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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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The last two are just about training AI and not security
Well, sort of. They're not for secutiry, that's for sure. They were originally about making it harder for automated bot requests to go through and overload the server. ReCAPTCHA then started turning it around to make OCR better using machine learning, which is commonly agreed to be a Good Thing since it helped digitize old books and things like that. But of course, this in turn made it possible for bots to get past the CAPTCHA, and everything spiraled from there.
At some point everyone kind of forgot the real point of a CAPTCHA, and it's now much more of a free training data generator and much less of an obstacle for bots. But it still can prevent complete rookies from making thousands of requests per second with a simple python script, so it does serve a little bit of that original purpose.
So, did they open access their trained model weights?
So now you can know that if you are getting DOS'ed, it is actually malicious.
In that instance it wasn't really training, it was crowdsourcing the transcription. Rechapta would pull out a word from their book archive that the OCR failed to recognise, and if many people identified it as the same word, it would be archived. Now that rechapta has been purchased by Google, the archive and the transcriptions are available on Google books.
They stopped doing this once ai became more effective than rechapta for book transcriptions.
Modern chapta actually is about training models. But old, classic rechapta was really just about book transcriptions, and those are available.
Nice.
Looks like they did make good use of the opportunity.
Rookie mistake, if your server has no rate-limiting.
Is what i wanted to say, but then remembered, that a colleague once overloaded the company network by experimenting with a self-programmed youtube-downloader.
The last one is popping up as age verification. And it's done with a camera now because otherwise anyone just sends in an AI generated picture of a face, and people don't trust companies with government id.