Glossary
CAPTCHA solving
Passing a challenge to a third-party service that answers it. Useful occasionally, and a poor substitute for not triggering the challenge.
Also called: captcha service.
A CAPTCHA solving service takes a challenge a site has presented, answers it — historically with human workers, increasingly with models — and returns a token the page can submit. They are sold per thousand solves and integrate either as a browser extension or as an API call from whatever is driving the session. Modern challenges are frequently invisible risk scores rather than images, so what such a service returns is a token rather than a transcription.
The thing worth understanding is that a challenge is a symptom. Being challenged repeatedly means something upstream is reading as risky, and the usual causes are an exit address on a hosting range or already on somebody's list, and a device whose reported properties do not agree with each other. Fixing those is the lever that works; buying solves is paying per occurrence of a problem you still have. Argus ships an optional captcha plugin among its four built-in extensions, and solves nothing itself. The two upstream causes are covered by the proxies page, whose background sweep names the sites that refuse a given proxy, and by the fingerprints page.
More from the glossary
Timezone and geolocation spoofing
Making a browser report a clock — and sometimes a position — that matches where the session claims to be rather than where the machine is.
Anti-detect browser
A browser built to run many separate identities on one machine, each with its own storage, device characteristics and network address.
Browser fingerprint
The set of properties a page can read about your browser and machine in a few milliseconds, without permission, which together identify the device.
Canvas fingerprint
An identifier derived by asking the browser to draw a shape or a line of text and hashing the exact pixels that come back.
WebGL fingerprint
An identifier built from the graphics hardware a page can see through WebGL — the reported vendor and renderer strings, plus the pixels a 3D scene produces.
Audio fingerprint
An identifier derived from processing a synthesized tone through the browser's audio stack and hashing the numbers that come out.
Every entry is listed on the glossary index.