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by tempoponet 443 days ago
Modern captchas use a number of tools including many of the approaches you mentioned. This why you might sometimes see a CloudFlare "I am not a robot" checkbox that checks itself and moves along before you have much time to even react. It's looking at a number of signals to determine that you're probably human before you've even checked the box.
1 comments
dalemhurley 443 days ago
When I am using keyboard navigation, shortcuts and autofills, I seem to get mistaken for a bot a lot. These Captchas are really bad at detecting bots and really good at falsely labelling humans as bots.
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Quarrel 443 days ago
With AI feeding / scraping traffic to sites growing ridiculously fast, I think captchas & their equivalent are only going to be on the rise, and given the rise in so many people selling residential proxies I see, I don't doubt that measures and counter-measures on both sides are getting more and more sophisticated.

> These Captchas are really bad at detecting bots and really good at falsely labelling humans as bots.

As a human it feels that way to you. I suspect their false-positive rate is very low.

Of course, you may well be right that you get pinged more because of your style of browsing, which sux.

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diatone 443 days ago
Given the volume of bots they tend to be remarkably good at detecting bots

source: I work in a team that uses this kind of bot detection and yes, it works. And yes we do our best to keep false positives down

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magicalhippo 443 days ago
They're detecting patterns predominantly bots use. The fact that some humans also use them doesn't change that.

Back when I was playing Call of Duty 4, I got routinely accused of cheating because some people didn't think it was possible to click the mouse button as fast as I did.

To them it looked like I had some auto-trigger bot or Xbox controller.

I did in fact just have a good mouse and a quick finger.

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animuchan 443 days ago
What's different is the badness of the outcome: if children mislabel you as a cheater in CoD, you may get kicked from the server.

If CloudFlare mislabels you as a bot, however, you may be unable to access medical services, or your bank account, or unable to check in for a flight, stuff like that. Actual important things.

So yes, I think it's not unreasonable to expect more from CF. The fact that some humans are routinely mischaracterized as bots should be a blocker level issue.

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magicalhippo 443 days ago
Does it suck? Yes, absolutely. Should CF continuously work to reduce false positives? Yes, absolutely.

I've never failed the CF bot test so don't know how that feels. Though I have managed to get to level 8 or 9 on Google's ReCaptcha in recent times, and actually given up a couple of times.

Though my point was just it's gonna boil down to a duck test, so if you walk like a duck and quack like a duck, CF might just think you're a duck.

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willsmith72 443 days ago
Well you have to have false positives or negatives. Maybe they prefer positives
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