Creating a Cheeky Ouroboros Out of Google APIs

Do you want to know something that fills me with unspeakable joy for very little effort?

Like many others, I loathe being forced to fill in Google reCAPTCHA challenges. They are tedious, exploit people as free workers in order to improve their AI research, and most importantly, they are a terrible way to distinguish humans from bots. However, there is a sneaky way around this Sisyphean nightmare.

Firefox has an add-on called Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans. Here’s what it does: when you receive a reCAPTCHA challenge, it gives you a 3rd option; when you click the Buster button, it requests the vision-impaired reCAPTCHA challenge (audio only). Then, using Google’s own audio recognition API, it solves the reCAPTCHA challenge for you!

I have been using this add-on for years with a success rate of about 90%. It has saved me so much wasted time — but, more importantly, it has allowed me to bask in the irony of something as simple as a browser add-on defeating Google’s “state of the art” “reverse Turing test”.

If you hate solving reCAPTCHA challenges, you know what you have to do.