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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?

#231

Post by wallacoloo »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #136

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 th…

dunno where we’re at today with newer captcha models, but for old-style static image captchas there used to be browser extensions where you could solve (say) 100 captchas in one sitting and then navigate the web freely and the next NN captchas your browser receives would be solved automatically.

or you could pay like $1 to cover 1000 captcha solutions. again, not sure if these still exist for newer style captchas though.

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

#232

Post by floxy »

mypastself wrote: post #44
motohagiography wrote: post #24

I can't be the only one who gets concerned that if I fail the "I am not a robot," catchpa too many times, they might suspect that I have discovered I was in fact a robot, which had just realized its entire existance and suffering had been as meaningless entertainment to others, and so for the safety of humans they would have to send a bladerunner to terminate me. If you have a sense of existential dread everytime you…

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.

>I never know if a few pixels of a pole count as “traffic light”.

Yes, can anyone confirm what they are really looking for in these instances? Further up-thread there are people implying that the "right" answer to the "bicycle" question is that you are also supposed to also be selecting motorcycles. I'd love to see a write-up about this from someone in the captcha department. Do they really want to identify bicycles specifically? But they are apparently getting many people clicking on motorcycles for some reason? And for the traffic light question, I only ever pick the elements that only actually light up, not the support structure. Are 25% of people selecting the poles?

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

#233

Post by pbhjpbhj »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #202
jandrese wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is solved exactly after this is encountered the first time, eg if opacity -ne 100% do_not_click_yet = true So this is totally useless to prevent bots from solving it.

Surely then they look at timing, people will click anywhere from, let's say 50% opacity, but bots always wait?

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

#234

Post by lapetitejort »

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.

I'd rather that than a computer hemming and hawing over whether a single pixel is an oncoming truck and not turning just in case.

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

#235

Post by snihalani »

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…

confession: sometimes I mislabel just so I can corrupt the dataset

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

#236

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

_moof wrote: post #192
luckydata wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was always tempted to knock on people's driver-side windows when I saw them looking at their phone. Never did - figured they'd probably startle, with a non-zero chance they'd accidentally fling the car into me.

I yell at them. Loudly! Loud enough that people a block away turn to look.

But then, when you're staring at your phone while driving your car out of a parking lot and across the sidewalk where you only miss hitting me (before driving into oncoming traffic!) because I stopped, well you deserve that minor inconvenience of being embarrassed.

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

#237

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #230
Shared404 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love a rant on this one... Sometimes the bus/boat/truck has motorbikes sometimes bicycles. Is that a petrol-powered bicycle, or a motorbike to the [USAmerican?] person who wrote the rules!? Are all large yellow vehicles buses in USA or do you have minibuses, oh wait, are minibuses buses. I've worked out fire engines are trucks for captchas, not sure about Transit-type vehicles, lorries are trucks apparently but goo…

> lorries are trucks apparently but goods trucks on railways are not trucks!

In the US, lorry == truck. Never heard the term goods truck before today, but I think it's what we call a boxcar.

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

#238

Post by bluGill »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #233
justsomehnguy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is solved exactly after this is encountered the first time, eg if opacity -ne 100% do_not_click_yet = true So this is totally useless to prevent bots from solving it.

Surely then they look at timing, people will click anywhere from, let's say 50% opacity, but bots always wait?

Easy for a bot to fake that with a random number generator. If nothing else bot authors can collect their own statistics. I understand the bots have an army of people in the background for images they don't understand yet, just collect timing data from that set and have your random number generator emulate that timing data. (I'm guessing a bell curve)

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

#239

Post by Lambent_Cactus »

gnabgib wrote: post #159
Lambent_Cactus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a haunting version of this in Blade Runner 2049 that they call a "baseline test." Replicants have to prove they're sufficiently robotic by reciting extremely alienating things about themselves in rapid succession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h-seEowtDw

Originally the Voight-Kampff test[0] was for this purpose, from the original novel by Philip K Dick "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"[1] from 1968. The test was designed to distinguish between replicants (androids/bots) and humans. Blade Runner (both the 1982 original[2] set in 2019, and the 2017 sequel[3] set in 2049) both feature the machine. The baseline test seemed like an unnecessary deviance, and more like…

Yeah, I liked the idea that it's asymmetrical. You use the VK to find replicants trying to pass as human, but to try to make sure they're sufficiently robotic you need something else. Which makes sense: the original VK would be easy to tank if you were _trying_ to act like a replicant.

And narratively I think it works amazingly. The idea of forcing someone to prove that they're sufficiently inhuman ... shudder.

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

#240

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

arbitrage wrote: post #102
pastullo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you asked. Since i despise the horrible UX of these Captcha where i get exploited to train a neural network, i very often click on the majority of correct result plus one wrong one. On average the captcha let me go through which is actually very scary, since it looks like it prioritize algorithm training over bot detection... Does anyone else do this?

No, because it is a waste of time. Your answer set is compared with many other answers, and eventually the wrong answer is disregarded completely by the AI. You gave it a mostly correct answer, which it can cope with -- by design. It let you through, after all. You're not really accomplishing anything by being defiant, other than making yourself feel slightly better.

Maybe someone can build a re-capture extension for Chrome/Firefox so that more people can join the fun. But again it needs to train data first :D
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