this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
237 points (99.6% liked)

Technology

38009 readers
626 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 days ago (3 children)

A reminder that recaptcha is no longer free, but since a few months ago now the website owner needs to pay $0.001 each time a verification is performed

https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/compare-tiers

Free tier is only 10k verifications per month and must link a valid credit card so they can charge you immediately when you reach higher level.

Hopefully this kills the product in the long term as bots solve recaptcha faster than humans, so it's just for slowing down humans than actual security. I personally use a browser extension that solves them with a click in a second.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Do you pay for successful verification only, or even for failed ones?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Probably only sucessful ones.
Google captchas have had multiple rounds (with it faking you out claiming you failed) for probably a decade. Every round of the game updates some confidence score which if you get it high enough lets you pass.
This conversely means there is no way to fail, you just get stuck in an infinite loop of challenges if your score doesn't get high enough.

The only other alternative means of pricing it would see even valid users consume way more than one "verification" per actual completed captcha, since so many users have low enough scores to need multiple rounds of captcha even when completing them with perfect accuracy.
I doubt they do this, but if they do it's a scandal waiting to happen, besides also being very weird for any kind of statistic google certainly offers for their captcha.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

but if they do it’s a scandal waiting to happen

That was my line of thought. If you pay for failed captchas, there are a few websites using it that'd deserve a bot failing them constantly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Does that also work for the puzzle captchas? Do you have a link if so?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

No it exclusively works with recaptcha https://github.com/dessant/buster

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Lol so now site admins pay more than the bot farm companies pay to solve each one