Geohot tries to break Google's recaptcha

[loopdoend]

This problem was solved long ago to the apparent satisfaction of the marketplace: http://bypasscaptcha.com

George, the devil is in the details. You can't do everything overnight.

0% chance of success.

[photogrammetry]

Thanks, dang and sctb, for encouraging people to flag and neg my comment wishing Geohot good luck.

[desdiv]

>the Google Self Driving Car Cheaters

How is the Google self-driving car team cheating?

Or is he just being a sore loser about how his own self-driving car venture didn't work out?

[vidyesh]

I think he wants to imply that everyone who is trying to build a self driving car is working on it in house, testing and tweaking while collecting data to make it better and possible. But what Google has done is, they tried and couldn't get the ball rolling that well in the commercial market as expected and eventually they created 'Waymo' which will partner with car manufacturers who will create prototypes for them to make ride sharing autonomous cars. Which sounds more like a mashup of Tesla and Uber.

[commaai]

lol, comma.ai still exists and is still winning self driving cars. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot We have some amazing things scheduled for 2017

This repo is literally a joke for George to learn Go, in a similar vain to https://github.com/geohot/lowqualityraytracer being about learning raytracing.

Google is "cheating" because they are crowdsourcing labels with CAPTCHA, but then of course there's https://www.producthunt.com/posts/comma-coloring

[ztratar]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but comma.ai still exists.

[alphabettsy]

Pretty sure he abandoned the car project when he realized how much of a massive liability that was.

[krackers]

Why only street signs though? The new captchas I've seen ask you all sorts of random image recognition things, like identifying the squares with grass, with tea, with eggs, etc.

[chiefalchemist]

Pardon me if this is stating the obvious, but the captcha images being decoded serve a second purpose. In short, Goggle is crowdsourcing the decoding of those images in a mechanical Turk sorta way.

Why street signs and house numbers? Because when your taken as much Street level photos as they have some are gonna need human review.

[blechschmidt]

A possibility to break these might consist in using Google's image reverse search and check whether the word which you are supposed to identify images for appears on the result pages. However, the Google search is protected by reCaptcha - so you could build your own image reverse search or you use one implementing captchas which are easier to break.

Otherwise, if you own a highly frequented website, you could ask your users to solve the captchas for you by proxying the challenges to them.

[doughj3]

For the "which image is..." type captchas, there is always an option to "refresh" the captchas and get a different challenge. After 1 or 2 refreshes, you almost always get a street sign challenege. I was playing around with breaking Google's captchas a few weeks back and tensorflow's basic image recognition demo is actually already good enough that it too can almost always correctly identify which of the 9 or 12 images contain street signs. So I think that's a good start- exploiting the fact that Google favors showing street signs, and that in many cases you can already programatically identify street signs with image recognition. Obviously it's not perfect or Google wouldn't need to farm users to aid in improving image recognition , but it's good enough where you can break the captcha roughly 50% of the time.

[Dolores12]

Current solutions on the market solve new google recaptcha with up to 50% accuracy. Let's see what Geohot can do.

[zitterbewegung]

Has he read this paper? https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/materials/asia-16-Siva...

[meowface]

Clever idea, but Google also has some bot (and maybe also captcha farm) detections to try to ban captcha gamers. I think you'd also need a distributed and human-seeming proxy network.

[wodenokoto]

Wonder if anybody commenting has read the readme. This is just a learning experiment.

Is it really wrong for a famous hacker to dip his toes in a new language by doing something that is not state of the art?

[felippee]

He was the biggest hacker, tried to be an entrepreneur, now he is working hard to became the biggest comedian of Silicon Valley. Seems like the comedian role might actually work out.

[kabes]

He never was the biggest hacker.

[arcticfox]

Here's my solution: rerecaptcha.

1) Own or work with a very popular site with people filling captchas often

2) Instead of showing a full random captcha, use the recaptcha technique against itself: show a small random captcha alongside a full recaptcha that you want to break

3) Use the random known captcha for validation and profit from the user entered recaptcha

[bmpafa]

You have to admire the showmanship: using a language Google created to try and break a Google-made system.

[rubyfan]

Should use Tensor Flow for his classifier

[problems]

... this code literally just scrapes images from recaptcha right now, and it barely does that.

If you want it broken, all you have to do is take these images and feed them through a captcha cracking service that uses humans and get them to input numbers for the corresponding squares. Works fairly well in my experience. And $1/1k you can't argue with.

[neurostimulant]

That price is inhumane. Assuming the worker can solve 1 captcha every 10s in average, when working full time at 25 working day and 8 hours / day, a worker can clear 72000 captcha per month, grossing $72. The take home pay might be like half of it? Even in developing countries, $36 per month is too damn low for that mentally taxing work.

[hartator]

Geohot never stops to amaze me, at least.

[badcc]

Geohot - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg

[mwambua]

I'm never really sure how I feel about Geohot. I know for sure I liked people like him a lot more when I was younger and thought that everything was within close reach.

I hope that he keeps on winning... maybe it will inspire youngsters to try the impossible before reality knocks the wind out of them.

[elmar]

always easier to deal with code than bureaucrats.

[vippy]

George, file paperwork? lel.

[angry-hacker]

What does he mean by dates? Girls? Is it humor? Sorry, I don't really get it but I'm interested to understand. I only know he unlocked iPhone and was sued by Sony...