a sites.google.com link when I told them I don't know what they're talking about.

Only difference is that it downloaded a .zip file containing a shortcut (.lnk) file which contained commands to download and execute the malicious code.

Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Saturday November 30, 2024 @12:36AM (#42279794)
All the worst slurs I can think of in my limited vocabulary can't even be spelled with the characters available. I suspect the opposite - they might have been chosen to avoid spelling things like that.
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @11:57PM (#42279580)
It does not, at least not once you pass the Cloudflare Turnstile challenge (which can be done with an API as well.)
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @11:01PM (#42279288)
Is your company hiring? :)
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @10:43PM (#42279201)
I am always interested! Thank you for the tips, I'll definitely research these.
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @09:50PM (#42279004)
I would also be inclined to believe that my project to solve the proprietary 4Chan text CAPTCHA cannot solve an unrelated image CAPTCHA. I'd bet a lot of money on it, in fact!
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @09:15PM (#42278860)
I initially wrote the alignment-only script (in the source repo as `user-scripts/4chan-captcha-aligner.ts`) before the rest of the project because the person who was collecting the data manually for me couldn't wrap their head around the slider-style CAPTCHAs. There's definitely a learning curve.
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @08:38PM (#42278710)
The 4Chan userbase hates the CAPTCHA as much as I do :)
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @07:47PM (#42278503)
I really hope my post didn't come off as if I was trying to make it sound like this was a new idea. Regardless, this is good information, because it counters the posts of the form "great, now that you made this, you're going to make it harder."
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @07:33PM (#42278430)
Reddit and Twitter both have huge bot problems. On Reddit it's a bit less obvious due to the upvote/downvote system, and on Twitter it's a bit less obvious because you usually only follow people you want to see. Make a post on Twitter that mentions something like cryptocurrency, and you'll get a dozen bot replies immediately.
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @06:29PM (#42278042)
Do a Web search for "4Chan CAPTCHA" sometime. All the top results will likely be people complaining about how terrible it is. You're certainly not alone.

The worst part about the countdown: if you wait too long to make a post after waiting the 10 minutes (eg: you get distracted,) it will expire, and you have to wait another 10 minutes.

Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @06:06PM (#42277916)
What do you mean by "generated code"? All of the code in the linked GitHub repo was written by me, with the assistance of a couple friends who helped here and there, but didn't request to be credited.

I learned a lot because I had to do a ton of research and experimentation (fancy word for trial-and-error) to write the code and have it work as I expected.

Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @05:48PM (#42277822)
This project was really my first decent introduction to computer vision and machine learning (along with that of those who helped me in various ways; none of them desired to be credited here other than the guy who collected some of the data for me.)

It was definitely a successful learning exercise, and it's made me more confident tackling some other problems I've had in mind for awhile.

Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @05:34PM (#42277735)
I need to manipulate the data a bit, because right now it's just raw, unaligned foreground/background images with solutions. I need to do the alignment and save them as images rather than JSON files. I'll do that when I have the time.
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @05:33PM (#42277725)
Some datacenter IPs can post fine, mostly just not those belonging to any large hosting company. I would mention a list of ones I know aren't blocked, but, well, that might get them blocked.
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @05:16PM (#42277602)
Little bit, but at least you learned something :)
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @04:54PM (#42277446)
Yeah, I encountered those as well in my data gathering. I threw them out from the training set, but I kept them for possible future experimentation.
Re:Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA on Friday November 29, 2024 @04:17PM (#42277187)
(author here) Interestingly, the email registration/time-limit was added after I started this project, but before I told anyone about it.