Buster promises to solve captchas automatically
Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans is a browser extension for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and related browsers to make captchas less frustrating on the Internet.
Websites may display captchas for verification to site visitors; this is done often to block bots and flagged IP addresses from accessing a site or service.
Internet users may run into captchas for a number of reasons: when they use shared IP addresses or VPNs, or when their requests trigger flags, e.g. when they make too many connections in a certain amount of time.
One of the most common forms of a captcha requires visual identification of objects on a photo or image, e.g. to identify cars, shops, or traffic signals on the photo. Users need to click on squares in a grid to identify the requested objects and solve the captcha.
The solving of captchas can be quite frustrating; not only do captchas interrupt workflows, they are sometimes difficult to solve and may prevent access to certain resources if they can't be solved.
Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans
Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans is a free browser extension to automate the solving of captchas. While the extension won't just skip the captcha, it uses an ingenious method to solve them.
Most captchas support audio challenges next to visual challenges. The extension uses speech recognition to solve captchas automatically so that you don't have to do so.
All you do is click on the extension button at the bottom of the widget to have it solve the audio captcha automatically.
Speech recognition is not infallible but you can retry if the extension did not get it right the first time. Granted, it may sometimes be faster to solve the captcha manually but if you run into one that you can't solve, you may want check if Buster can solve it for you.
Buster is not the first extension of its kind. Cloudhole was released in 2016 for Firefox to make Cloudflare captchas less painful; Cloudflare launched Privacy Pass in 2017 to limit the number of captchas displayed to users, and Google launched reCaptcha v3 in 2018 to switch to a captcha system that required no user interaction.
Everyone saying it is not working for them, you haven’t FULLY INSTALLED IT.
There is another half to the extension that makes it 99% effective, and when it fails just retry it.
The link is here ( https://github.com/dessant/buster-client#readme ) and its posted in the description of the extension as well.
Here is the direct link too: ( https://github.com/dessant/buster-client/releases/latest ) Install this, reboot and try it again.
The problem with captchas isn’t just that AI keeps getting better at solving them than humans, but that they use other AI to help confirm a human has likely solved the captchas. In other words, this is in part an arms race between AI.
For companies like Google and Cloudflare, captchas will likely be a losing game for them eventually. They still have no great ideas on how to fix this issue before it no longer works at all.
Understand that with captchas, it allows users to access services without logging on, which likewise allows us to remain somewhat anonymous. Yet without captchas, users would likely be required to register and always log on to all services, such as is required with banking transactions.
Also note, captchas help protect sites against fraud and attacks. Without captures, sites can be locked via DoS attacks and such. It doesn’t matter if a site requires users to log on, as DoS attacks simply jam the sign-in page, thus breaking the site.
That all said, we will soon need a new way to access sites on the web. Any ideas?
you make it sound like the captcha only shows up for vpn users or other unusual users. thats not the case those annoying captchas show up for everyone and many login pages have them now so its quite hard to avoid. the purpose of the captcha is to get work done for google for free but you stupid it people just keep praising it like its a good thing.
You may also check https://captchas.io
Martin, Thanks so much for introducing this. I’m myself blind, and also suffering from hearing impairment. This extension helped me a lot. It worked every where I tried it. Good job creating good contents.
I AM OVER 80 YEARS OF AGE. I HAVE SERVERE HEARING LOSS IN BOTH EARS AND MY HEARING AIDS DO NOT OFFER MUCH HELP. ADDITIONALLY. I SUFFER FROM AMD-WET (AGE-RELATED MACULAR DEGENERATION) SO I HAVE A HARD TIME LOOKING AT WORDS/PICTURES AND FIGUREING THEM OUT. Captchas ARE A REAL CURSE FOR ME!!!
Captchas s^ck. I mean the captchas with pictures. It’s more difficult to solve and time consuming. I don’t agree with people complaing about their existance, without them sites would suffer from endless ddos attacks. They need to find a way to make them fully automated and without the need to solve maths, type text, or to click images. I saw the link of “reCaptcha v3 in 2018 to switch to a captcha system that required no user interaction” in the article. Good, hurry to make it the default and kill all previous versions.
I was trying to register with a website recently and I must have had to have 8 goes before I finally got one right. I did shopfronts, traffic lights, bicycles, Street crossings, mountains in the distance,
@Martinhwatson: hear, hear, same here !!
Some years ago I read that transcribing historic handwritten documents was going to be used to separate humans from bots. I’m interested in family history and it seems an excellent idea, but I’ve never heard any more about it.
I never return to a site using Google captcha. There are other ways to defeat bots and robots.
“I never return to a site using Google captcha”
You may have that luxury in life, but not everyone can operate that way – many seem to be online service providers of some sort.
In my experience, the captcha shows up most frequently when using a VPN.
While (highly, at times) annoying, I understand their use – too many bad actors who run bots to scrape loads of info off of websites.
We can bad mouth tools like these and Google, but like having to lock up your house or car, it is a reflection of the society we live in.
Is there a better way? I’d be very happy if someone had that figured out.
Which ways?
@Anonymous, like i.e. this one : https://mobile.free.fr/moncompte/
No need for Google.
@Anonymous, my answer to Klaas Vaak answers your question as well I guess.
Yes, it did answer my question Tom, thank you. But this is still captchas with typing texts etc. It’s still annoying. It’s still the same annoying captchas. We need something that “proves that you are human” without user having to solve anything. Is there anyone working on something like this? Because the article mentions only Google working on something like that.
@Anonymous, you wrote,
“We need something that “proves that you are human†without user having to solve anything.”
Now that is a mighty quest with intellectual and technological challenges, maybe an area for AI? But isn’t this what Google reCaptcha aims to do? I never understood how this worked but I admit having imagined that the reCaptcha would send the user’s IP to Google servers and that these servers, fed by all the data Google embraces, would return a probability… no idea really.
We all have our priorities. Personally my first condition is to avoid as much as possible cross-site data transfer : if a reCaptcha or any other method would allow me to be immediately recognized as a human at the price of sending information to a 3rd-party server for analysis then I’d prefer to take a few seconds to resolve a basic test. What bothers me the most is a 3rd-party server between me and the site.
But your question is fantastically inspiring : be recognized as a human rather than a robot is in itself a science fiction topic, maybe a 22nd century problematic in a world where humans and robots would appear similar : “I’m not a number, I’m a human being!” (TV series “The Prisoner” I think it was) shifted to “I’m not a robot, I’m a human being!”. We wouldn’t have to prove it, a dedicated algorithm/process/device (handled by a human or a robot?) would diagnose it without “users having to solve anything” :=)
Imagination!
@Tom Hawack: please share your secret with me because I have looked for but not been able to find a way around those damn captchas. And what strikes me is that the sites seem to keep you going through more loops than before before they decide you are not a robot :-((((
@Klaas Vaak, what I mean is that I don’t waste my time with sites imposing a Google captcha, or even reCaptcha, for two reaons:
1- I don’t want Google to be once again between me and the site. Moreover I have filters that block all of Google (I presume) which is not necessary for a site’s correct rendering. And Google captcha is not, IMO, required, hence is blocked, hence would require being disabled on a per-site approach : no way.
2- Because captchas bother me when they require more than a few seconds to be resolved.
I understand why captchas exist. But there are alternatives to Google’s once-again interference with its captchas.
I don’t know the terminology but I have in mind a bank (private, right?) I know, an ISP I know which with others offers sites offer a numbered grid, like a numpad but with the digits displayed randomly, used for entering a “pre-code” before entering one’s login. Works nicely, takes a few seconds. Why isn’t this method used everywhere rather than systematically calling Mommy-Google? Go wonder.
I remeber another place (forgot the address, not bookmarked) where the user had to solve a quick logic query. No problem!
Why these damn captchas? Anyway, as I said, I don’t return to sites using them.
Good luck bot, even humans have problems with captchas. I couldn’t pass as a human multiple times.
Tested about 30 times last evening and this morning (Chromium-Browser), didn’t work even once. 🤔
Captchas: Making the web suckier one website at a time.
Not work for me.
Isn’t this just another way to monitor web users and the paths they trod?
IMO, the Picture Captchas are far worse than the old text ones.
@lehnerus2000: they’re supposed o because the text-based ones can easily be bypassed with a script. The picture-based cannot, in any case I have not come across any or any extension for it.
Captchas are Google’s way of verifying their AI self driving cars are working – you’re working for Google for free.
Didn’t work for me.
Recaptcha is using you to improve its machine learning A.I. abilities and you’re not getting paid for it. Have you noticed how it’s all about identifying objects that a car would see?
I have not come across audio captchas yet.
You can switch some captures to audio instead.
>Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
As soon as I clicked on that button added by this extension. Thanks Google and CloudFlare for making the WWWeb a worse place for users who value their privacy!
Yes, I get the same thing. Google could be sued for discrimination against the blind and handicapped. Furthermore since we are obviously not bots Recaptcha is fundamentally broken if it continues to block access even after we are able to solve it. How does solving the captcha have anything to do with whether you are human or not? The test is supposed to be to see if you are a bot, not how well you can solve ridiculous multipage captchas!
I’m not sure if reCAPTCHA v2 even cares much about if you correctly select the images. It seems to think I’m a bot even if I do them all right. I guess I’ll have to quit the internet after v3.
Didn’t work for me when I tried it, Google found out it was automated.
Ok I could make it work, but one has to first click the headphone icon to switch to audio captcha before clicking the yellow guy icon to auto-solve it ; clicking the yellow guy icon while captcha is in the default picture puzzle mode won’t work.
Sorry ignore that, it’s not necessary to click the headphone icon, it will just work or not randomly…
I’m glad buster found a job after mythbusters