Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA(nullpt.rs) |
Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA(nullpt.rs) |
crazy
> The official TensorFlow-to-TFJS model converter doesn't work on Python 3.12. This doesn't seem to really be documented, and the error messages thrown when you try to use it on Python 3.12 are non-obvious. I tried an older version of Python (3.10) on a hunch, using PyEnv, and it worked like a charm.
2 is stable and does not change from under you. Which is what you want in a programming langiuage
[edit]
More specifically I mean when they insidiously give you infinite tests even though it's impossible to pass because the IP has been blacklisted... There's a special place in hell for the anti-human's that made that decision, and yes it involves captcha.
Anonymous boards were supposed to be low-friction, but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around. It takes a special kind of dedication to post there, which I seriously doubt helps the quality of the site.
I just opened 4chan and after the initial Cloudflare bot detection I was told to register an email or wait 15 minutes before I was allowed to even obtain a CAPTCHA. Looks like they're already taking a layered approach to combat bots.
I dislike the captcha a lot, but I wish people would invest the same effort in attacking spam that they do in defeating anti-spam techniques. Spam and similar kinds of abuse are the bane of the internet but most people seem to shrug it off but declaring that a 'hard problem' so they can ignore it.
mostly kidding! mostly
It's the spam that tops the problem list.
> is there any better way to do
> it with a single developer for
> a website that serves millions
> of people a day?
If you're not making your free website annoying to drive revenue there's obvious ways to make it less annoying.
E.g. keep the annoying captcha, but don't show one again for the lifetime of a cookie, validate users who can make a money transfer of $0.01 etc.
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.
When an earlier version was trialled on /biz/ (mandatory email verification - https://warosu.org/biz/thread/58388587), it nuked the board and it hasn't recovered.
- Obscure CAPTCHA and other anti-spam features
- Pay to post
Choose one.
yeah, the recent 5-15 minute countdown before your first post is a bizarre thing, but I assume the volume of spam and ban-evading schizos they're dealing with is ungodly. a single dedicated shithead can shit up a general or a slow board indefinitely by just resetting their router or switching airplane mode on/off for a few minutes when they get banned.
>but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around.
virtually every single big platform requires your phone number.
Stay off /v/, /tv/, /pol/, and /a/ and you’ll have a pretty good time.
I don't get why they added that nasty "feature" to the post form, it really discourages you to post(maybe it's because they want to sell you their 4chan pass), I don't understand why 4chan is still active
The horrible captcha + 300s countdown is for completely unauthed users. Most sites don't even allow unauthed users to post at all.
There is A LOT of ban evasion on 4chan. If you have a dynamic IP address from your ISP, you just spam/derail threads with personal crusades/whatever until you get banned, reset your router and repeat.
This countdown increases the cost of ban evasion, since you can't get right back in to continue. Everyone on your targeted board/thread now gets at least a 15-minute respite.
They've also had to blacklist entire ISP from making any posts because some people are constantly ban evading on them. Especially mobile ISPs, where there's basically an unlimited amount of fresh IPv6 addresses available.
The general state of ML code is abysmal, as it attracts a lot of inexperienced developers, and Python's duck/relaxed typing spirit makes it easy to write incomprehensible code with megabytes of unnecessary or bloated dependencies.
It's not bad per se, the amount of innovation is impressive, but a lot of it is a castle of cards, from low level libraries to end-user software.
So politics threads in /b/ are actually better than in a ton of other boards.
Second, Twitter absolutely does make you perform captchas if they suspect you are a bot. I say this as someone who ran Twitter bots previously.
I think this is a really cynical outlook, especially for a website that is not run as a modern tech-centric company. 4chan's roots are in that of the Old Internet, where it is a creative and messy and interesting place to be. why would they be banking solely on using a terrible captcha as a method to drive user subscriptions, when they have the option to run circus-tent ads? if making money was their sole purpose, why would they not kick the problematic and porn boards to the curb and ban the use of slurs to make room for more friendly advertisers? there are so many other avenues to increase profitability that most websites have taken which 4chan has staunchly refused to follow. why would they choose only the 4chan pass and ads as their only opportunity at making money?
That's clearly the case. As a trivial example, 4chan could take your $20 and avoid giving you a captcha for 2 years, or charge you $10 for one year.
Both are a 2x improvement, if the only goal is to get past the necessary evil of the captcha.
But that clearly isn't the goal, that doesn't mean I'm begrudging 4chan their business model, that's something you grabbed out of thin air.
why would they not kick the
problematic and porn boards
to the curb and ban the use
of slurs to make room for more
friendly advertisers?
What you're describing would be a Reddit or Facebook groups clone. If 4chan became that, nobody would use it. They'd just use Reddit or Facebook groups.
The link between spam protection and payment is well documented and as old as the internet.
Consider the origins of bitcoin and PoW have been as a currency to stop email spam.
I do agree that the incentive is probably not to make money, but to deter spam. That said after so many times the company has been sold, I wouldn't disregard that theory
Companies centered around communities don't generally have leeway to shape their communities into a profitable form by directly altering the fabric of the community. Time and again it has been shown that forcing changes to the identity of a space leads to communities' rapid demise. In rare circumstances and with a skilled hand a community can be guided here and there in even some significant ways, but 4chan probably does not have that option: they'd need a massive shift to pull off what you describe.
Instead profit must generally be built around what is there. But whether or not such communities exist to make profit, they surely must be profitable, or they will not survive. They must, some time or another, be free of deficit. This is not a matter of capitalist greed for most communities, but an attempt to find a path towards stability.
This is already being done, there's a cookie and heuristics in place that will give you an easier captcha or occasionally skip it entirely. But 4chan really does have a couple (and I truly mean a small amount of super super dedicated users) of bad actors who constantly spam and try to work around any roadblocks given to annoy the rest of the userbase. You cannot give them a reliable way to spam no matter what. That's why there's now many country and region blocks in addition to your standard VPN/DC IP range blocks. Plus the Cloudflare check added a couple years ago.
But if you post something that goes against the alt-right that pisses them off too much and getting a lot of replies, it'll be deleted within minutes, or you'll even get banned for being "off topic".
4chan is not free speech, it is just a haven for the alt-right.
I do think though that any such site or platform will have the issue of judges inflecting their bias in their application of the rules.
So I wouldn't say that it is a unique phenomenon.
That said, of course there is a semantic as well as technical identity to 4chan. And they are quite connected, rather than isolated.
4chan, apart from its lax rules on what we now call hate speech, has developed a community where insults are now part of its culture. The fact that the site is anonymous greatly influences that animosity.
I like to think of 4chan not as a place where horrible people go, but where people go to be horrible. Of course you have the dedicated users, neets or schizos or chronically online, but again that's a propery of every site, and not necessarily a majority.
So if you read /pol/ or /b/ like articles of an organization with an editorial line, sure you will see nazis and a deranged group of people.
If you however see it like bathroom wall writings, you will see a bit of everyone.
1. 696014001
OP:
>Face it, it’s going to be a BG3 situation. Everyone will screech about it being woke, play it, then 6 months later everyone will say “no one called it woke, what are you talking about?”
2. 696014873
OP:
>If Japanese people are so based and anti-woke then why is this so popular in nipland? [pic of otokonoko game in image]
3. 696016309
OP:
>>9999 games cater to cis men, 1 doesn't
>>THIS IS LITERALLY GENOCIDE
(Two of these threads I found by searching the word "woke" in the catalog. The first was the first thread when I opened the page.)
In fact, these types of threads are against the rules,[1] but /v/ is somewhat evenly split between liberals and anti-liberals and liberals make these threads all day and can be seen in replies as well. They even have their own terms, eg. "Grumzcord Raid" "Grifter thread" etc. And if you knew anything about the mods and janitors you would know many are far from alt-right.
My guess is you went to /g/ and started making blatant political threads and got banned. Note that both sides get banned for blatant off topic political posts. Do you have any examples of posts you were banned for?
[1] rules#v §3 - "Threads should not devolve into flamewars. Instigating or encouraging such activity will not be tolerated."
There aren't many places for the people that share the views you mentioned to go other than sites like 4chan, so even though there's an awful captcha, they're going to be quite dedicated as they don't have many mainstream options elsewhere.
I believe if users were able to have a frictionless experience, then it'd reduce the chances of someone throwing their hands up in the air and saying, "this isn't worth it". I've actually attempted to reply to threads to challenge the views of others, but once I'm hit with the 300-1000 second wait time to post, I just close the tab and move on.
Isn't that more easily solved by just not visiting the site in the first place?
We are especially interested in the ideas that people deem offensive enough to suppress. Are they actually wrong or are they just socially unacceptable? Whatever the truth is, it can't be learned from a place that suppresses discussion of it. Declaring the matter as settled and suppressing any opposing viewpoint is the very definition of an echo chamber.
I don't use the videogame board so I do not know if anti alt-right comments there get deleted, but I find it hard to believe that anybody is going to be emotionally invested enough to delete posts that say "game X is going to succeed even when it is woke".
From a random search it looks like there's a lot of racist or alt-right aligned political comments there that never get deleted though.
And no I don't visit g, if I wanted some discussion about technology I'd rather use this website instead. I'm not going to show any of my own examples for privacy purposes, and no doubt you will probably find some way to nit pick at those.
Janitors don't delete posts that they don't see or are not reported.
>I'm talking about pol, the #1 board on the site by activity.
/vg/ is neck and neck with /pol/, and that's only because /v/ was split into /v/ and /vg/.
And yeah, if you don't give any examples it's hard to take you seriously. The example you did give was egregiously OT, and in fact potentially thread-derailing. The fact that you saw that as an example of janitors being unfair puts your credibility into question. I showed that liberal opinions are allowed and even common on 4chan, which was your initial point. I don't browse /pol/ but I found liberal threads pretty easily here as well:
490048710 (99 replies)
OP:
>Calmly explain why pissing off these countries [in OP pic] will result in untold riches for the working class [countries are China, Canada and Mexico, in reference to Trump's tariffs]
490048788 (103 replies)
OP:
>Is Trump the last gasp of a dying empire?
>He's going hard, threatening every country in the world with huge tariffs and massive retaliation if they use currencies other than the US dollar. It's rather absurd. [post continues for another 3 paragraphs]
I don't think 4chan is necessarily a bastion of free speech. Twitter is probably more free in terms on what you can post now. However 4chan is nothing like Reddit, old twitter, YouTube etc. in terms of what you can post.
So why is it that any alt-right or racist posts never get deleted? Even if they only deal with things that get reported to them, there's clearly a huge bias going on here when alt-right aligned posts never get reported while the opposite is reported and dealt with within minutes.
https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/206317377/
https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/206526786/#q206527439
https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/206199053/#q206200223
https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/206521664/#q206526548
> And yeah, if you don't give any examples it's hard to take you seriously. The example you did give was egregiously OT, and in fact potentially thread-derailing. The fact that you saw that as an example of janitors being unfair puts your credibility into question.
I believe I've given plenty of other examples not my own. I don't want to bring in my own examples because I don't want to be arguing about politics on this website, especially since I am not using a throwaway account like you are.
If the example I gave was egregiously OT, then so are all the dozens of race and politic baiting posts aligned with the alt-right that never ever seem to get the same treatment.
And for posts be deleted quickly, it needs to piss enough people off. The examples you used are the most softball examples that are not too aggressively worded and makes it more likely that alt-right users try and refute the claim rather than a knee jerk "report and sage".
Also tariffs are more of a tangential viewpoint rather than one exactly opposed to the alt-right.
Violent far-right groups use these threads as a pool for recruitment. These far-right groups cause real societal harm through violent crime and shifting the view on violent policies against minorities.
I am not using an abstract moral argument when I say these ideas cause harm, I'm arguing based on objectively observed effects that the loose ethical norms of a liberal democratic society would unambiguously deem harmful.
Everything with the word "socialism" in it is harmful.
> vilifying other ethnicities and women, using rhetoric calling for people belonging to these groups to be killed
Unfiltered hate like that is a property of humanity itself. It is not at all exclusive to the so called internet hate machine. If you look closely, you'll find that plenty of "virtuous" people are capable of just as much hate, if not more. I've personally witnessed it.
3. You will not post any of the following outside of /b/:
b. Racism
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
They selectively censor any opposing views that rile them too hard or they can't easily refute, so it is not equivalent to bathroom scribbles.
Recent example just found today (not my post).
That thread is about the Spanish movie "La piel que habito,"[0] and that OP post is actually describing the plot, it's not even a political post. So bringing up American Republicans out of nowhere is quite off topic. Strange how you conveniently cropped out the title and image that ostensibly showed this. Is this the best you can do?
Examples
https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/206317377/
https://archive.4plebs.org/tv/thread/206526786/#q206527439
Image related is unfortunate. Not uncommon for jannies and mods in any website to use their power to self serve. It happens even in more serious and regulated sites like wikipedia, so I'm not surprised by the lack of moderation neutrality in a meme site.
This isn't just a 1 off thing by rogue moderators is what I'm trying to point out. This is a constantly re-occurring thing. I also experienced the same issue multiple times until I got fed up with it and stopped posting there a few years ago.
Their main moderator had a goal to make 4chan politically aligned with his views. 4chan used to be free speech but it really isn't anymore.
More often though it starts with wave after wave of logical fallacy.
As applies to your critique above, for example:
It's also not an example of oppression, even though it is violent.
You singled those people out as "harmful" because they call for the deaths of "other ethnicities and women". Implicit in your world view is the idea that these people wouldn't also do such things. The idea that these groups are the blameless and virtuous victims, deserving of special protection against these "harmful" words and ideas. That's the part of your argument that I chose to attack.
I chose to attack that idea because I've personally seen people from these "virtuous" groups post some of the most concentrated, unfiltered and unabashed hate speech I've ever seen. I witnessed them call for deaths of entire groups, including those I'm part of, with a clean conscience. I was there when they laughed at the very few people who tried to hold them accountable for it. Not only did they not suffer any consequences, people actually made excuses for such behavior and treated it as though it was justified. Their openly hateful behavior actually empowered them.
I will never forget that as long as I live. I straight up archived those social media threads to ensure the internet never forgets. I even posted those archives here years ago when people asked me for examples. If I cared enough I bet I could even dig up those archive links from my post history.
I didn't care to dig up those links because I've yet to see a single person get outraged by this sort of behavior when it comes from these groups. I have no reason to believe you will be the exception.
They post things like "KILL ALL MEN" verbatim and people make excuses for it. Well, I'm not interested in hearing excuses today. I decided to try and make you realize that hate is a normal human emotion instead. My argument to you is that hate is a perfectly normal human emotion. It's part of the human condition. It's not at all exclusive to 4chan's politics board, oh no. People hate. Everyone hates. Even people on this very site will hate and openly call for the deaths of other humans if presented with a juicy enough target. Don't doubt it, for I have seen it happen.
By the way, dang has rate limited my account to about 5 posts every 2 hours because I would get into too many arguments just like this one. He's actually right and when I contacted him about it I asked him to keep the account rate limited. So you will excuse me if I don't reply further to this thread.
I feel like you have massively extrapolated the argument from what the original point was. My response was about how "avoiding 4chan" does not shield you from the effects that 4chan has (including harm). I don't know which groups you belong to (because you don't mention them), but we clearly agree that violent rhetoric is bad, so why are we disagreeing? It seems you have the exact same point of view as me in the general case of hateful rhetoric, but simply feel that some groups are more important (because you belong to them, perhaps? this is the feeling I get).
Also, let's not kid ourselves, violent crime (including murder) and oppression towards women and minorities are well-documented and studied real-life issues. Violence towards men by "virtuous" groups (leftists?) does not even register on the scale when compared to them. The online violent rhetoric towards women is also at several orders of magnitude higher than violent rhetoric towards men. There is a clear disproportionate aspect to this issue that your emotional reaction is not taking into account.
It's very simple. We have 4chan people. We have "virtuous" people: women and minorities. I have witnessed the virtuous express hate with complete impunity. Therefore Anonymous should not be punished for doing the same thing.
Nothing emotional about it. I'm simply incapable of the cognitive dissonance necessary to accept the idea that some people get to hate freely while others don't. It is easier to accept the idea that hate is a normal and universal human emotion which will manifest everywhere where humans are present.
"Please wait for the timer or verify your email to post"
As a captcha
I used to get an ip block ban. But asking for my email to post in 4chan is just proof of how much it has changed.
Rowan Atkinson gives some nice examples here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUezfuy8Qpc
I'd say rather than there being *a risk* of descending too low on that slippery slope, we already have plenty of evidence this already happened. I'm from Poland and recently a party in ruling coalition proposed criminalizing hate speech on the Internet. Fortunately, precisely the slippery slope rhetoric, supported by evidence from countries like UK, seems to be enough of a backlash to stop politicians from following such ideas.
In order to have a slippery slope, you need something to extrapolate from. But the commenter wasn't providing that.
Actually, I'll extend that to saying every open source Google library/tool feels like that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42130881 on Francois Chollet is leaving Google
> "Why did you decide to merge Keras into TensorFlow in 2019": I didn't! The decision was made in 2018 by the TF leads -- I was a L5 IC at the time and that was an L8 decision.
Haven't looked at the devconsole but it'd probably be easily bypassed by someone dedicated.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14... is a paper on the subject i think is really interesting
However a surprising amount of text based captchas can be solved in a few line shell script of, using imagemagik to convert to greyscale, dilate and undilate, then pass to teserract
However there are also sites like https://2captcha.net , so really captchas are more like putting a small min amount of effort.
If you wanted to go full meta "never go full meta" you would train a AI to figure out if the agent on the other side was human or not. that is, invent the reverse turing test. it's a human if the ai is unable to differentiate it's responses from normal humans responses. as opposed to marketing human responses.
Well now I have to go have a lay down, I feel a little ill from even thinking on the subject.
Even before captcha is being served your TLS is first fingerprinted, then your IP, then your HTTP2, then your request, then your javascript environment (including font and image rendering capabilities) and browser itself. These are used to calculate a trust score which determines whether captcha will be served at all. Only then it makes sense to analyze captcha's input but by that time you caught 90% of bots either way.
The amount your browser can tell about you to any server without your awareness is insane to the point where every single one us probably has a more unique digital fingerprint than our very own physical fingerprint!
EFF have been running this for years. Gives an estimate about how many unique traits your browser has. Even things like screen resolution are measured.
> TensorFlow.js doesn't support Keras 3.
I tried getting into some casual machine learning stuff a few years ago and more or less gave up because of stuff like this. It was staggering how many recent tutorials were already outdated, how many random pitfalls there were, and how many "getting started" guides assumed you were already an expert.
The chronological sorting at least offers some diversity of opinion. The first 50 replies to a 4chan thread about Trump (in the right board) will usually contain many, maybe even mostly, anti-Trump posts. On Twitter you usually need to scroll through the sea of blue checkmark replies for a while to find even one anti-Trump post.
Some 4chan boards are majority neo-Nazis who want all minorities expelled or murdered. But stumble across a particular Twitter thread and it's the same thing but with even more ideological uniformity within the thread, and with 4000 neo-Nazis in the thread instead of 60.
That said, both sites definitely are not great to use if you aren't very right-wing.
But an even better approach would be to go fully P2P and leave the scoring and ranking and filtering at the end nodes, with the possibility of friendly networks of interest group peers assisting with the task. BitTorrent for social media, pgp signed accounts, fully flexible annotation and ingestion. It's also less subject to cabal-based censorship.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jkcs/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/joshi-koukousei-cap...
Userscript version: https://github.com/drunohazarb/4chan-captcha-solver
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.
- a smeared gaussian in one axis and another in another axis can really help segmenting chars, finding lines of text in OCR
- You can unshear chars using the Radon or Hough transform as a basis to understand the angle
Went through MNIST a few weeks ago and I agree it's interesting!
During this election, I completely gave up even trying to participate and just lurked.
▲
▲ ▲If the JSON file is corrupt, it shows the following if tt1 and cd do not align.
> "error": "You have to wait a while before doing this again"
There's a significant amount of time, skill and effort that went into the solution from this post, and the end result doesn't generalize well (you'd have to start all over for a different kind of captcha).
The vast majority of spammers would not be able to replicate this; those who do would either make money legitimately, or focus their skills on juicier targets (if you have AI/ML skills and want to do nefarious things there are other options that pay much better than spamming).
Such captchas still work well at raising the cost of successful spamming above the expected payoff from said spam.
I can't get any real jobs that pay me for my more advanced skills. My primary sins were going to a second/third-tier university and some performance concerns in a portion of my previous roles due to divorce and burn-out. I make $80k/year in government IT, and $30-150k/year as the "AI" guy in a small 2-5 person group that offers a CAPTCHA-breaking API.
The spammers aren't the ones replicating this. They just pay B2B rates (combo of SaaS + Consulting, depending on client needs) to help them remove the roadblocks.
Are there? Say you've got a felony record and can't get a legit AI/ML job at eg OpenAI/anywhere. What would you do instead? most of the options I can think of involve getting paid for doing things that are basically spam if you zoom out enough.
Well-intentional bots are first-class citizens
If you manage crack it at 1mhz per captcha or 1ghz or 1000ghz, it makes no difference, as the bottleneck is the network identifier (ip address/block)
While still a type of PoW, these economics are different than offline mechanisms like password hashing or crypto. Where a 1ghz cost is still significantly different than 1mhz.
I say this with the chagrin of someone who works on a cool software product that is also coincidentally really well-shaped to make people want to abuse it.
Eh? They just need to buy their software from someone that can. I would say many of the malware and spamware isn't created by every individual deploying it, but instead vendors that got good at it and decide to make revenue by licensing out their software to other bad actors.
At that point a proof of work captcha (mCaptcha.org is one, but there are others), is probably the best option. Especially with how any reasonably effective traditional captcha is an accessibility nightmare.
Or disallow free users to post at all, and require everyone to buy the 4chan Pass for $20 USD per year if they want to post.
This is already available to not have CAPTCHA. So if CAPTCHA is totally ineffective, it follows that they should do away with CAPTCHA and free users being able to post at all and everyone should buy the 4chan Pass if they want to post.
Of course it's not perfect, and it will still happen, but I have yet to hear any better solutions. Please prove me wrong though!
I can't imagine what the internet must be like if you're still on CG-NAT, sharing an IP address with bots and spammers and people using those "free VPN" extensions donating their bandwidth to botnets.
People think 4chan is just /pol/ when in fact more boards exist and their users don't really appreciate when /pol/ leaks into their threads.
If you want to stop a dedicated attacker ready to spend time to attack your site, it won't work, but nothing will. If you want to stop a generic bot going over the internet and submitting all forms it finds with spam, this will work, and might even work better than wide-spread solution for which the bot has a countermeasure.
It has the advantage of being novel for the user rather than doing the same Google/Cloudflare/... CAPTCHA for the 10th time that day.
Whether or not a square is part of the motorbike when it’s either the rider or a few pixels of the wheel is subjective and fuzzy. Fuck google for not making these questions clear cut enough that answers aren’t disputable.
I’ve only ever tried to post through Cloudflare WARP (or Apple Private Relay, which is also Cloudflare but different exit IP range). Once I realized that didn’t work, I thought maybe it wasn’t worth posting at all :) I don’t like the idea of my ISP having any suspicion I posted to 4Chan (even if it’s technically https yadda yadda…)
If the user solves the CAPTCHA in 0.0001 seconds, they're definitely a bot.
If the user keeps solving every CAPTCHA in exactly 2.0000 seconds, each time makes it increasingly likely that they're a bot.
If the user sets the CAPTCHA entry's input.value property directly instead of firing individual key press events with keycodes, they're probably either a bot, copy-pasting the solution, or using some kind of non-standard keyboard (maybe accessibility software?).
Basically, even if the CAPTCHA service already has a decent idea of whether the user is a bot, forcing them to solve a CAPTCHA gives the service more data to work with and increases the barrier of entry for bot makers.
Very chicken and egg this entire field- defending against the spammers while simultaneously operating a “free” system. How to do it without making it prohibitively expensive to join the system…
Any free system will be abused yada yada yada
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
Is the oversimplification from "deep neural network" into "AI" caused by the prevalence of brain-fog due to long COVID?
some projects worth checking out: https://github.com/refraction-networking/utls https://github.com/berstend/puppeteer-extra
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.
> > I've built 3 iterations of captcha solvers for that crappy website based on https://github.com/drunohazarb/4chan-captcha-solver/issues/1
> This project was really my first decent introduction to computer vision and machine learning
I see now that your code is linked from the article, and looks really informative - thanks for sharing!
Given the schizos that are still present and drowing out the conversation in half the threads I read, there wouldn't be a point to posting anyway.
If a bot can meaningfully pass and act as a productive member of the community, what does it matter?
The opinions of bots are not just irrelevant, they are a form of consensus creation attack. They make it seem like a lot of people have an opinion when the reality might be the opposite. We are not interested in the made up realities that people pay bot operators to create. We want the truth, and the truth comes from real humans expressing their real unfiltered thoughts.
Who's driving phone farm?
https://www.some3c.com/blogs/news/unified-control-20-pcs-pho...
You can apply this to most social media, but in the spectrum of wikipedia (the people control the content) to netflix(the private owners control the content), I'd think 4chan would be closer to wikipedia.
Young man, there's no need to feel down, I said
4chan pol has straight up mainstreamed most incel talking points to young boys all accross the world.
I’m lucky that some people still want chops no matter the thought crime, I’m very grateful such excellent employers exist (love you guys).
But you’re never sure you’ll line up two such in a row, this isn’t the IBM until company casket and company funeral days. Makes life “interesting” even for a risk-taker.
I used to run one of the world's largest ebook piracy websites but want to put that life behind me. Recently work came across my desk to create tens of thousands of accounts on a well respected website so they could more easily scrape it.
I just want a traditional job, but I also want to support my family and $4000 for a months work
* Audio Formats
* Transcoding
* Spectral analysis
and more.
This is the interview prep website: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html
Some of which have been observed to be associated with certain countries.
There are bad actors. There are bad groups of actors. There are bad political regimes of groups of bad actors. There are countries made up of bad political regimes made up of groups of bad actors.
And if you make the PoW so hard that it takes very very long to solve then you basically made a captcha that bots have no problem doing (it’s just time) and humans don’t want to do at all especially on their phone.
Or it could be a SAT or something that's easy to verify and hard to solve.
Because in the end it's up to us. We're the ones who have to draw the conclusions. At some point we're gonna have to decide whether some idea is right or wrong. This is much harder compared to just blindly taking a side at face value and just believing them and repeating what they say. I suppose it's possible that most people would prefer to be told what to think and what to say. I for one can't live like that. Things gotta make sense before I'll believe in them.
It's important to witness every possible argument and to see every single one of them viciously attacked on the proverbial ideological battleground. Then you can figure out which points remain convincing. Declaring oneself right, unwillingness to engage in debate, attempts to suppress opposing viewpoints, emotional appeals, these are all signs of authoritarianism. This is reason enough to cast everything they say into doubt. Good ideas don't need to be forced in this manner in order to convince.
CGNAT is not an anonymity mechanism – at best it may be a very crude one, but the carriers will make extra effort to remove that anonymity through logging, retention, and segmentation.
(Otherwise, it's akin to the usual confusion between anonymity and pseudonymity.)
While I can appreciate the technical achievement, you know most users of forums and imageboards don’t want any AI content at all.
Money, obviously. I'd also do it for $30-150k/year
> you know most users of forums and imageboards don’t want any AI content at all.
He's not creating or posting any "AI content"?
If you want to spam, you don't actually need to break many captchas. Just make your spam/scam/misinformation "engaging" enough and the social media platforms will host and promote your spam _for free_ and won't even ask a captcha.
But the rhetoric around the assumption that I was doing it for spammers was also interesting, as well as being more closely related to TFA!
I get it man, gotta make the bucks helping spammers advertise their shitty products, even if they destroy the internet.
We're all complicit in the enshittification of the internet and technology in general, just that we delude ourselves into believing we're on the "good" side because we call it "advertising" or "marketing" or "analytics" instead of spam, more spam and spyware.
The end result is exactly the same however.
There's a difference between parasites that spam and make 1000 free gmail accounts. And Google.
Or indeed the users, who have to wade through trash invading their threads?
Or other legitimate users, who now have to answer captchas from CloudFlare just to access their favourite websites?
Ultimately this is a parasitical element, choking the internet. It will kill the things it profits from. Many will give up running these sites, you walk away with your $100k, and no one can ever do it again... you've not created anything of value, but destroyed it.
If $150k/year is “a bit richer” for you you could simply offer to pay that poster that much in exchange for stopping.
The lesson here is that systems that rely on humans to do the 'moral' thing and fail otherwise are bad systems.
Parasites can solve captchas, people with accessibility issues and the poorest of people are the one being locked out.
Our group focuses on scraping for lightly-funded LLM startups who cant pay Reddit/X/etc API fees, and data aggregation for cottage industries (price comparison, etc)
But a LOT of the people in our niche do fraud and spam, so we’re steeped in that culture whether we embrace it or reject it.
Capitalism optimises for value to the customer, not for overall public good.
The other one that comes to mind is anacap, which I view as fringe. I read the comment threads sometimes and it leaves me with the impression that I'm the only one that thinks Von Mises and Rothbard are a bit out there.
Maybe my disability is CAPTCHA blindness.