Windows 10: Google - "unusual activity" recpatchas

When you say range of IP addresses, is your supplier changing your IP address?

Yes when you search there were hits on the unsolvable puzzles, they just couldn't be solved.

Time to switch to DuckDuckGo

 

Well I just mean when I do force a new IP hoping to clear the issue, maybe Google doesn't like that whole range of IPs my ISP uses?

I do use DuckDuckGo and others sometimes, but none of them give me the results that Google does sadly.

 

Interesting. My IP address is assigned by ISP and I would imagine the only way I could change would be through a telephone call.

I wonder if your ISP is on some sort of Blacklist. Of course with all the hits I saw on Google this seems to be a wide spread problem, especially among researchers. The chance that they would all be "Bad" ISP is very low.

Do you have another Computer to use to see if it performs the same?

 

Well I have FiOS. I would hope Google isn't blacklisting them. I only have the one PC.

Normally, I'm stuck with the IP address they assign to me, but if you're having issues, you can force the router to reassign a new IP when it reboots the router. It doesn't always work - I'd say it gives me a new IP about 50% of the time I try. Sometimes I have to leave the router turned off for a couple hours before it releases the IP and assigns a new one. I really only do it when I'm having issues from Google, but unfortunately it's been happening enough that I'm really getting annoyed these days.

What's sad is Google doesn't care. They know it affects many people, and they know at least some of their captchas are unsolvable, but they have done nothing to improve the situation.

 

Well I guess I can at least explain the problem, even though I don't have a solution either.
The attempts by websites to protect themselves against robots have entirely failed and backfired, simply because there are now real humans, incredibly poor people in China, earning pennies an hour, solving captchas for a job, where robots send captchas to get them solved.
This way, Google can step up the game as much as they like, they can't tell robots from humans, because for the captcha part, robots are in fact real humans.
But Google doesn't want to give up their profitable reCaptcha business, so they keep stepping up the game, increasing difficulty of captchas to a level, where they become impossible to solve for "normal" users.

In effect websites protected by reCaptcha end up having almost exclusively robots as users.
To my mind it's only a matter of time, until the websites figure this fact out and stop using reCaptcha, simply because it's counter productive in the first place.

The good news (if you want to call it that) is, you actually CAN solve captchas, IFFFFFFFFF you get to websites using them less than 10 times a day.
Currently the ONLY option Google has left to tell robots from humans is the frequency of how often a given IP accesses reCaptcha, therefore, if you don't use them often, Google will throw at you only easy to solve captchas, but if you're a user like me, dealing with several dozen websites, all reCaptcha protected, which you have to refresh about once every 10 minutes, it becomes useless.
For me it was already almost impossible to do the registration here on this site, because that's reCaptcha protected as well and it took me roughly 50 Captchas to solve before it accepted my registration.

Personally I've started contacting websites, saying good bye, with the following message:

"Well guys, I'm giving up, reCaptcha is officially unsolvable for humans, there's no point in clicking half an hour through captcha images just to get 100 times a "wrong captcha" message on a site that pretends you could use it every 10 minutes. Feel free to let me know when you have a better solution, until then I wish you fun with loads of robots, who are by now the only ones able to solve your captchas."

Hopefully websites will figure out some day, how useless a protection is, that protects exclusively against regular users.

 

Thank you for the detailed post. I agree that maybe the best and only thing we can do is not support sites that use the recaptcha service, and tell them why. Some sites I do use regularly rely on recaptchas but for newer sites maybe it's best as soon as I get served the first recpatcha maybe the best thing is to back away and send them an email telling them why I refuse to use their service. I know Google obviously doesn't care but I hate even having my email through gmail at this point because I hate supporting the company that makes this possible. I remember articles years ago saying those miserable puzzles would be getting easier for us and less frequent. Instead, they have gotten more common and much more difficult. As you said, it's doing the opposite of what it's intended to do.

 

Well, today it's getting even worse.
SolveMedia now also has images that are impossible to solve for humans.
Seems to depend on time of the day and European working hours seem to be reserved for exclusively robot traffic.
I've posted a "letter" to Google on my FB page, but apparently nobody cares about that either.
https://www.facebook.com/thomas.grif...76?pnref=story

 

So just now I typed the words "weight kg convert" into Google and it just threw the recaptcha up. I have searched several other terms involving pre-ordering items over the past 5 minutes with no problem until this. I seriously hate Google.

 

you're not alone...has happened to me frequently...and I use all different types of browsers; Edge, Opera, Firefox, Vivaldi, Safari or Chrome, doesn't matter which one...am still trying to find one that works properly [but I fear it is due to Windows 10...never happened to me in Win 8.1; error = running short system memory, so browser crashes - 64 GB DDR4 Ram, yep, certainly short of system ram]
Have had occasions where the 're-captcha from Google' opens up maybe 8 or 10 sequential images, but it ALWAYS fails...and that's just trying to save my search preferences

 

Well, today they are exaggerating (I think).
After I had figured out, you get easier reCaptchas when you are logged in to your Google account and you use Chrome for browser, I've done just that.
Several 100s of Captchas later, where all seemed to be halfway fine, I suddenly cannot access ANY captcha protected site anymore, I'm just locked out, not only from reCaptcha but from SolveMedia as well.
reCaptcha says something about suspicious activity, SolveMedia gives me an error 117B, both of which mean I got blacklisted.

Now I do not use any form of VPN or anything, I only access about 2 dozen captcha protected websites and I refresh them every 15 minutes, I never use a robot or anything, wouldn't even know how to, meaning I solve roughly 100 captchas per hour MANUALLY and the ONLY reason why I got blacklisted is because I solved too many captchas.

It doesn't get any more ridiculous than that, it literally means, websites protected by captchas lock out their most active customers, for the only reason that they are so active.