The part about bad Keras<->Tensorflow.js interop is classic Tensorflow. Using TF always felt like using a bunch of vaguely related tools put under the same umbrella rather than an integrated, streamlined product.
Actually, I'll extend that to saying every open source Google library/tool feels like that.
Semi-related but I needed a CAPTCHA on my site[0] mainly to block comment form spam and settled on repurposing a fun method I’d seen before. Is definitely not foolproof (or hard at all), but I really liked making it.
Reminds me of the Doom captcha.
99% certain this is where I copied the idea from.
It says I've been blocked when I try to view that. Not on a VPN.
The site runs off of a tiny little server at home so I’ve got some very aggressive firewall rules. Anything from the usual bad countries, certain signatures etc are blocked. Reduced traffic to 1% of previous load.
What are the bad countries? Russia and china?
I believe even a cursory examination of recent history to show your premise to be less than truthful.
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.
Are you in a safari browser?
Chrome android
No way, that is a cool fucking captcha!!
There is a reason why people moved away from distorted text based captcha. We are basically at the point where computers are better at them then humans.
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.
Just because you can technically crack them doesn't mean they're useless.
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.
So, I do this type of AI development for solving CAPTCHAs.
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.
I am a nafri with a PhD and engineering experience (with europeans), I can't make good living going the traditional way either with with remote jobs being impossible and no luck landing a visa.. I have built custom solutions for big name EU companies to keep an eye on the competition through scraping. captcha solving cloudflare bypass is a great part of that. Getting back at companies making the UX bad with captcha does feel good also.
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Why do you do this?
While I can appreciate the technical achievement, you know most users of forums and imageboards don’t want any AI content at all.
Okay, but you know his actions are enabling more AI content and spam to proliferate? I hardly think he is making that much money just because legitimate users don't want to fill in a captcha.
The percentage of captchas used to deter spam is probably a minority these days. A lot of captchas nowadays are used to prevent adversarial interoperability or the free flow of information.
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.
People who do jobs like that don’t really care about the impact
It's working for the Russians.
If there were a totally 100% aboveboard way to do this in a net transfer of utility from Tessier-Ashopool SA to the typical web surfer I would be a superfan.
Is your company hiring? :)
Despite the spamming angle, I think CAPTCHA-breaking is, on the balance, noble and honorable work. These things are user-hostile blights on the web, and any effort towards making them disappear as useless is worthwhile. Sites worried about spam should invest more in automated spam classification/elimination instead of punishing real users with CAPTCHA-solving. Not that I can offer a solution--if I could, I'd be a millionaire.
Who do you think spam classification false positives are going to be pubishing if not real users? At least with a captcha, you have some idea that you were rejected before you put in the effort to write your comment.
$30-150k/year is a big range
Ahh the good ole dilemma of selling your soul, you study what you love only to destroy it for profit. Like an entomologist hired by a pesticide company.
I get it man, gotta make the bucks helping spammers advertise their shitty products, even if they destroy the internet.
What about the spammers that already destroyed the internet by steering it entirely towards advertising & surveillance capitalism? It's like the pot calling the kettle black.
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.
Interesting, subtle difference but I always thought of captchas as having computational difficulty, but that's clearly not the point as you say. The cost is not compute but developer time.
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.
The watershed of "good enough at programming to just get a real job" vs "can code enough to be really annoying to businesses, but not enough to hack it as a dev" is a lot more on the annoying side than you'd think.
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.
Captchas are now useful to distinguish well-intentioned bots (they stop whenever they see captcha) from malicious ones, which solve them, but still behave a lot like bots.
Well-intentional bots are first-class citizens
Wouldn’t a well-intentioned bot follow robots.txt anyway?
Do you complete the circle and do the good bot bad bot classification with a mod bot?
> there are other options that pay much better than spamming
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.
I’ve got no criminal charges of any kind and I’d still want to know about any way to work without getting flagged as a known enemy of the Cartel.
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.
How many people are there like that, and how much damage are they collectively likely to do? If you're a random spammer, how hard will it be to hire that person? Again, not aiming for impossibility, just reducing the damage.
If I were you, I'd probably try looking at companies working in the web scraping and reverse engineering fields, who might even appreciate the skills even if they were acquired in a, let's just say, "different" way.
There's nothing immoral about scraping a website. Best of luck to you!
The secret is knowing that companies actually want people like you, with the real world blackhat experience, because you know how the game works in practise not just theory.
There's plenty of mischief potential with "deepfakes".
>he vast majority of spammers would not be able to replicate this;
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.
I think captchas are just another lind of defense to make it harder for actors abusing the system. It's not a solution, just a little (getting outdated) fortification.
Makes me wonder what comes next. Could we create a forum where every member must do a 15 minute video interview with a moderator? I know this "doesn't scale" but I think it could make for a funny gimmick.
When I was a teenager, I stumbled upon a music forum that required phone interviews for signing up. They had other interesting sign up rules, like you could not have silly user names (judged by the admin). I guess it served as an effective filter for their member base..
The silly username thing goes a bit too far though. It just means the admin will subjectively apply other rules. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.
private torrent trackers are/were doing that. It was really just to make sure you understood how p2p culture works and what the expectations are, and really easy to pass if you just followed a guide. However, I did see many people fail their interview.
The famous RED tracker has a full on technical interview asking about:
* Audio Formats
* Transcoding
* Spectral analysis
and more.
This is the interview prep website: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html
Was there ever video interviews? Admittedly I wasn’t really paying attention but back when I was getting into what it was only IRC, and these days it still seems to be IRC anywhere that does interviews (otherwise class-restricted forum invites).
I dont recall ever seeing that. I dont think anyone doing piracy wants to be photographed or videoed lol. I did get in mumble with some community members but it was just a hangout.
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We are increasingly moving to ID checks. Australia law just now. For all its faults it solves spam as side effect.
It also makes it 100x more likely for you IDs to leak online as KYC companies are valuable targets that get hacked every month
There are lots of random ID documents available on dark networks however.
A small signup fee is much easier.
But it excludes people who don't have easy access to international banking.
Small? From your own link, recaptcha v3 takes 10-15s and costs $1.3 for 1000 captchas. This is actually huge, and cost prohibitively expensive for many things where you would want to use it (like scrapping a large website).
> so really captchas are more like putting a small min amount of effort.
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.
It's completely unclear what a "proof of work" captchas is supposed to be.
It's CPU intensive JS code that must run to get an output that must match something server-side, the idea is that it makes attacks/spam not economically viable to run.
The problem is that it doesn’t do anything. Maybe you slightly slow down a volumetric spam attack, but you’re just putting a sleep() before letting spam through which might be the worst solution. As for economic viability, it’s still just a sleep(). Even if it somehow did cost extra money to use more of the CPU, botnets don’t even use their own hardware.
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.
Brave search uses it. From my limited understanding, it sends a time-consuming javascript function and its input to your browser, and has your browser calculate the output and send it back. The server matches your output with the expected output. I assume the server would pre-compute in some way? On the spectrum, it leans more towards being a spam-alleviating thing rather than a human-distinguishing thing.
id think its some kind of proof of sequential work, basically an un-parallelizable calculation that is guaranteed to take a certain number of steps, and making solving thousands of them much harder and hopefully not worth it
Almost always it's some variation of "give me a string with the SHA256 hash starting with 0.a471"
Wow Funcaptcha cost the most and it is open source.
If you're into this, here's my 2014 breakdown of the Silk Road CAPTCHA: https://github.com/mieko/sr-captcha
Appropriate response by 4Chan to this: simplify the human work given that anyway it's simple to solve via NNs. We are at a point where designing very hard captchas has high probabilities to increase the human annoyance without decreasing the machine solvability.
> simplify the human work given that anyway it's simple to solve via NNs. We are at a point where designing very hard captchas has high probabilities to increase the human annoyance without decreasing the machine solvability
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.
This kills the board. Users will go elsewhere, fuck all people pay for pass.
And the spambots will follow them. Which kills the next board. Repeat ad nauseum until the end of the internet.
At this point I have to wait 90 seconds before making every post. (maybe because I don't persist cookies). I posted very rarely, but now I just stopped - I get it when someone shows me the door.
Agreed, charging for accounts is the only halfway viable solution I have seen any service use that gives a sizable downtick in the sheer number of bots/spam.
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!
This is known as a Sybil [1] attack and it lays the groundwork for stuff like Adam Backs hashcash [2] protocol and it’s basically why things like proof of work [3] have a monetary value today.
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
That would work. It would also kill the site.
What? So you use 4chan? It would completely kill what makes this website special
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As a large language model, I don’t have access to up to date weather information.
Nah. But whatever you’re trying to imply, I think it would make more sense to claim that I am Hiroyuki Nishimura or something.
For now, I’m going to prescribe you 6 months of abstinence from /pol/ and we’ll do another evaluation after that.
Partly irrelevant with a 30% chance of hallucinations.
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We've been stuck at that point for at least 5, if not 10, years.
Just use Worldcoin retina scans next
What is NN?
"AI" but pre-COVID
Oh my!
Is the oversimplification from "deep neural network" into "AI" caused by the prevalence of brain-fog due to long COVID?
"Drag each symbol to the group that is most likely to be offended by it."
Ooh I love this, all off-the-shelf AI won’t touch it due to all their “safety” (aka anti-hurt-feelings) protocols
4chan doesn't care about human annoyance. They just started doing a 15 minute post delay, which is infuriating. I had to whitelist 4chan in Cookie AutoDelete.
Hi fellow cookie autodeleter, I experienced the same thing, but I just decided to stop posting. Whitelisting felt too much like giving in to terrorists. I'm considering just not going there in the future. Maybe after all this time I will finally be free.
Same. In my case I always use a separate incognito mode browser for posting and a regular locked-down browser with JS disabled etc. So I'd have to either give in and leave the incognito mode browser running in the background while I browser on the main browser, or give in and stop blocking as aggressively on the main browser, and I chose to do neither and just stop posting.
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.
Why are you doing this ? What are you trying to avoid ?
See you tomorrow, anon.
Just stop posting there. The whole point of it is to post anonymously in a high traffic forum. The rate limiting timers have reduced traffic to the point many boards feel dead, and their solution to that problem is to sell accounts.
I am totally in favor of increasing the annoyance of 4chan users.
I wonder if it would be better to pretend to have a captcha but really you are analysing the user timing and actions. Honestly I half suspect this is already going on.
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.
That's kinda what every major captcha distributor does already!
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!
This is how ClownFlare and its ilk, make life hell on the internet, when you use a "weird" browser on a "weird" OS.
My experience is that IP reputation does a lot more for Cloudflare than browsers ever did. I tried to see if they'd block me for using Ladybird and Servo, two unfinished browsers (Ladybird used to even have its own TLS stack), but I passed just fine. Public WiFi in restaurants and shared train WiFi often gets me jumping through hoops even in normal Firefox, 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.
Would it be possible to serve a fake fingerprint that appears legitimate? Or even better mimic the finger print of real users who've visited a site you own for example?
yep, but it can get tricky.
some projects worth checking out: https://github.com/refraction-networking/utls https://github.com/berstend/puppeteer-extra
Re: your last paragraph, https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
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.
In that case why do I ever receive a captcha?
It adds another layer of analysis. For example:
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.
I found several websites switched to 'press here until the timer runs out', probably they are doing the checks while the user is holding their mouse pressed, it would be trivial to bypass the long press by itself with automated mouse clickers.
That's what reCAPTCHA does.
In my opinion the granddaddy of all 4chan CAPTCHA busts is still Yannick Kilcher’s GPT-J tune on “Raiders of the Lost Kek” set, and might be the coolest thing an LLM has ever done on video: https://youtu.be/efPrtcLdcdM?si=errY0PrEhnX9ylDw
Nearly a full minute of disclaimers and warnings about 4chan. That's got to be a record.
>I released the model, the code and I evaluated the model on a huge set of benchmarks and it turns out this horrible, terrible, model is more truthful-yes more truthful-than any other GPT out there
> The official TensorFlow-to-TFJS model converter doesn't work on Python 3.12. This doesn't seem to really be documented.
> 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.
As someone who has been working in ML for years, I can only recommend to stay away from anything recent. Grab an old bayesian statistics textbook and learn the fundamentals, then progress to learning the major frameworks like Pytorch. Try to write every part of a CNN, RNN and Transformer architecture and training pipeline yourself the first time (including data loaders, but maybe leave out CUDA matrix kernels). Stay the hell away from wrappers for other people's wrappers like Langchain. Their documentation is often not just outdated, but flat out wrong regarding the fundamentals. Huggingface is great if you know the basics and thus how to fix things if their standard wrappers break.
Any book you would recommend?
You can try Theodoridis if you can find a first or second edition. It is old enough to not be diluted by the recent craze but still recent enough to cover all the necessary fundamentals. There is also a new edition coming out soon, but that seems to have been heavily tainted by the ChatGPT hype.
That’s like spending a few hours, learning to take the lid off your septic tank.
Oddly enough, I find most of 4chan less brainrot inducing than Twitter, even pre-Musk.
It's still brainrot, it's just on the opposite end of the political spectrum.
Back when Llama was leaked on /g/ 4chan's /g/lmg/ was the best place to be up to date with local models. It still might be but not so much.
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.
I have bad news for you, then...
What's the bad news?
There's no smart algorithm for sorting posts, and there's a limited number of active threads, so it's not rage baiting in quite the same way. Only active threads stay alive though, so it has the exact same issue as twitter and other social media, only engaging content is served to users, and the most engaging things are rage bait, conspiracy theories, and porn. Things that get someone riled up enough to respond.
I am a liberal and also genuinely find many 4chan boards less politically awful than current Twitter most of the time.
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.
Little bit, but at least you learned something :)
...Don't underestimate the things to be learned studying a septic system.
If there is one blog I've fell in love it, it's nullpt.rs. Still waiting for part 2 of Reverse Engineering Tiktok's VM Obfuscation
This project also solves the 4chan captcha https://github.com/moffatman/chan
I'm asking myself if a post titled “Breaking the Stormfront CAPTCHA” would lead to the same discussion. Maybe I should spend less time on this website.
I understand why Cloudflare has to exist. But its beyond annoying that it forces you into using an unmodified Chrome sans VPN.
I remember trying to use 4chan once and i couldn't even pass through the captcha.
I remember using it before it had a captcha
There was a chaotic neutral time in my life where I used it daily for an extended period of time; and then found myself out of that rut and would only go back to see unhinged takes on a particular current event that I was interested in seeing the hivemind's thoughts on. Each and every time I went back, and tried to contribute to a thread, the Captchas and the CloudFlare checks were increasingly intrusive.
During this election, I completely gave up even trying to participate and just lurked.
▲
▲ ▲I tried to post and it gave me a 900 second cooldown, not even on vpn. I too remember the good old days when there was no capcha.
Does 4Chan also have bot BEHAVIOR detection (e.g. unnatural mouse movements)that google captcha has?
It does not, at least not once you pass the Cloudflare Turnstile challenge (which can be done with an API as well.)
The results here suggest it does not.
Yeah I had been under the impression that the point of captchas like this (and those "slide a puzzle piece" ones) weren't the solution to the problem as much as checking for human-like mouse movements.
I've built 3 iterations of captcha solvers for that crappy website based on https://github.com/drunohazarb/4chan-captcha-solver/issues/1 . The only thing I've learned along the way is that it's mostly pointless outside of a "learning" exercise, since they'll change the captcha (in terms of letter count or the entropy background). Initially, it was 4 characters with pretty obvious background, then it turned to 5, then it was both 4 and 5 and the current iteration which is also either 4 or 5, but with a lot of entropy surrounding the characters.
This project was really my first decent introduction to computer vision and machine learning (along with that of those who helped me in various ways; none of them desired to be credited here other than the guy who collected some of the data for me.)
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.
To help you out if you're interested:
- 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!
Shearing is a linear operation that should be trivial for a NN to learn. Have you found that unshearing is actually useful? Was it to feed the image to an existing OCR program?
I am always interested! Thank you for the tips, I'll definitely research these.
How did this project help you to learn computer vision? I'd also like to write a basic captcha solver as an intro, but superficially this project just looks like a dump of generated code.
What do you mean by "generated code"? All of the code in the linked GitHub repo was written by me, with the assistance of a couple friends who helped here and there, but didn't request to be credited.
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 think there's been a misunderstanding. I didn't understand you were the author of the linked article, and read the following exchange to mean you'd found the code at https://github.com/drunohazarb/4chan-captcha-solver to be a helpful introduction:
> > 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!
Not OP, but maybe consider reading the fucking article before throwing out rude insinuations?
I'm not sure this is helpful - please see my other reply.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
In the article it mentions they changed the number of characters in the captcha after he trained the model, and the model could still solve it
Changing the number of characters barely registers as a change. They merely need to use a variety of fonts (according to the post right now there are a grand total of 15 possible glyphs which is tiny) and it would vastly increase the difficulty of generating the training set, and probably affect model accuracy by a lot. Not to mention more complex backgrounds. What’s seen here is an ancient and relatively simple form of captcha.
I remember when they introduced their new captcha; it was so tedious to solve it I stopped interacting there entirely.
Glad to see Blackjack and Jordin. We used to hack on Minecraft together. nullpt.rs and secret.club are full of former video game hackers :)
It’s nice to see this posted and interesting that it’s in tensorflow. I wonder for how many years the capture was already broken but not just posted about publicly.
Parsing the visualization data, within a JSON script tasked with parsing it is a complex endeavor when the site requires verifying email.
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"
I’ll never forget spending the evening of the 2016 election on /pol/
What happened?
A lot of memes and shitposting, I assume. /pol/ was always political, pro-trump, and according to some was even important enough to influence elections. I find that claim dubious, but it's true that many pro-trump memes (and memes in general) were created on 4chan.
/pol/ is 100% a big factor in the rising popularity of MAGA and far-right nationalist sentiment among young men
Consider that Trump's hymn goes like:
Young man, there's no need to feel down, I said
I know people personally who recently graduated high school and went down the 4chan rabbithole because they wanted to be "edgy", then they got comfortable with the extremely racist attitudes they were promoting
I’ve never seen such a small group of people have such a big impact on world affairs.
4chan pol has straight up mainstreamed most incel talking points to young boys all accross the world.
Made a profit of 40 bucks betting 10 bucks on Trump that evening / night
It might be worth noting that this, including the harder version the op encountered, are not the hardest captchas that 4chan can serve. There is a still harder version which is sent to less trustworthy IPs. I imagine it would still be tractably solved with computer vision. This in part misses the point though, since 4chan has been continuously altering their captcha since it released, making it difficult to create a permanent solution that won't be broken down the road.
Datacenter IPs can’t even post at all, nevermind needing to solve a CAPTCHA. That’s why the accusations of “VPN shill” are usually wrong, as is the assumption of anonymity – 4chan is in fact one of the least anonymous sites on the internet. The optional username feature gives it a veneer of anonymity, but the strict IP requirements ensure almost every post is attributable to a residential internet connection, and reliably associable with other posts from that same connection.
4chan tries to make its users anonymous to each other. There's nothing in there about you being anonymous to their servers.
Some datacenter IPs can post fine, mostly just not those belonging to any large hosting company. I would mention a list of ones I know aren't blocked, but, well, that might get them blocked.
That’s surprising to me. I assumed they were using some service (like Cloudflare) with an updated list of non-residential IP addresses.
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…)
You can get residential ips nowadays. They are much more expensive for an individual, but for a business or nation-state, it is a feasible option.
What about users behind CGNAT, like mobile users?
That’s attributable with the right warrant and correlation with other data available to the ISP.
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.
I'm pretty sure all of t-mobile is rangebanned. Phoneposters are usually told to buy a pass.
Hiro owns 4chan. I remember something about Moot giving him the website for free.
Some mobile users can post but I think they've gone so far as to ban entire ISP mobile IP ranges to prevent people from constantly rolling new IPs on their phone.
Nice callback to Moot banning an entire Australian region (Queensland or Victoria, if memory serves) because Aussies did an outsized share of shitposting, and of Aussies those particular ones were the worst.
"Attributable" means by law enforcement, and mobile carriers, like all ISPs, must keep logs. In this case, for who had which IP address when.
(Otherwise, it's akin to the usual confusion between anonymity and pseudonymity.)
That’s true, but to be fair my original comment also said posts would be reliably associable with other posts from the same IP. With CGNAT, that association will be slightly less reliable, but not meaningfully so. The segment of the population who posts on 4chan is so low that there is negligible chance of two 4chan users sharing an exit IP and time window. Even with non-overlapping time windows, the population will be low enough for stylometry (and other factors) to remove any remaining ambiguity.
Yeah, I encountered those as well in my data gathering. I threw them out from the training set, but I kept them for possible future experimentation.
Can you upload a few of these samples somewhere?
I need to manipulate the data a bit, because right now it's just raw, unaligned foreground/background images with solutions. I need to do the alignment and save them as images rather than JSON files. I'll do that when I have the time.
Jesus looking at both example captchas... as a human... i have no fucking clue the answer lol
You get used to them, there are various heuristics built in that make them easier then they at first appear.
I initially wrote the alignment-only script (in the source repo as `user-scripts/4chan-captcha-aligner.ts`) before the rest of the project because the person who was collecting the data manually for me couldn't wrap their head around the slider-style CAPTCHAs. There's definitely a learning curve.
And now we can look forward to even harder ones now that those have been broken. soon the web will be unusable to everyone but robots
Following the links to the captcha solving service you can read profiles of the humans doing the work where its pitched as more ethical than them working in hazardous factories!
I can only imagine how much worse they'll make the captcha after stuff like this picks up speed with the users all the while being ineffective against the bots.
I really doubt that they're the first to do this.
captchas are broken, forever. There is no way to prevent bots without also preventing a bottom tier of human users (visually impaired people, old people, or just impatient people). Like this xkcd [1] comic suggests, we need to just focus on rewarding and punishing specific behavior, regardless of whether the agent is human or not
PoW like hashcash (not a cryptocurrency thing) might be a better solution. Users could even delegate solving the PoW puzzles to a 3rd party for low power devices like phones. But it imposes a cost on spammers that's inescapable.
That assumes spammers are using their own hardware to post. If they're using a botnet, they don't care about CPU cycles. Botnets would probably become even more profitable in that model.
Jokes aside, we don't want any bots at all. Even if they're posting constructive comments, we should interact with humans, not machines
That doesn’t mean that webcrawlers have no legitimate value (think: search indexers) or illegitimate value (think: intellectual property theft via data scraping for AI purposes), and bots which communicate while they have no place, aren’t going to go away.
In the interest of provoking discussion: why?
If a bot can meaningfully pass and act as a productive member of the community, what does it matter?
Because I'm interested in what people have to say, not what machines have to say.
It's nice to want things. The people paying expensive programmers for bot armies to parrot their thoughts are currently paying cheaper humans sitting at a bank of beheaded cellphones to parrot amplify their thoughts instead. You're being lied to, regardless, the only difference is if it's a shell script to do the lying or a paycheck to a human to do the lying.
Who's driving phone farm?
https://www.some3c.com/blogs/news/unified-control-20-pcs-pho...
I think a better approach is to make account creation frictionful (eg. charge money, set karma thresholds, require an invite, etc.), score each account, and ban or time out accounts when they break community rules.
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.
I mean at some point ... the average visitor is dumber than the AI and your now just blocking dumb people
yes, we're creating websites that are gated by IQ tests. This isn't the way
I’d like to believe I have at least an average IQ and I can’t pass half the google captchas.
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.
*you're
Very tasteful title animation I must say. It’s fast enough, you feel it, and not distracting, gives a vibe even from glancing
Man, is there anything computers won't be able to break!
crazy
[meta] what blog site is this? Is it a joint among authors? I can’t find more information on their GitHub. Looks neat.
I (veritas) run the blog but accept contributions from anyone. The blog itself is open source :-) https://github.com/nullpt-rs/blog
For those that don't know, the JKCS extension has been doing this for years already:
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
I really hope my post didn't come off as if I was trying to make it sound like this was a new idea. Regardless, this is good information, because it counters the posts of the form "great, now that you made this, you're going to make it harder."
I didn't look at it that way, just maybe that you (and/or others) might not have been aware of its existence since I didn't see it mentioned anywhere.
the blacked out minimalist aesthetic on this site looks really cool
I really like it too. I'm always excited to see the themes of personal and other tech blogs I come across here.
Hey dude. Any idea if 1000 labelled images are good enough for training and how much time it would take to train on a a40 nvidia like on https://www.runpod.io/pricing ?
4Chan is probably one of the only social platforms where genuiune users and russian bots share the same views, why even bother with CAPTCHAs?
Hi veritas
Not a word on how describing and releasing this code is obviously unethical!? Captchas have a legitimate use to keep bots out.
Bet it can't break reCAPTCHA on a VPN.
[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.
I would also be inclined to believe that my project to solve the proprietary 4Chan text CAPTCHA cannot solve an unrelated image CAPTCHA. I'd bet a lot of money on it, in fact!
> 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.
Do you have examples of "just use python 2" still being a thing in 2024?
Yeah, whenever i need to write a quick script and have no time to suffer "$library needs python 3.x, where x must be > $value and <= $value2, and not a prime except when that ends in a 3, except on leap days"
2 is stable and does not change from under you. Which is what you want in a programming langiuage
In my recent experience, this dependency hell is quite specific to scientific / ML python.
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.
Python 3.10 seems to work for almost everything, and Python 2 most certainly doesn't. In fact, even latest works for almost everything - there's an alternative to 99.9% of Python 2 stuff in Python 3.
I wasn't a very active 4chan poster to begin with, but when they introduced this awful CAPTCHA, and later the 300s countdown before making the first post, I completely lost interest in using the website.
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.
one of the biggest problems that 4chan has to combat is spam. unfortunately, at 4chan's scale, hcaptcha and recaptcha are not free. 4chan is not exactly a font of money, either. the only reason they turned to this awful homebrew captcha was because recaptcha stopped being free. is there any better way to do it with a single developer for a website that serves millions of people a day?
Not the rampant racism or sexism or simple misanthropy or outright calls to violence or overflowing hostility.
It's the spam that tops the problem list.
It's a bit embarrassing I even have to explain this, but yes, because racism or sexism are very important parts of 4chan's appeal: it's a place with freedom of speech. Let's be real the standards of discussion are low, but people can discuss stuff freely, which they wouldn't be able to if everything was buried under some GPT generated spam.
They do have rules and the site is quite moderated.
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.
No politics and news is just one board. You can go to 4chan to discuss more important things such as videogames.
This is not true. You can go to /v/ right now and see tons of pro black/trans in video games posters, and /lgbt/ is one of the largest boards on the site at 12th place by avg. posts per day.[0] Here are 3 /v/ threads I found in less than 5 seconds that are "pro woke":
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."
The thing is, addressing the spam and also allowing users to have a low friction experience would be the first step to addressing the concerns you mentioned (without compromising the purpose of the site: anonymous and totally free speech).
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.
GP said "one of the biggest problems", not "the biggest problem"
> Not the rampant racism or sexism or simple misanthropy or outright calls to violence or overflowing hostility.
Isn't that more easily solved by just not visiting the site in the first place?
This is how oppression starts. First it's "let's only get rid of the most offensive content", then "let's suppress opinions we don't like".
The fact you think some ideas are "harmful" is exactly why humanity needs sites like these. We don't trust people like you to determine which ideas are "harmful" and which aren't, which ideas are worth spreading and which aren't. We want to see for ourselves, thank you very much.
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.
That's the price you pay for ability to freely and anonymously voice different opinions. And even then 4chan is considered "soft", because mods still delete some egregiously "incorrect" opinions.
> 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.
>No, the other reason they're using this is to make it so annoying that you'll spend $20/yr to buy a 4chan pass to bypass it.
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?
You're reading a lot into my reply. The GP's question was "is there any better way to [avoid the captcha] with a single developer?".
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.
Cynical yes, incorrect no.
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
Doing so would destroy the culture of 4chan.
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.
> keep the annoying captcha, but don't show one again for the lifetime of a cookie
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.
Is the anontalk guy still up to his shenanigans? It's admittedly been a very long time since I've used 4chan.
Do a Web search for "4Chan CAPTCHA" sometime. All the top results will likely be people complaining about how terrible it is. You're certainly not alone.
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.
The addition of the post countdown has had a pretty noticeable effect on posts/day across multiple boards: https://4stats.io/
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.
recaptcha is terrible if you are cursed with an ISP that Google deems icky for some indiscernible reason. at the time, I was getting slowly fading bullshit that invariably gaslit me with "try again" several times. when they've switched to custom captcha, I actually started posting again instead of just lurking.
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.
They had a gigantic spam problem, captcha saved the site
- Obscure proprietary algorithm decides what you read
- Obscure CAPTCHA and other anti-spam features
- Pay to post
Choose one.
Paying to post sounds like the only good solution. There is no privacy problem if they accept Monero.
Patient dead operation successful.
then how does Reddit and Twitter work without such an obnoxious captcha? I find it hard to believe those sites get less spam. Or any other community.
You need accounts with unique emails to post everywhere else, and those sites are massive with hundreds/thousands of devs, some of whom work exclusively on anti-spam. If you make a site immune to advertising revenue and any other source of profit, you’re going to struggle to pay for “internet-scale” efforts.
Twitter is extremely user hostile. Every time I've made an account it has inevitability asked for an email and a phone number, and at least a few captchas.
First, they aren't anonymous. It's a lot more friction when you have to generate an account (which also requires a captcha).
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.
They don't surface every post to everyone unlike 4chan so spam is much less visible though they still exist.
Reddit and Twitter both have huge bot problems. On Reddit it's a bit less obvious due to the upvote/downvote system, and on Twitter it's a bit less obvious because you usually only follow people you want to see. Make a post on Twitter that mentions something like cryptocurrency, and you'll get a dozen bot replies immediately.
By selling your data to advertisers.
Reddit and Twitter are replete with bots
but now 4chan is one of the most user-hostile social media platforms around
Stay off /v/, /tv/, /pol/, and /a/ and you’ll have a pretty good time.
certainly won't have a good time on /b/ either
It's mostly porn nowadays but through some chain of events, /b/ actually is ideologically one of the most normal boards on the site now. Not even kidding. Many - probably most - other boards are majority Trumpists or neo-Nazis but /b/ is roughly at least 50% liberal or libertarian.
So politics threads in /b/ are actually better than in a ton of other boards.
Same here. the captcha is the tip of the iceberg. VPNs , proxies...all blocked. Tons of ghosting and censoring of posts too. Also crawling with feds and people trying to get you to incriminate yourself. I love the option to bypass it with crypto. Yeah, like I am going to give them btc, which will be traced by every agency and coin analysis firm and also get my wallet/exchange account restricted by being linked to 4chan. The owners more than happy to comply with every 3-letter agency request for info.
taps the sign
> 300s countdown
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
Presumably, anyone who regularly uses 4chan would register. Once you register and click the login link in your email, you just get the easy Cloudflare captcha and no countdown.
The horrible captcha + 300s countdown is for completely unauthed users. Most sites don't even allow unauthed users to post at all.
If you don't get it, you probably don't spend too much time on 4chan.
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.
[dead]
[flagged]
Read the guidelines, OP /s
[dead]
I suspect really strongly that the available characters in the 4chan captcha were chose to be able to spell out the most racist/nazi/extreme slurs and slogans imaginable. For instance, not all numerals are ever used, but 1, 4, and 8 are. K is often there, and whatever the algo is, pseudorandom or not, it often doubles/triples characters. I've personally seen "kkk" twice over the years. Mind you, it does seem random. But even randomly, these must happen often enough to set that crowd off, they make a game of posting a screenshot of the "good ones".
All the worst slurs I can think of in my limited vocabulary can't even be spelled with the characters available. I suspect the opposite - they might have been chosen to avoid spelling things like that.
You either know some radioactively hot slurs, or you've just not hung out there enough. Only the "i" is missing, and a week doesn't go by that someone doesn't post it with the 1 instead. Granted, I think that one's a repost (never bothered to try to check).
Oh no you’re probably on the money
4chan was gaming the previous captchas for awhile to label some of the data with racial slurs, as they had discovered the threshold that you’re allowed to be wrong by, and were aggressively abusing it.
Congratulations, now it will get upgraded and become more work for humans to solve, increasing the burden on every non-malicious user.
It's not like bots aren't already bypassing these CAPTCHAs. One author writing a blog post about how they accomplished what spammers and bots have been doing for ages isn't going to change anything.
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.
(author here) Interestingly, the email registration/time-limit was added after I started this project, but before I told anyone about it.
It only took about three days until the very first captcha solver was made back in 2021, and the dev's only response was to blanket ban the author's name sitewide until he became popular again for other reasons so they had to remove the filter. They know it's only a matter of time for someone to train a new model no matter how much they update the captcha so they don't really care much about it these days.
There are already loads of extensions and scripts out there that can solve these captchas with a great success rate.
Adding one more will degrade rather than improve that. Notwithstanding all the downvotes, the author's comment (just above) seems to endorse my argument.
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.
If there's one place on the web I would apply anonymity with great diligence, it would be posting any article that might put me at odds with the good people of 4Chan.
mostly kidding! mostly
The 4Chan userbase hates the CAPTCHA as much as I do :)
This, but unironically.
related (15 days ago)
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.
something something Conway's law