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General discussionCan bots pass captcha?(43 posts)(43 posts)
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Posted April 08, 2016
So before tonight, it'd been about a week since I posted (that being a non-controversial post celebrating 2K coming to GOG iirc). I signed in tonight to post about the Demoniaca Kickstarter and saw that I've taken a 30-something-point rep hit (not sure exactly how much, but I'd recently passed the 600 mark).

Now, I'm used to this kind of thing on GOG, so I wasn't particularly shocked. But it did get me wondering: Can bots pass captcha tests?

I know GOG uses captcha for multiple logins from the same machine within a certain timeframe: I've logged into my brothers' accounts to claim freebies for them when they've been busy during some promotions, and when switching over to their accounts from mine, I got a captcha. (I'm the most active/enthusiastic GOGer of the family, so I'm usually the one texting them about giveaways and whatnot.)

So... can bots pass captcha? Or do they get around it by clearing cache or switching IP after every login or something since GOG only asks when switching accounts?

If they're evading the captcha rather than passing it, perhaps GOG should force captcha on every login. It'd be a mild annoyance, but it might put an end to some of the ugliness on the forum.

I suppose it's also possible that bots aren't being used, and that there really are that many people with no lives scouring the forum for my posts and downrating them... in which case I don't know whether to be insulted or flattered. ;)
Posted April 08, 2016
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SeduceMePlz: I suppose it's also possible that bots aren't being used, and that there really are that many people with no lives scouring the forum for my posts and downrating them..
Similar to you; I had a 132 rep that had gotten knocked down to 124 between the time that Siege of Dragonspear was released and a couple of days ago, but has been climbing back up since. I would guess that the part of your post that I quoted is probably most likely.
Post edited April 08, 2016 by ValamirCleaver
Posted April 08, 2016
Piss off the wrong crowd on this forum (not hard to do, just ask tinyE) and the first thing they do is go after your rep with multiple alternate accounts. Odds are, sometime, somewhere one or more of these people didn't like something you had to say... or they were just feeling particularly naughty and you had the bad luck of being present. I seriously doubt it's any kind of bot action that is doing it. Consider a GOG forums rite of passage; most of us have been hit at one time or another.
Post edited April 08, 2016 by cogadh
Posted April 08, 2016
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SeduceMePlz: I suppose it's also possible that bots aren't being used, and that there really are that many people with no lives scouring the forum for my posts and downrating them..
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ValamirCleaver: Similar to you; I had a 132 rep that had gotten knocked down to 124 between the time that Siege of Dragonspear was released and a couple of days ago, but has been climbing back up since. I would guess that the part of your post that I quoted is probably most likely.
Hahahahaha, that gave me a good laugh :)
Posted April 08, 2016
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SeduceMePlz: I suppose it's also possible that bots aren't being used, and that there really are that many people with no lives scouring the forum for my posts and downrating them... in which case I don't know whether to be insulted or flattered. ;)
Essentially this. Pretty much anybody who's ticked off a scammer or disagreed with the majority in a political thread can attest to it.
Posted April 08, 2016
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cogadh: Piss off the wrong crowd on this forum (not hard to do, just ask tinyE) and the first thing they do is go after your rep with multiple alternate accounts. Odds are, sometime, somewhere one or more of these people didn't like something you had to say... or they were just feeling particularly naughty and you had the bad luck of being present. I seriously doubt it's any kind of bot action that is doing it. Consider a GOG forums rite of passage; most of us have been hit at one time or another.
Oh, this isn't the first time I've been hit. I get large hits on a regular basis. Sometimes I get little bumps up, but usually not enough to make up for the hits. Freakin' roller coaster.

I'm thinking "bots" mostly because of the magnitude here: 30+ rep lost in 5-6 days. And I haven't posted regularly to any "hot" topics in some time. Hard to imagine someone taking the time to manually find and downrate my posts with multiple accounts... I mean, wouldn't most people rather be, I don't know, gaming instead?

Anyway, as I said, I'm used to it at this point.
Posted April 08, 2016
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SeduceMePlz: I mean, wouldn't most people rather be, I don't know, gaming instead?
What, you want NES to actually PLAY the game he collects? Nah, he just likes adding them to his ego trophy shelf.
And 30+ is about right for 5-6 days, since I think 6 per day is the limit you can lose.
Posted April 08, 2016
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SeduceMePlz: I mean, wouldn't most people rather be, I don't know, gaming instead?
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zeogold: What, you want NES to actually PLAY the game he collects? Nah, he just likes adding them to his ego trophy shelf.
And 30+ is about right for 5-6 days, since I think 6 per day is the limit you can lose.
Lol. Mine is probably political since I'm not active in the trading or gifting threads. I can be an ass sometimes, but I still find it hard to grasp the payoff of wasting all that time being worth it for someone. I guess I should be flattered.

Good to know there's a loss cap, at least.
Posted April 08, 2016
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zeogold: What, you want NES to actually PLAY the game he collects? Nah, he just likes adding them to his ego trophy shelf.
And 30+ is about right for 5-6 days, since I think 6 per day is the limit you can lose.
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SeduceMePlz: Lol. Mine is probably political since I'm not active in the trading or gifting threads. I can be an ass sometimes, but I still find it hard to grasp the payoff of wasting all that time being worth it for someone. I guess I should be flattered.

Good to know there's a loss cap, at least.
Oh. Well, mine is NES, as you can probably tell from both my rep and my dig at him.

In your case then, it's probably multiple people doing it. I've heard Klumpen as well as a couple others state that in the GamersGate thread, some dude literally admitted to bringing his friends in to make alts and downvote people. You might be the target of something similar.
Posted April 08, 2016
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SeduceMePlz: I still find it hard to grasp the payoff of wasting all that time being worth it for someone.
Seeing you guys complain so much about losing rep is probably pretty gratifying for whoever is doing it.
Posted April 08, 2016
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SeduceMePlz: Lol. Mine is probably political since I'm not active in the trading or gifting threads. I can be an ass sometimes, but I still find it hard to grasp the payoff of wasting all that time being worth it for someone. I guess I should be flattered.

Good to know there's a loss cap, at least.
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zeogold: Oh. Well, mine is NES, as you can probably tell from both my rep and my dig at him.

In your case then, it's probably multiple people doing it. I've heard Klumpen as well as a couple others state that in the GamersGate thread, some dude literally admitted to bringing his friends in to make alts and downvote people. You might be the target of something similar.
Probably. I posted there semi-regularly a year or two back, tho I like to think my opinions tend towards the moderate for the most part. I have been not-so-nice on occasion when someone managed to actually irritate me (which doesn't happen too often). Perhaps someone is nursing a one-sided grudge from back then. Ah well.

I posted because I was curious if bots could somehow pass captcha now. Brute force wouldn't work because the pictures change each time a wrong answer is entered. Seems like they'd just have to get lucky over hundreds or thousands of attempts to guess the right answer.

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SeduceMePlz: I still find it hard to grasp the payoff of wasting all that time being worth it for someone.
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Mephe: Seeing you guys complain so much about losing rep is probably pretty gratifying for whoever is doing it.
Ha. Perhaps. Might be a game itself to them. But it's not like they stop when you don't complain about it. I'll only post about it every once in while after particularly large hits; it's not like I constantly make a fuss about it. *shrugs*
Post edited April 08, 2016 by SeduceMePlz
Posted April 08, 2016
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zeogold: Oh. Well, mine is NES, as you can probably tell from both my rep and my dig at him.

In your case then, it's probably multiple people doing it. I've heard Klumpen as well as a couple others state that in the GamersGate thread, some dude literally admitted to bringing his friends in to make alts and downvote people. You might be the target of something similar.
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SeduceMePlz: Probably. I posted there semi-regularly a year or two back, tho I like to think my opinions tend towards the moderate for the most part. I have been not-so-nice on occasion when someone managed to actually irritate me (which doesn't happen too often). Perhaps someone is nursing a one-sided grudge from back then. Ah well.

I posted because I was curious if bots could somehow pass captcha now. The ones with the pictures seem like they'd be especially to difficult for them. Brute force wouldn't work because the pictures change each time a wrong answer is entered. Seems like they'd just have to get lucky over hundreds or thousands of attempts to guess the right answer.
To answer your question, yes, there are bots that can pass some captcha now. I took the online Coursera course for Machine Learning and it was somewhat eye opening. Learning systems can actually detect the letters/words from images with definitely above 90% accuracy depending on how much data your feed it to learn. The more data you feed it, the better its predictions, even if it isn't the best the algorithm.

The professor from Stanford who did the video lectures for the course was Andrew Ng, one of the fellows collaborating behind the original "Google Brain" project eventually leading to a cluster of computers that had learned to recognize cats given millions of images scraped from YouTube videos.

Other topics touched on in the course are spam filters, rating and recommendation systems and a project where you train an algorithm to recognize handwritten numbers. Sorry if it sounds like I'm trying to push the course, but if computer prediction and learning systems seem intriguing, I highly recommend it --I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Posted April 08, 2016
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JDelekto: snip...Andrew Ng...snip
Cool. Looks like some of his talks are on YouTube. I'll check 'em out. Thanks!
Posted April 08, 2016
Here is the thing. It is rather difficult to make a CAPCHA that is simultaneously:
1. Easy for humans to pass
2. Impossible (in a reasonable amount of time) for a computer to pass

Don't forget that OCR is one of those tasks that can be performed effectively on a GPU, making it more difficult for #2 to be satisfied.
Posted April 08, 2016
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dtgreene: Here is the thing. It is rather difficult to make a CAPCHA that is simultaneously:
1. Easy for humans to pass
2. Impossible (in a reasonable amount of time) for a computer to pass

Don't forget that OCR is one of those tasks that can be performed effectively on a GPU, making it more difficult for #2 to be satisfied.
Yeah, I get the OCR aspect, but the captcha GOG and many other sites use now involves picture matching (e.g. - select all the pictures of cars or food or whatever). Seems like it'd be difficult for anything but the kind of advanced learning machines JDelekto mentioned. Not something I'd think an average programmer could/would whip up to spite his enemies on GOG or spam advertisements. ;)

Maybe bots could be tailored to a particular captcha service. If the puzzles presented have some sort of unique identifier, then the bot could match the identifier to a database of correct solutions created by a human.
Post edited April 08, 2016 by SeduceMePlz
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Community
General discussionCan bots pass captcha?(43 posts)(43 posts)
(43 posts)