DEV Community: ambituous

Suspicious of Google’s reCaptcha? Here’s a popular alternative!

ambituous — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:33:04 +0000

hCaptcha helps machine learning companies get their data labeled, pays publishers for their trouble, and users don’t know the difference.

In the fall of 2018, Google released a new version of reCaptcha, the company’s widely used bot detector. reCaptcha v3, as its called, is great at detecting bots but it has a dark side, as researchers suspect that Google is compromising users’ privacy to feed the system.

Luckily, there’s alternative to reCaptcha for website owners who don’t trust Google—and could use a little extra cash.

Called hCaptcha, it’s a bot detector that acts just like the captchas users are already accustomed to, where they’re asked to label what they see in different images. But instead of showing Google’s images–images the company uses to train its machine learning algorithms–hCaptcha shows users images from datasets, which belong to other companies that also need images labeled for machine learning applications. In theory, the service helps everyone: you prove you’re not a bot while helping companies hone their algorithms, and websites make money off the whole exchange.

Because accurate labeling is so valuable to these companies, websites that host hCaptcha are paid based on how many of their users click through hCaptcha and answer questions successfully. Depending on their traffic and the number of bots attacking them, websites can make thousands of dollars per month. It’s a good deal for machine learning companies that need people to label their data, and for websites that want the security of a captcha–and some extra cash. As for users: The experience remains the same as always, though you can tell the difference is you look closely, because there will be an hCaptcha logo in place of the reCaptcha symbol you’re used to. Today, 10 million people interact with hCaptcha every month on thousands of websites, powering dozens to hundreds of machine learning-labeling projects at a time.

hCaptcha (the “h” stands for human) is the brainchild of Eli-Shaoul Khedouri, a longtime entrepreneur and AI expert who founded the machine learning company Intuition Machines in 2017. At Intuition Machines, Khedouri and his team build large-scale machine learning algorithms for Fortune 50 companies. While Khedouri declined to share specifics because of nondisclosure agreements, he said that Intuition creates algorithms that can do things like analyze the content of videos. To accomplish tasks like this, Intuition’s models require millions if not billions of data points, much of which must be labeled by people. Once they have the annotated videos or images, Intuition’s team can start teaching an algorithm how to recognize what’s going on in a video. “We actually ended up being in the captcha business accidentally because we’d become a large consumer of [human annotation] labor,” Khedouri says. “The services available weren’t really what we wanted.”

Finding enough people to label such vast datasets was a serious challenge. First, Khedouri tried building up his own team in Vietnam who could annotate datasets. But some days he’d have enough work for 12 people, and other days he’d have enough work for 50. Since the amount of data in need of labeling changed so much based on whatever projects the team was working on, having a full-time team wasn’t the most cost-effective solution way to go (though was probably better for the workers).

Instead, Khedouri turned to captcha farmers—clickworkers who are paid a fraction of a cent to solve captchas on the internet. His team built a platform for the captcha farmers to label the datasets for Intuition Machines, and designed measures to assess how accurate each farmer’s labeling was. It was the most efficient, least expensive way for Khedouri to label his data, in real time.

hCaptcha has the same roots as this platform Khedouri built just for Intuition Machines to use, but as of January 2019, it has been open to any company that needs datasets labeled. And instead of captcha farmers who are doing the labeling, it’s regular users of the internet like you and me. According to hCaptcha’s website, companies will pay about $1,111 for one million images that need one label each.

Of course, users might balk at the notion of doing free work for companies, a pervasive phenomenon in the tech world. Khedouri set up hCaptcha so that all payments made to websites would be published via the Human Protocol, a decentralized ledger that runs on top of the Ethereum blockchain. That means you’re at least able to see which websites are making money off your labor—though not what the data you’re labeling will be used for. (All the data-labeling projects are under non-disclosure agreements because they’re mostly for large companies, Khedouri says.)

So hCaptcha offers a more transparent–if not exactly perfect–alternative to one of Google’s most pervasive free services. In doing so, it joins the ranks of smaller services in browsers, search, and analytics that privacy-focused people can turn to if they want to escape the tech giant’s ubiquitous reach.

You can easily set it up with their Wordpress plugin here
https://medium.com/hcaptcha-blog/hcaptcha-plugin-for-wordpress-now-available-49765536c69f

This article was taken from FastCompany to kickoff discussion on reCaptcha and hCaptcha, their pros and cons, and more!

Is anyone else using hCaptcha? It seems to work fine and got my first payout

ambituous — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 09:39:13 +0000

hCaptcha is basically reCaptcha which you can apply to your site and earn for visitors solving it. I run a forum and so far managed to cash out after hitting the minimum required. (used wordpress plugin) https://link.medium.com/k1KTaRzLmY

From some of their content i found this: Labor is placed into an anonymous open market for bidding. Companies all over the world bid for that labor to complete simple tasks easy for people but hard for machines. Websites earn revenue from that work instead of donating it to Google. Users support the site they’re visiting, and experience less web spam.

https://hcaptcha.com

So AI/ML companies are the ones who are paying for labeling services so at least there's a market being made here. Also looks like they're using ETH's blockchain to help this work altogether with reputation oracles to check the quality of those solving captcha, so you'd earn based on the quality of visitors (bots vs humans). It should be around 1000 solves for $1?

Also, been seeing some concerning news over reCaptcha basically being a "Google Pixel". Quite concerning but i don't know to what extent they can extract from the mass of info they collect.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-recaptcha-has-a-dark-side

https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2019/07/googles-new-recaptcha-tracks-you.html

I'm curious if other Devs know about this and if there are other alternatives?

Invite - Formal Verification Discussion with Certik & Kadena - Covering Blockchain FV

ambituous — Mon, 06 May 2019 20:00:31 +0000

Kadena is hosting another AMA, an interesting topic that looks into…

FORMAL VERIFICATION: WHAT, WHERE, AND WHY

As the discussion is on ‘’Formal Verification’’, this is the latest series as part of Kedana AMA’s arsenal. From the general public, to the hardcore techies out there. Everyone is open to ask any questions in the areas of Formal Verification and its application and use within the Blockchain space.

In this technical AMA, you’re going to witness two serial tech entrepreneurs scale a very interesting discussion, venturing into how blockchain projects audit their code to meet specific standards.

The term Formal verification in this context expands on the mathematics focused on reducing the instances of bugs and vulnerabilities of smart contracts. A critical requirement if enterprises will ever be comfortable with deployment on top of enterprise blockchain platforms. This AMA is a must-attend session as it is being covered by Certik, one of the, if not, leading security auditing and penetration testing formal verification platforms in blockchain.

Join the AMA at discord.io/kadena May 7th, 2019

Kadena

An Enterprise-focused & high-throughput scalable Blockchain. With only a handful of consensus mechanisms, Kadena is the first to introduce BFT-consensus protocol and Chainweb, a new Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism. Both founding partners, Will Martino and Stuart Popejoy who’ve met while working at JP Morgan, have developed a new private blockchain from the ground up that meet’s enterprise standards

In the past, Kadena held a similar townhall AMA featuring Kyle Samani, co-founder and managing partner at Multicoin Capital — a Crypto-focused Investment Hedge Fund. The topic of discussion was on Proof-of-Work vs Proof-of-Stake, for a quick recap read this

For more information, head over to official EventBrite listing. Those partaking in the AMA can drop their questions in the #ask-kadena channel or tweet with the tag #FormalVerficationAMA.

The AMA is scheduled to go live on May 7th, 2019, don’t forget to tune in to Kadena’s Discord group where questions will be addressed Live by both Will Martino and Ronghui Gu.

Join the discussion @ discord.io/kadena