They don't deter, AI can beat humans at solving many of them and sometimes better than humans. The humans are stuck waiting and randomly clicking.

I run a small web site with a decent level of human traffic for what it is. I haven't run the figures recently, but last time I did, about 90% of the page accesses were from bots. Fortunately, most of the bots are dumb and measures like captchas block them from the pages that need protection, as a first layer of security.

So it isn't a question of letting some bots through, it's a question of letting a hoard of bots through that will dominate traffic to the site.

95% of the time, if I get a CAPCHA I bail thinking "I guess they do not want me to see their content". It is the number 1 reason I now use duckduckgo instead of google. Everytime I try to use google I get a CAPCHA.

I was shown one the other day that looked like a bad acid trip full of psychedelic colors, and some animal shapes you had to match to dotted silhouettes at the top. Absolutely insane. I started feeling dizzy and nauseous from looking at it for just ten seconds.

> "AI makes it harder to prove you are not a robot."

or a dog..

I do that every time I go to a website and it has a must-click popup. Eventually some marketing taintstick will get the hint that their engagement goes down they bother people, but we know that marketing people are inhuman scum and will take that as a reason to bother you more.

Sure, until a captcha is suddenly implemented to guard the entrance to your banking website. (My credit union did).

Ebay has really clamped down, too. My ebay account was once tied to me by nothing more than a throwaway email. But now it's tied to your phone, your bank, and your social security number (because they report your sales to the IRS).

It's all pretty irksome, until my credit card number gets stolen yet again and wastes more of my time than typing in a 2FA ever could.

Sometimes you wonder if

I guess some people are just captcha challenged. Glad it's not me; although a few years back there was one set of photos where you were supposed to click on all the mailboxes, but the captcha itself was broken because one picture of a street address painted on a curb was supposed to be considered a mailbox...

Even if they are useless it does slow down the bot traffic that would otherwise overwhelm some sites.

Instead of laws against recaptcha, how about laws against using someone else's site to advertise without their explicit permission?

If we take the argument of "My site is my property" to it's logical conclusion, then these bots are effectively defacing private property to make money. That's already illegal in many physical places. Take their profits (plus a percentage penalty fine) away, and give it to the property owner whom they've plastered their ads on.

Select all the picture that has cars/dogs/whatever until there is no one left. The whatever continues to reappear. When it's done, instead of "solve" there is a "next" button. Repeat, combined with selecting parts of a picture. After 6 or 7 rounds and more than 40 clicks finally the "solve" button appears but apparently I guessed wrong and I have to restart the process. I resist the urge to throw the laptop out the window, curse the captcha's developers and promise to kill them if I meet them in real life.

Old and busted: "Click on all squares that contain a traffic light"

New hotness: "Write a one-paragraph erotic fiction story"

Seems like a simple solution to stop bots would be to deny any layer 7 traffic that contains an IP address where a host name is expected.

A lot of bots are just scanning IP space and attempting brute force logins whenever they encounter a recognized login form.

For example, https: // google.com and https: // 142.251.40.206 are equivalent, bot only a bot would be accessing the IP address directly.

For the websites I used to manage, I blocked all of Asia. Piles of bots and hacking attempts from India, China, Russia. Pakistan, etc. Also a lot from the US, but we also had legitimate traffic from there, so I couldn't block it.

How else is SkyNet meant to gain control over society?

> ... to spot the bicycles? I can't even do that when I'm driving!

Busses, bridges, taxis, motorcycles... Damn it Google, why don't you just teach your self-driving cars the same way everyone else does, by putting them on the road and letting them learn from their own mistakes? So what if a few of them end up reenacting some drunk GTA V gameplay scenes. That's just the price of progress! /s

Usually those are not looking for you to click on specific tiles, but use other data like mouse movements and browser config to fingerprint you. I typically just click a few tiles at random and more often than not, it passes.

Thus, it's important to bear-proof your websites with honeypots and blackholes.