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Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#131

Post by chinathrow »

jdavis703 wrote: post #8

First, I’m going to teach you to fish. Go to hCaptcha’s website, then scroll to the footer. Click around on the about links. It’ll reveal their business model. This trick also works for other businesses and NGOs. Now, if we look at https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling we can tell they make money by labeling data sets for a fee. So as a guess, there’s someone out there that needs to improve computer vision detection of t…

https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling

> hCaptcha has one of the largest pools on the planet available for your use. Whatever your scale, we can handle it without expensive upfront commitments. Millions of tasks per day are no problem.

Thanks for pointing this out - I feel abused now.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#132

Post by FredPret »

an_ko wrote: post #114
MegaDeKay wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found it isn't about "perfection". It is about selecting the same tiles as an "average" person would. I might stare hard at an image, think that one of the tiles contains a tiny fragment of a traffic light, and select it. That isn't what most other people have already done, so the captcha thinks I'm a bot and gives me tougher and tougher challenges. Ever since I stopped pixel-peeping and started quickly selectin…

I wonder if this means self-driving vehicles' detection of important traffic features will be at the level of an irritated and disinterested web user who is trying to just do the minimum work to please an algorithm.

Pretty much a regular driver then!

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#133

Post by amirhirsch »

bearbin wrote: post #80

Other commenters have talked about labelling. Maybe labelling of real life data is something they're trying to do; but from my experience with hCaptcha the challenges are _NOT_ real life data. They're AI-generated images which bear a passing resemblance to the targets but if you look closer nothing adds up at all. Here are a couple of examples: https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/1.png https://bearbin.net/images/captc…

The generated images are those that provide the neural network with optimal loss reduction when tagged.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#134

Post by pastullo »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #104
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is a way to pollute the data. Since I always click the captchas correctly, what happens if someone just randomly clicks stuffs? Is he/she banned from the website?

If I were to make this system I would design for this and present the same captcha to a high number of people. The higher the number of people, the lower the chance someone would make a mistake (intentionally or not) and the higher the confidence in the results.

of course bro, i'm sure that no self-driving car is gonna crash as soon as i deliberatly click on the wrong bicycle picture.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#135

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

forgetfulness wrote: post #112
dylan604 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. the blame shifting seems to be a very skewed thing here. then again, this is a tech forum, so of course it would lean that way. stupid users vs bad tech, so let's just blame stupid users.

We used to get Googlers huffing and puffing at the mere suggestion of feeding "wrong" data to their data collection machinery here at HN. Lots of people here put themselves in the shoes of the company making a buck out of your data, if not being in them right now, before the user.

> We used to get Googlers huffing and puffing at the mere suggestion of feeding "wrong" data to their data collection machinery here at HN.

Yeah, it always seems funny to me. I'm using AdNauseam and other techniques for the same reasons they feel I shouldn't be doing it.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#136

Post by discardedrefuse »

Cloudflare has been doing some great things. But lately it seems that, maybe, they have their hands in too many cookie jars. I get the ominous feeling that things could go south real fast.

I have my browser setup in a way that makes Cloudflare quite intrusive. I use the Temporary Containers extension on Firefox to open almost all websites in temporary containers (paired with the Containerise extension to whitelist the handful of sites that I like to stay logged in to).

About 30% of the random (like from web searches) sites I visit throw the Cloudflare captcha at me...EVERY SINGLE TIME. I'm so sick of picking out boats and buses that I just close out the tab without bothering the visit site.

I assume, that if I wasn't using Temporary Containers, a Cloudflare cookie after the 1st captcha would persist for the entire browser session, but there are privacy implications which are beyond the scope of this post.

Anyways, I guess what I'm saying is...Cloudflare sure seems great. Dangerously great.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#137

Post by GameOfFrowns »

jjoonathan wrote: post #120
potamic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many a time I receive multiple challenges on a site despite having selected all images perfectly, and can't help but wonder, "Hey, are they getting me to do more work than necessary because they're running behind on their labelling backlog?". There's definitely a conflict of incentives in this case. If you're a website owner, you're better off choosing a different service which doesn't have adverse incentives, otherw…

There's also a mode where it thinks you are a bot/sucker and gives you unlimited images until you give up. That's always fun.

>where it thinks you are a bot/sucker and gives you unlimited images until you give up.

I frequently get these from Cloudflare when using Tor Browser. Google is basically unusable with Tor Browser.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#138

Post by renewiltord »

bearbin wrote: post #80

Other commenters have talked about labelling. Maybe labelling of real life data is something they're trying to do; but from my experience with hCaptcha the challenges are _NOT_ real life data. They're AI-generated images which bear a passing resemblance to the targets but if you look closer nothing adds up at all. Here are a couple of examples: https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/1.png https://bearbin.net/images/captc…

Really cool observation!

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#139

Post by 3np »

mypastself wrote: post #128
3np wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like this? https://pleroma.remerge.net/notice/AFCYPtCzeNBIIOD808

Of course someone’s already thought of it. All of my jokes are so obvious, they could have been written by an algorithm.

Could have been but in this case your comment prompted it (:
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