Cloudflare trying to stop AI crawling somehow!
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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I've seen captchas for years before the recent influx of AI. It's the way I go about obfuscating network activities that the site security cannot determine if I am a bot on not. There is a Captcha Buster extension for Firefox. If the captcha is 'Pick the three busses from these blurry, pixelated set of pictures' then I can solve those easily. It's when the captcha is a full page of a motorcycle and you have to check all the relevant pieces, then on to the next full picture, that chap me. So you click Captcha Buddy and it 'listens' to the audio portion of the captcha, then solves it. It's not 100% on all types of captchas, but it 90% of the time it works every time. It's interesting to me that after a while, you start to notice patterns in the captcha images. For instance if the directions are 'Pick the fire hydrants', there will be at least 5 you have to pick. Crosswalks are the same way too.
I'd much rather have to do captchas than have my jimmy out in the ether traffic. Anecdotal, but Stack Overflow doesn't trigger a captcha for me. All I get is the cookie popup.
@irmadlad @lambalicious I just manually do the audio captcha. Every time. Because the picture captchas often don't work correctly for me.
It does bug me a little that I don't know what the audio captcha is being used for - am I helping an amazon echo transcribe whatever it is surreptitiously listening to?
I've always wondered where the hell they scrape all that audio from. I mean, it's random shit.
Gotta be physicists or fanfic writers. I can not imagine other better options.
idk..Some of the stuff I've heard sounds like they eavesdropped in on a board room roundtable. Other stuff sounds like instructions how to install something. They probably are siphoning data off YT.
so... physicists and fanfic writers, yeah :p