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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?

#171
post #117
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…

Seems like that is another kind of labeling to me: is our generated image good enough to fool a human?

Not sure they are fooling anyone. It's more like "is our generated image good enough to make a human recognize what it is to get rid of an annoying pop up?". If there were actually consequences to getting it right/wrong people would pay more attention I'm sure.

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

#172
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never know if a few pixels of a pole count as “traffic light”. Might as well tell me to pick the Ship of Theseus.

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

Genius.

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

#173
post #117
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…

Seems like that is another kind of labeling to me: is our generated image good enough to fool a human?

For many generative models, this is on the way to become a standard- using Humans as a judge of generated material, and this is not limited to Computer Vision either. I am about to use this technique to judge the sanity of text generated by a Transformer model for a paper that I am writing (with a small group).

There are also attempts to properly standardize it, and this is called- HYPE [0]. And there are big names like Fei-Fei Li and Michael Bernstein behind it.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.01121

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

#174
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, Google captchas in my experience are much quicker compared to hcaptcha When cloudflare switched to hcaptcha I definitely noticed it.

Sorry, but Google captcha is specifically designed to annoy real people in some cases. They literally implemented slow fade-in / fade-out for images. This does absolutely nothing against actual bots, but annoying as hell for a real person. Literally any other captcha is better than this.

I thought the fade thing was specifically to trip up bots. Like bots know what the picture is long before it is shown to the user, so if the bot clicks on it then the CAPCHA knows something is up.

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

#176
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's about as much attention the average driver pays anyways. I drive a motorcycle, I KNOW that.

That's an interesting idea - maybe it would be smart to have captcha's do a "Point out all the motorcycles" or "Click all the pedestrians" setup.

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

#177
post #71
post #51

Whatever they're doing it's american-centric. Identify "Crosswalks". What the hell is a crosswalk "School bus" - what's the difference between a bus currently serving a school and another one? "Show taxis", there are no black vehicles listed at all

Or failing 3 in a row because 3 motorcycles or scooters are considered a bike. We will easily win AI uprising.

> AI uprising

There won't be one. But there will be more and more unethical rich people using Machine Learning and Deep Learning technologies and vast computing power, money, and political clout to gain things for their own, and many people will suffer or at least be worse off as a result of this.

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

#178
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.

If anyone wants to see that, try launching the browser via Selenium. I used to do that to partially automate some activities, such as download bank statements. I'd have my Selenium using script open a browser and go to the bank, then wait for me to login and get to the account page.

I'd login, dismiss any popup or interstitial promotions the bank decided to give me, get to the account page, and tell my script to continue.

My script would then use Selenium to click the download button, click the "custom date range" radio button on download popup, fill in the range fields to cover the last 60 days, pick OFX for the download format, and start the download, prompting me to let it know when the download is finished.

When the download finished, I could then go to one of my other accounts at that bank, tell the script I'm there, and that one gets downloaded, and so on.

My bank isn't giving CAPTCHAs so that would still work if I were to get around to updating my script to deal with some redesigns they did of their pages which broke finding the relevant elements on the page.

But I've found that if I do visit a site that uses hCaptcha while using the Selenium launched browser, it seems to get stuck. Click to tell it I'm not a bot. Then get an image test. Answer that correctly and get another image test. Answer that correctly. Then it goes back to the click if you are not a bot thing, and repeats--two more image tests and back to the beginning.

Here's a program if anyone wants to try this and has the Selenium Webdriver package for Python3 installed. This will open a browser and take you to fanfiction.net. Trying to actually read any story will bring up the CAPTCHA.

  #!/usr/bin/env python3
  from selenium.webdriver import Chrome

  driver = Chrome()
  driver.get("https://www.fanfiction.net")
  input("press enter when done")
  driver.close()
  driver.quit()
I'm not sure if the looping is a Cloudflare thing or a fanfiction.net thing, because the latter is the only site I use that has Cloudflare's CAPTCHA.

It used to be that if you added

  from selenium.webdriver import ChromeOptions
and changed opening the driver to

    options = ChromeOptions()
    options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
    options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
    options.add_argument("--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled")
    driver = Chrome(options=options)
you could get past the CAPTCHA, but that stopped working a while ago.

There's this project to provide a Selenium Chrome driver that is supposed to not trigger anti-bot detectors [1], but it still hit the CAPTCHA loop when I tried it.

[1] https://github.com/ultrafunkamsterdam/undetected-chromedrive...

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

#179
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…

I have found many times that if select an incorrect tile and then unselect it before submitting, I am not presented with multiple challenges. My guess is a bot would not exhibit this behavior. Try it out next time.

Not anymore.

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

#180
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…

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…

Same experience. Once I observed that most (about 9/10) times there are only 3 tiles to select, I stopped looking for a 4th and selected only the 3 most obvious.
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