reCAPTCHA migration to Google Cloud by the end of 2025: what do you need to do
Posted by ribtoks@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 31 comments
Posted by ribtoks@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 31 comments
IsHeNeverAffTheTelly@reddit
Fuck reCAPTCHA and all involved with it. I will never use any website which requires me to solve one of those bloody annoying things.
Mesthabro@reddit
I am not sure if recaptcha is still useful in 2025. At this point AI recognizes images better than me
thecoode@reddit
Haha true! Feels like AI’s testing us now!
Relative-Scholar-147@reddit
Are you a bot?
thecoode@reddit
Why did you ask, Beau case i came here after so long to engage
Relative-Scholar-147@reddit
It was just a joke mate!
yasth@reddit
The modern one isn't even an image-based check it is basically advanced fingerprinting. The goal is to basically force attackers to act like humans which at least slows them and makes it a bit more spendy.
KawaiiNeko-@reddit
It's not even based on human behavior, the reason it works is because it knows who you are, all the time. If you have taken steps to build a completely new fingerprint and identity, then you will get captcha'd every single time.
I believe the FBI' anonymous tips webpage had a hidden reCAPTCHA embedded into it. Cheeky little way of deanonimizing submitters.
Mesthabro@reddit
I think privatecaptcha does this. OP could you confirm?
MechanixMGD@reddit
I didn't even understand the purpose of captcha, it is not like it really blocked the real problem. It just bothered the real people.
ribtoks@reddit (OP)
The purpose was to help train the AI to recognize the crosswalks :-D
Mesthabro@reddit
You think you almost passed and then it hits you with a "Page 2" of verification
gimpwiz@reddit
Does it want every square that has even a sliver of motorcycle or just the main ones? Does it want the person riding the motorcycle or just the bike itself? Let me guess... well apparently this one is configured to not want the same thing as the last one.
tooclosetocall82@reddit
The OG purpose was to help digitize books where OCR failed or was uncertain. Long gone are the days of it stopping bots and helping humanity in some small way however.
Relative-Scholar-147@reddit
I think it was never the og purpose, just a side effect they noticed they could use for training.
tooclosetocall82@reddit
The captcha content was designed to stop bots. reCAPTCHA in particular though was designed to crowdsource digitizing books while stopping bots. So a bit of both I suppose, but this thread was specifically about reCAPTCHA.
stumblinbear@reddit
These aren't mutually exclusive
MartinMystikJonas@reddit
You would be surprised him much spam would there be without captcha-like systems
MechanixMGD@reddit
You have no idea how much spam I did even where was captcha.
MartinMystikJonas@reddit
Sure captcha will not stop everything. But speaking about stats we collected from websites I manage it stops about 99.5% of spam attempts.
stumblinbear@reddit
Absolutely massively disagree. It doesn't stop determined bad actors, but it cuts out those who can't be fucked to put in even a little bit of effort, and those that intentionally skip captchas to go for the sites without them.
I've seen sites recently remove their captcha just to quickly add it back because they started getting flooded with new accounts.
Cacoda1mon@reddit
Modern CAPTCHAs are PoW-based; they give your browser a riddle to solve. E.g., which number between 1 and 100k plus this random string computes in this hash? The server has to take one random number, generate one random string, and calculate one hash. The browser has to compute 50k hashes, on average, to solve the riddle.
itijara@reddit
The image recognition is not the real test anymore, it is things like mouse movements and other meta information such as device info, cookies, and IP address. There is an "invisible" captcha that just uses meta information and also that one that just requires clicking a box. Google likes the "click images of ..." as it helps them train their models, but it isn't that useful at separating humans from robots anymore.
zerovian@reddit
for the same reason as above, Google doesn't need the training data for images. Ai does it faster .
PersianMG@reddit
The Invisible reCAPTCHA is great for bot detection. I can also recommend CloudFlare Turnstile as an alternative if people are exploring options.
Another good one to mention is Akismet which is the API I use to detect spam comments made by bots on my blog.
itijara@reddit
I can attest that it works. We had an issue with bots using our platform to send emails, and adding a simple invisible recaptcha made the problem disappear. I think that anyone who complains about it hasn't actually used it. One caveat is that it won't really block low-volume bots being run from a real person's browser, which means that it is not good for catching "cheating", e.g. someone using a bot to scalp GPUs or something.
nekokattt@reddit
Click the squares showing AI hallucinations
afastrunner@reddit
"Your existing reCAPTCHA integration continues to work without requiring code changes. You can retain the same web page instrumentation and backend calls." https://cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/migrate-recaptcha official docs say you don't have to make any code/integration changes after the move are you just trying to scare people in to moving to your service which costs more?
ribtoks@reddit (OP)
Read carefully: “The following changes occur **after you complete the migration process**” - this is the condition in front of the text you quoted
afastrunner@reddit
but there is auto migration "If you don't migrate your keys yourself, reCAPTCHA automatically migrates them. The automatic migration provisions a Google Cloud project and associates your reCAPTCHA keys with that project." so most people can literally do nothing and it will just continue to work.
ribtoks@reddit (OP)
You are correct about this - automigration creates a (potentially orphanned) Google Cloud Project, but if you don't have billing enabled, it will reject requests after free tier limit. So I guess it's better to setup everything yourself!