The simplicity of it is logic defying. It used to be that you had to find crosswalks or move puzzle pieces or type blurred letters and numbers, but NOW all the sudden I can just click a box and HEY!, I’m human?
That’s hardly the Turing Test I’d expected.
It tests whether your mouse movement looks human–we’re really bad at things like moving in straight lines, so it’s pretty evident from a mouse movement log whether you’re a human or a simple bot. It also takes a bunch of auxiliary browser/environment data into account. It’s not perfect, but it’s complicated enough to defeat to provide fine protection against cheap spam.
Shitty situation if you are used to using hotkeys and only use mouse cursor when no other means are available by moving it using numpad.
Nah that’s different as well. What they are filtering out is
Et cetera. Humans are much noiser than anything a python script will spit out. Of course there are ways to get around this, like recording and reenacting a human mouse movement, but the point of any capcha system is to make it significantly more difficult to bot, not impossible.
Yeah, never thought about this before, but how do blind users deal with captchas?
There are audio captchas.
Some provide screen-reader instructions, but most places barely remember blind people exist. It’s another example of people with disabilities being ignored and marginalised.
And then even if they do remember blind people exist, they probably forget there are people who aren’t blind who can’t do their tests for other reasons, like dyslexia or dexterity impairments.
And then you have hCaptcha who makes disabled people to sign up to their database to use their cookie.
What if you’re on a phone or tablet?
Clicking percision and reaction time are still measurable and the checkbox can fall back to other captcha tactics if it has low faith in the user.
It’s also checking your other traffic. (Since Cloudflare handles traffic for so many companies.) Are you visiting other sites in a realistic fashion, or are you doing 99% of your traffic trying to do one thing over and over.
I’ve learned from these that I must definitely move my mouse like a robot since it always asks me to do more puzzles afterwards. This is even if I try jiggling it around after clicking just to try and convince it.
This is really interesting… Can you elaborate? I’ve never one had a follow up to the check mark.
I use a high dpi mouse, what do you use?
Spoiler: I think resolution matters here. The top comment is wrong, if anyone cares enough to take notice…
Cheapest Logitech mouse I could find in the supermarket about 6-7 years ago.
As others have said, it might be more to do with my browser choice, browser settings and extensions. That said I remember when I first started seeing these years ago that sometimes it’d think I was a robot and sometimes it wouldn’t and maybe it was a placebo effect, but I felt fairly confident then that me jiggling the mouse really helped. Now it doesn’t matter what I do. My natural movement, a deliberately wonky but still single and continuous movement or a totally artificial mouse wiggle after the clock, I’ll always have to do captchas.
This feels only partially accurate. I’m a web developer, and I know websites don’t track all of what you suggest. Can you clarify, or come clean on what actually takes place?
Honestly, I doubt it… I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be abrasive.
Interesting that my mouse movement is available to anyone who wants it.
It seems like a small step from that to accessing my keyboard.
Your mouse movement and keyboard events are available to webpages that you’ve loaded, when the browser window is focused.
This isn’t nefarious - it allows websites to build nice UIs that most people enjoy using, most of the time.
There’s lots of shady stuff going on in browsers, this isn’t really one of them.
Hmm, I can think of some ways to misuse this. And I’m not very smart at all.
I mean, how do you think websites work? Of course your mouse and keyboard events are available, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to interact with a website at all.
This was the slap on the head I needed. I now get what you mean by interact with my keyboard. In other words = can tell what I’m typing. Like perfectly normal function of websites.
I didn’t understand the “focus” part and how it helped. I think I said earlier, I’m not particularly smart.
Say more
Like those sites that ask me to sign in using Google (or other options) and then Google asks me for the password?
Pretty easy to grab passwords I think.
To clarify, websites can’t capture keyboard events that were typed into a different website like you’re thinking. Think of going to a web game that let’s you use WASD for controlling your character. It’s able to capture those events on that page because its in focus. When a site goes out of focus (such as switching tabs or switching to another window that’s not the browser), it loses that ability. Overall, it’s very secure.
I was more wondering how you thought capturing the mouse movements would lead to security issues.
If you’re using a webpage JavaScript can see your mouse cursor and anything you type. But only if the browser has focus. So if you’re typing in another window it can’t
They can only access it while you’re focused on their webpage. CORS is all about that.
If you click off to another web page and enter information or type of password into a secondary app they can’t gather that. As soon as they lose focus they lose the ability to capture your data.
Couldn’t I just record my mouse movements clicking on it a couple dozen times and randomly replay one of those recordings?
It could store the mouse movements to compare later.