That sounds like something a robot would say.
As I said above, it’s the Family Feud method.
None of y’all are using Brave with its default settings, or with privacy addons that block fingerprinting, right?
Because the way CAPTCHAs actually work is that they track your actions. They don’t figure it out from that one interaction. They monitor if your network activity is bot-like. And, to do that, they need to be able to uniquely identify you. It’s only if they can’t do that that they fall back on these more crude methods of establishing you aren’t a bot.
The first thing I had to do in Brave was turn off its fingerprinting protection to get it to let me into its own help website. But I also noticed it meant those single-click captcha started working again, without showing me the images.
The idea that it cares about how you click on things is dubious. The single checkboxes clearly don’t, as there is no code that does that or sends that data elsewhere. And software that mimics realistic human mouse movements predates the current AI boom. Surely modern AI can do a lot better.
There is no reason they would not try to beat anything that was part of the captcha test.
Sharif don’t like it…
… Rock the Captcha,
Rock the Captcha!
True. But the whole point of the various CAPTCHA like things is to increase the cost of doing so.
Any given bot factory can attack, say, 100K websites per hour if none have captchas, but only 5K websites per hour if all have captchas. Much like the current thread about the (dubious) value of luggage locks, the whole point is to make your luggage / website a slightly less attractive target than somebody else’s luggage / website.
Good thing for you two that I had just completely swallowed my mouthful of yogurt and granola, or it would all be adorning my screen right now.
I tried this method, back when my Cox Internet was turning off randomly. But I still didn’t get a human that way, so I just went ahead and canceled.
And then, after AT&T came in and set me up, Cox called me back to try to persuade me to stay. Nope, sorry, you had your chance, too late now.
The website recognizes that there will be some squares that are ambiguous, and it generally won’t ding you either way for an ambiguous square.
AAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!
Just tried to pay a bill for Sacramento Utilities. Could not get past ecaptcha.
Had to call customer service and DO NOT get me started on automated phone menus.
Talked to several people. No one can answer the simple question of ‘What kind of robot tries to pay bills???’
I tell them how the creator of ecaptcha is a minion of Satan…but this is for security.
I say the only person it is obstructing is ME.
I forget who posted this, but IMHO it’s by far the best description of those.
I had to enter all the digits of pi.
I found a website that has something worse than this! I tried to log in to an existing retirement account. I had to answer a bunch of security questions, but they weren’t questions that I had been given a chance to provide the answers to. They were questions gleaned from somewhere on the internet, and they included things like what month I bought a car that I owned around 15 years ago. Another one listed several people and asked if I had a connection to them. One was the person who lived in my apartment before me, so I don’t know, is that a connection? I never met her. Also what is my favorite color. If you know me, you know that I don’t have a favorite color. I love them all. So apparently I had a wrong answer to one of these ridiculous questions, and I had to send them a notarized form to prove my identity. 
Unsurprisingly, this is run by the state, which always goes with the lowest bidder. I feel like this is our future, and it’s not going to be good.
By order of the Prophet
We ban that boogie sound
Degenerate the faithful
With that crazy Casbah sound
But the Bedouin they brought out
The electric camel drum
The local guitar picker
Got his guitar picking thumb
As soon as the Sharif had cleared the square
They began to wail…
That form of identity verification is increasingly common. Usually to set up an account, not to access an existing one. But for one dormant long enough maybe they’d do that too. Even more likely if the provider radically overhauled their website since your last login.
But regardless of those legit points …
Hoo-boy were those last questions really crappy. A reasonable person could answer either way about a former resident at the same address. I’d lean to “no”, but the problem of course is that ultimately you’re not trying to be truthful. Instead you’re trying to guess what their decision criteria think is the right answer, and provide that.
I have BCBS as a Federal retiree. For years whenever I go to their website to check various things on my account I have to verify my device, which is my desktop computer. This consists of giving them a preferred contact method for them ton send me an authentication code which I need to enter in order to confirm that it is, in fact, me trying to access my account. There’s always an option for me to tell the website to “remember this device”, which results in a box popping up to inform me that “this device is certified for the next four months”.
However, as implied above, it isn’t. If I try to log in the next day, or the next week, or even later the same day, I have to jump through the same hoops. I put up with this for a long time, thinking that maybe it had something to do with the way Firefox was saving my cookies. This Monday I finally snapped, and called the BCBS website info number to see if I could find out what was causing this, and maybe even to get it to stop. After fighting my way through the interminable phone tree I was finally able to speak to a live person. He walked me through several possible solutions, including having me try logging in on Chrome, but nothing worked. He agreed that this should not be happening, and finally said that he would “write up a ticket” (I had visions of BCBS being hauled into traffic court, even though I am familiar with the term from past experiences with IT). He called me back yesterday afternoon and had me try the log-in procedure again, but the problem was still there. He then said he would have someone else review the ticket, and said he would get back to me on Monday.
It would be nice to be able to get this resolved, but I have to say that I am impressed that he’s actually interested in solving my problem instead of just passing me off with a “I dunno, I guess you’ll just have to live with it”.
I’ve seen questions that were like this before, but not to this extreme. Things like old addresses, and other info that’s not hard to remember. I couldn’t tell you exactly when I lived at a certain address or owned a certain car.
There’s some screwed-up information about me on the internet. If you look me up on a find-a-person website, it has people listed who aren’t connected to me. I used to live in the same building as someone whose daughter’s name was similar to mine, so sometimes people who are related to them show up as my relatives. Also there’s someone with the same last name who I only know about because I was getting his “Fast Company” magazine, so maybe he lived in the same apartment, but not recently. The internet is not a good source for information about a person.
Yeah. The “better” versions of those services use quality first-sources for the data and questions.
The others seem to scrape 3rd party info sites and for anyone such as yourself with an apparently messy history, you’ll have a messy set of questions.
I’ve lived in long-term self-owned houses since before the internet. And I have a very uncommon last name. So my history has been simple that way. I’ve recently moved to a rented apartment and although I expect to be here for years, I notice that I get snail-mail addressed to 4 or 5 distinct former tenants. And at least weekly for two of them. Much of which is legit first class mail, not third class mass-advertising junk.
The “fog of war” is descending on me too.
When i moved to this house, i got free drug samples addressed to the prior owners (doctors) for a while. They weren’t sent first class, and couldn’t be forwarded.
I tried to deal with Chase bank, who kept asking me security questions based on my credit report. Since I’ve lived abroad for over a decade, the report is flat-out wrong about most things, so “what is your current address” meant I had to guess which relative’s house I was having credit card bills sent to over a decade ago.
I ended up giving up: I’ll have to just go in with a passport next time I’m in America.
A couple of years ago I got the Big Three American credit-company reports at the same time. One of them stated flat-out that I lived in my post-office box. (I didn’t.)
eBay now sends you into a never-ending spiral of encaptcha to place a bid.
Dammit! I really wanted that Dachshund Armadillo Costume!