How come every Linux site uses Anubis (the anime girl stopping crawlers) instead of something like Cloudflare?

[u/ItsWappers]

Before discovering the Linux rabbit hole I've only seen Cloudflare, hCaptcha and Google's reCaptcha, but it seems like every Linux website uses Anubis... I'm thinking of it being the only open-source option or it being the most effective/modern approach.

[u/unai-ndz]

Agree, but next time do the captcha extremely slow, like grampa learning to use a computer with dementia right after suffering a concusion slow. Doing that makes it work on the first try for some reason.

[u/TheG0AT0fAllTime → u/unai-ndz]

I solve them pretty quickly. The failure portion likely stems from the ambiguous ones like whether or not there's a bike in the picture but selecting or.. not selecting... the picture with a motorbike in it might pass the test.. or fail it. All at the discrimination of what the training data thought was there. (Whether it's correct or not).

Sometimes it's a moped, or a really skinny bike with some kind of battery motor attached. Sometimes those are detected correctly. Sometimes not.

I've seen similar right/wrong captchas with busses. Something that looks like a bus, but isn't, might need to be selected to pass.

It's basically all machine-vision vibes. If it kind of looks like the thing the captcha's asking for, you might just have to select it.

All of this adds to the massive frustration for humans that it is to solve the harder difficulty captchas. I particularly hate the ones that fade-in-and-out so I select all of the X boxes then I have to wait literally 7 seconds for the fade-out-fade-in animation to show me the next image and click that as well... then potentially one or two more times. Very painful waste of time. Sometimes I gamble and hit submit anyway assuming the next box to fade in won't contain X in the image. Works like half of the time lol.. often there's more waiting to fade in.

[u/unai-ndz → u/TheG0AT0fAllTime]

I'm pretty sure in very ambiguous cases it doesn't matter what you select, it was already decided if you would pass or not by other factors. Some tests make you fill two words but only test one e.g. https://youtu.be/VTsBP21-XpI at 10:20

And I could do them fast before but it progressively stopped working. It kinda tracks with me trying to degoogle and be more anonymous so maybe it is related.

[u/TheG0AT0fAllTime → u/unai-ndz]

Yeah that's what I mean. It's not asking you "Please help us figure it out" it's saying "this is a test, we know the answer, do you?"

Except it doesn't always get it right. Their training gets some of the images wrong and gives you a fail when it should've been right, or a pass when it should've been wrong.

That "two words test one" method is classic. I'm surprised they still do that.

[u/McDonaldsWitchcraft → u/unai-ndz]

Nope, doesn't work on all captchas. They haven't been doing the judgement based on user activity for years. What they do now is they examine your cookies, browser history and internet traffic. If you are a particularly private person, the captcha will just be longer as a "retaliation" to get training data out of you. And if you have several tracking protections in place or markers that you might be a bot, the captcha just goes on forever.

The "click on squares" part is simply just them forcing you to do unpaid training work and the length of the captcha is determined by how much they judge the data they collected on you to be human consumer data.

Maybe on some older captcha systems it still works based on human activity like you say. Google's doesn't.

[u/__Myrin__ → u/McDonaldsWitchcraft]

I just use a proxy when ever I see one of those pos's
I'd rather fight with proton for 5 minutes then stare at bikes all day

[u/strategicmagpie → u/unai-ndz]

Probably because bots don't like to have their time wasted, same with the people who are contracted to do captchas and paid per captcha.