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405 points blindgeek | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.421s | source
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isodev ◴[] No.42172859[source]
Why are captchas even a thing still? If folks want to scrape something or build an automation around something, then why not let them do it? They still have to respect the system they're logging in. Not to mention the privacy perk of not exposing your visitors to some captcha service with a dozen or more data subprocessors.
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dewey ◴[] No.42172909[source]
Captchas are used for many things, and the reason they are still a thing is because they mostly work. Especially fingerprinting invisible captchas.

Try having a login form without a captcha and you'll realize you are capturing 100s of users every day that require you to send out a "please confirm your email address" email for each of them for no good reason.

> They still have to respect the system they're logging in.

Your trust in people is admirable, but in my experience running anything on the internet you'll realize that intentionally or not people will bombard your system until it falls over.

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1. nraynaud ◴[] No.42173341[source]
they don't work, robots have a higher speed and success rate than humans.
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2. dewey ◴[] No.42173475[source]
Not everything is black and white. If it's cutting down 50% of the spam that does not have captcha solving robots because the effort is not worth it, that's already something.

There's a reason many site still have very basic captchas...it's good enough for their use case.