[croon]

I absolutely don't aim to defend Googles captcha here, but the other day I was setting up an Outlook account for my son, and I ran into Arkose Labs bot detection, and I actually got heatedly angry, which is extremely rare for me. I wanted to punch anyone related to that abomination.

Upon researching it seems to be used by the Epic launcher and Roblox (among others), which might explain why I've never encountered it before.

Someone else's screengrab, which looks larger than what I was presented on my laptop: https://imgur.com/a/jF1HxbN

So they:

* are very small (or I'm old)

* use faux 3d walls which further complicates the image

* have to be solved 10 in a row correctly

* have an unspecified time limit (which in my untempered rage felt like maybe 3 seconds per image tops, no promises)

* don't tell you you've failed by answer or time until you're through all 10.

I as a full grown human with ~25-30 years on the internet, as well as video games and puzzles for fun, could not get through it in less than 5 (*10) tries. I accept I might be occasionally slow, but this should not be an issue.

TL:DR; Can someone at Arkose Labs please just do an rm -rf /

Edit: Apparently they have other types as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/gkpz0f/how_to...

[proto-n]

Adding insult to injury, it seems pretty easy to write a quick image filter + path finding algo to solve these... as apparently all the walls have solid borders, while none of the walkable paths have them. So a targeted bot should have a much easier time solving these than a human.

[croon]

Absolutely, they've produced something fairly consistent making it easy for bots, yet by design made it harder for humans to see (small, image noise), and solve (10 consecutive, short time limit, no user feedback).

I recognize that by looking at just the screengrab it's an extremely simple concept to solve, it's just that at every implementation turn they made the worst choices, and it just infuriates me.

[steerablesafe]

Reminds me of https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-06-05

[superasn]

Wow what the hell is that. Thank god I've never had to see that. It's better to load a broken image and ask to enter the numbers (that has happened to me though).

[croon]

Oh, that actually reminds me of an entire other dimension of the whole thing. I blame rage induced fugue state.

What I described was just the procedure of 1 "level" of captcha. I had to complete either 2 or 3, the delineation is kind of blurred at this point.

The one I had before the above was audio based, but it failed to load a bunch of times, and failed my answers a few times as well, inexplicably.

It read out not 4-5, but 10-12 numbers, which honestly was manageable, but there was no audio spacing between the numbers that anyone who has to look at their keyboard to type would have to re-listen to it a few times to keep up. This one would also be entirely solvable by a bot, but problematic for a significant portion of humans.

I just don't understand how they make money, nor why Microsoft specifically would pay them for their services. I find the LEAST outrageous explanation that they're bribing someone in Microsoft's COTS purchasing.

[soco]

As other comments said, I'd just drop it and go somewhere else. If the website believes they're Fort Knox, let them have the same amount of traffic.