Google using captchas to get humans to read street addresses captured by street view cars to improve maps results remains one of the most Googly things they've ever done. Genius, lateral, and a little weird.
Having to do free work for Google is more than weird for me. For this reason unless the page is really important I end up closing the tab.
If it was for open service (such as OpenStreetMap) it would be a different matter though.
How is that "free work"? Automated usage can threaten a site's bottom-line, and even its existence. A site resorts to Google's CAPTCHA's service because they don't have the money to build their own detector. It's not a service that was free for Google to create.
edit: Also worth noting that some of this "free work" that users do for Google is used to improve bot-detection overall. The comment to this blog post (the post itself, and its paper are great reads) is a nice example:
Essentially, the user is complaining (and justifiably so) of being served the pre-Street-View versions of CAPTCHA; I had forgotten how bad they could get: http://i.imgur.com/01F2eES.png
I actually feed google false information (select rectangular objects when asked to select traffic signs, flat surfaces when asked for water surfaces, and so on). It'll probably be filtered out when aggregated with other users, but I like to think that I'm at least influencing it even if a little.
I wouldn't have a problem if they'd open the data set, but I'm not exactly keen on being forced to work for free.
I see lot's of those on Tor browser. There's nothing about entering street numbers, just identifying images that include street numbers. But perhaps that's also valuable. And what about the other major types, such as rivers, mountains, store fronts and street signs?
It depends on whether you're presented with the v1/noscript version or the v2 captcha. Desktop users may prefer the noscript version since it's faster to fill out with a keyboard if you're already typing into a form anyway instead of having to switch to the mouse.
Not sure if that's good for us. We're doing work for google for free. Google Translate will replace translators,
Google car will replace drivers, Google VR + map will replace city guides. We're giving them knowledge and powers to replace us, for free. Professions will disappear, people will lose jobs, Google will get richer and richer, will not pay me or you for fixing their suggestions in Google Translate or fixing maps or improving computed route from A to B.
No one is being paid for that work, but someone is monetizing it.
I consider it more a donation towards posterity than getting stiffed on some short term compensation.
It's just an opinion, but if the things Google has created and shared into the whole of human knowledge towards the betterment of future societies are still being used in a century for my grandkids (and the rest of humankind) to benefit from, then I think it's better than not having it because a few million people who couldn't have done it themselves said 'no' over a pittance.
I can't speak for you, but my dying thoughts won't be a sour reflection on all of opportunities to monetize my existence I might have missed.
My brother teaches math to at risk youth in the Denver area. He has students that don't speak a lot of English (their primary language is Spanish) and he's trying to explain math concepts to them. He realized he can use google translate and get 95% of the information across that he needs to.
I've never personally hired a professional translator and I don't think I would if I was going to travel to a country where the majority of people don't speak English because I assume a professional translator is expensive. However if I know I have free access to google translate which will be useful enough for me to navigate by myself I would be much more likely to go on such a trip.
I'm sure some jobs will be lost but at least for middle class people who arnt able to afford translators the technology will be used to communicate better without affecting professional translators.
There are plenty of similar professions that exist but not utilized by the middle/lower class due to cost. I would love to hire a interior decorator, as I'm sure plenty of home owners would, but I haven't due to the cost and likely never will. If Google (or any other company) offered a service where I put photos of my home online and gave me a free layout with online links to purchase the furniture I would be thrilled and no interior decorator would be out of a job because I wasn't going to pay for one anyway. I think its all about the level of quality you want.
and some don't, so this point of view is arguable, to say the least.
Regardless, translation is an intellectual work, driving (depending on the point of view), isn't. Same goes for city guides; people doesn't necessarily prefer an electronic device to a human.
Goog-411 predates that quite a bit an dis arguably more Googley. Launching a free 411 service (at a time when you usually paid per minute for that) and using it to improve your voice recognition algorithms.
It was essentially "OK Google" for dumb phones.
For anyone not familiar, 411 (in the US at least) was the directory service number. You could call it to get things like what time a restaurant was open until. Directions to the airport. Etc.
I wonder about the error-check thing. If at least one paid employee had to enter a first-set of data that was 'absolutely correct' before being seen by multiple people online which then 'solidifies' the correct responses. I briefly read about this somewhere but still not sure. I mean it does obviously work in the sense of entering something blatantly not correct is flagged.
Probably no need to have someone seed it. You just show the same image to a thousand people, and if 900 of them answer it one way that's almost certainly the correct answer.
edit: still, it's far better than the previous state of captchas. I'm glad they did this. But it's like for anything to be considered "advanced" or "good" in tech lately, it has to have been powered by "machine learning".
Well, technically, it is machine learning. Only that the machine learning was likely part of the usual data mining on google accounts and not much specific to the captcha problem...
(That said, whenever I used that checkbox widget they had before this announcement, there was a noticeable framerate drop in the browser while the thing was doing its magic. So I suspect, they are at least doing some browser fingerprinting/benchmarking to see if the widget runs inside selenium or a stock browser.
I also remember rumors that they analyze keyboard/mouse input on the page and check if it looks "human", but I'm not sure if that's true.)
Yeah it's basically browser fingerprinting (incl. GPU fingerprinting, hence the slowdown) plus google cookie.
If your browser is standard (AKA no anti-fingerprinting plugins) and your advertising cookies are not blocked (privacy or adblocker plugins) you'll probably pass with no issues.
If either of those is not true, you have to solve a bunch of image captchas.
Mouse/keyboard input analysis was just marketing talk; at least when they first released the nocaptcha it wasn't even captured.
It doesn't seem to be fundamentally different than reCAPTCHA. They will probably replace the click-this-checkbox box with a set of elements already on the hosted page. Only indexing a page's HTML isn't good enough -- it's better to also know how people interact with the HTML. Unfortunately, as soon as they click a link on Google, Google is no longer invited to the party, and is blind to how the user interacts with the page.
The next best thing a search company can do is have every website willingly track their users' mouse and key movements, and then willingly send all of that data to the company's inbox. In return, Google provides them with a binary classifier trained on all of the user click-stream/click-move data which determines whether or not the user is a bot!
It's an OK deal for the website owner; it's a great deal for Google. Not to mention, the user is now sending anonymous data to Google, at the expense of the website's Privacy Policy.
Google gets website owners to willingly install live-cameras on every corner of their website, and then willingly send over all of the footage, in exchange for "protection" from bots. Cough The Government gets citizens to willingly fill out lengthy tax forms, and then willingly send over a bunch of money, in exchange for "protection" from criminals. Cough
why are you implying that taxation is somehow a protection racket?
That's a pretty radical notion wrapped in a matter-of-fact language. Strikes me as a bit dishonest. Taxation pays for plenty of things besides police and military.
Instead of the user having to click the "I am not a robot" checkbox, then the submit button (or w/e), this basically binds clicking the submit button to reCAPTCHA. So whatever checks clicking "I am not a robot" would run are instead done automatically when submitting.
No idea how the additional prompts (e.g. "select the parts of the image with a street sign") are shown nicely in this "invisible" UX though.
While I like the idea of not having to deal with these annoying ReCAPTCHA prompts, something somehow feels "intrusive ?". I mean does this mean google is going to keep track of what I would be doing when I visit a site?
Say for instance I am signing up for a website, does the password I enter get sent to google servers to be analyzed now?
It's just one more of the many elements of Google puzzle. They control most web searches, GA is a de facto standard of web analytics, Gmail is the most popular mail service, not to mention other free services, Android etc. etc., Google can easily track you all the way from the moment you open your browser (likely, Chrome...), through your searches, visits and actions.
It's high time people realized giving so much power to one company, just for short-time convenience, is extremely dangerous. Google might have benevolent management now, but this can easily change, and it scary to think what could happen then.
The saving grace here is that there are alternatives for all those services and I can switch pretty easily at any time so honestly it's less urgent to me
don't they already? Almost everyone uses Google analytics and most websites that have ad placements use the Google network. Where do you think the data for those comes from?
That probably refers to check whether the mouse moves like a human or more bot-like.
Recaptcha does more than that though. It checks if you are logged into any other Google services, whether your browser user agent matches your actual browser, and I think one or two more things.
"NoBot is a control that attempts to provide CAPTCHA-like bot/spam prevention without requiring any user interaction. This approach is easier to bypass than an implementation that requires actual human intervention, but NoBot has the benefit of being completely invisible."
I was browsing Upwork the other week and I got trapped.
I couldn't load any more jobs, or view any more workers. I had to inspect the Network tab in Chrome, open the API request and then click a "I am not a bot" on their API page.
I also expect I will start getting silent registration failures with this. I'm using uMatrix to block most third-party scripts, and it's usually quite clear when I have to allow extra things with traditional captchas.
Then again, it's allow-more-and-retry on many pages already so nothing new in that regard.
Readit News
reCAPTCHA was a technology acquired by Google. Not developed in house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
edit: Also worth noting that some of this "free work" that users do for Google is used to improve bot-detection overall. The comment to this blog post (the post itself, and its paper are great reads) is a nice example:
https://security.googleblog.com/2013/10/recaptcha-just-got-e...
Essentially, the user is complaining (and justifiably so) of being served the pre-Street-View versions of CAPTCHA; I had forgotten how bad they could get: http://i.imgur.com/01F2eES.png
I wouldn't have a problem if they'd open the data set, but I'm not exactly keen on being forced to work for free.
I think of the personal data they collect from me and these types of things as my payment for their "free" services.
Deleted Comment
https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/partners/success-stories/recaptcha...
The original recaptcha was only text from book digitization projects.
Deleted Comment
Google car will replace drivers, Google VR + map will replace city guides. We're giving them knowledge and powers to replace us, for free. Professions will disappear, people will lose jobs, Google will get richer and richer, will not pay me or you for fixing their suggestions in Google Translate or fixing maps or improving computed route from A to B.
No one is being paid for that work, but someone is monetizing it.
It's just an opinion, but if the things Google has created and shared into the whole of human knowledge towards the betterment of future societies are still being used in a century for my grandkids (and the rest of humankind) to benefit from, then I think it's better than not having it because a few million people who couldn't have done it themselves said 'no' over a pittance.
I can't speak for you, but my dying thoughts won't be a sour reflection on all of opportunities to monetize my existence I might have missed.
I've never personally hired a professional translator and I don't think I would if I was going to travel to a country where the majority of people don't speak English because I assume a professional translator is expensive. However if I know I have free access to google translate which will be useful enough for me to navigate by myself I would be much more likely to go on such a trip.
I'm sure some jobs will be lost but at least for middle class people who arnt able to afford translators the technology will be used to communicate better without affecting professional translators.
There are plenty of similar professions that exist but not utilized by the middle/lower class due to cost. I would love to hire a interior decorator, as I'm sure plenty of home owners would, but I haven't due to the cost and likely never will. If Google (or any other company) offered a service where I put photos of my home online and gave me a free layout with online links to purchase the furniture I would be thrilled and no interior decorator would be out of a job because I wasn't going to pay for one anyway. I think its all about the level of quality you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
and some don't, so this point of view is arguable, to say the least.
Regardless, translation is an intellectual work, driving (depending on the point of view), isn't. Same goes for city guides; people doesn't necessarily prefer an electronic device to a human.
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It was essentially "OK Google" for dumb phones.
For anyone not familiar, 411 (in the US at least) was the directory service number. You could call it to get things like what time a restaurant was open until. Directions to the airport. Etc.
Doesn't help that I only see it on fairly shady websites, same kind that use adf.ly, pop-unders and other obnoxious monetization schemes.
[1] - http://solvemedia.com/publishers/
Its a small rebellious act of mine (that is for moot because I'm sure they give the same captcha to other users for verification)
Expect to see more of this.
Deleted Comment
Looks like they do little more than just check for a Google cookie [1].
[1]. https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/materials/asia-16-Siva...
edit: still, it's far better than the previous state of captchas. I'm glad they did this. But it's like for anything to be considered "advanced" or "good" in tech lately, it has to have been powered by "machine learning".
(That said, whenever I used that checkbox widget they had before this announcement, there was a noticeable framerate drop in the browser while the thing was doing its magic. So I suspect, they are at least doing some browser fingerprinting/benchmarking to see if the widget runs inside selenium or a stock browser.
I also remember rumors that they analyze keyboard/mouse input on the page and check if it looks "human", but I'm not sure if that's true.)
If your browser is standard (AKA no anti-fingerprinting plugins) and your advertising cookies are not blocked (privacy or adblocker plugins) you'll probably pass with no issues.
If either of those is not true, you have to solve a bunch of image captchas.
Mouse/keyboard input analysis was just marketing talk; at least when they first released the nocaptcha it wasn't even captured.
The next best thing a search company can do is have every website willingly track their users' mouse and key movements, and then willingly send all of that data to the company's inbox. In return, Google provides them with a binary classifier trained on all of the user click-stream/click-move data which determines whether or not the user is a bot!
It's an OK deal for the website owner; it's a great deal for Google. Not to mention, the user is now sending anonymous data to Google, at the expense of the website's Privacy Policy.
Google gets website owners to willingly install live-cameras on every corner of their website, and then willingly send over all of the footage, in exchange for "protection" from bots. Cough The Government gets citizens to willingly fill out lengthy tax forms, and then willingly send over a bunch of money, in exchange for "protection" from criminals. Cough
[1] https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/invisible
No idea how the additional prompts (e.g. "select the parts of the image with a street sign") are shown nicely in this "invisible" UX though.
Really?
> It doesn't explain how it works nor a demo page
Imagine a web form without reCaptcha. Do you really need a demo of that?
> nor the reason behind why it went invisible.
Because Recaptcha had an annoying, bad, terrible UX.
How does Google determine if the captcha should be shown?
What are the "adaptive captchas" that are shown to suspect users? A demo would do a great job here.
How does an invisible captcha "create value by applying human bandwidth" if the premise is that humans never see the captcha?
Say for instance I am signing up for a website, does the password I enter get sent to google servers to be analyzed now?
Oh buddy, I have bad news for you...
https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/1716364?hl=en
https://www.google.com/analytics/#?modal_active=none
https://www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/solutions/measurement/
https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/invisible
Recaptcha does more than that though. It checks if you are logged into any other Google services, whether your browser user agent matches your actual browser, and I think one or two more things.
https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo
"NoBot is a control that attempts to provide CAPTCHA-like bot/spam prevention without requiring any user interaction. This approach is easier to bypass than an implementation that requires actual human intervention, but NoBot has the benefit of being completely invisible."
Works like a charm even now, 10 years later.
I know that they stopped the project, but did Google at least release the data (old public domain text of books)?
The most frequent encounters with CAPTCHA's I see are rejected API requests over VPN.
I couldn't load any more jobs, or view any more workers. I had to inspect the Network tab in Chrome, open the API request and then click a "I am not a bot" on their API page.
That was a poor implementation tbh.
Then again, it's allow-more-and-retry on many pages already so nothing new in that regard.