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CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

shkspr.mobi

71–80 of 700 posts

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#71

Anyone with a half functioning brain can figure out which ones are the taxis. Taxis are not yellow in my country and I would have no issue picking those out. They have the very distinctive sign on the roof that no normal car has. Not even OP was confused by this, they are just complaining on the behalf of some theoretical person who might get confused.

This is a kind of "Western centric" view. In other parts of the world, a van/"minibus" is often used as a taxi.

Or even just a normal car in the UK (and I assume many other countries)

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#72
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in India, they are commonly refereed to as "Zebra Crossing". No one refers to them as cross-walks and most have no idea about that term.

There are no Zebras in Indian subcontinent; we accepted Anglo term. Cross-Walk(even Pedestrian) is a better term than Zebra-Crossing; for kids though, Zebra helps. Edit: English were in world over making colonies across Afro-Asian countries. https://www.thehindu.com/in-school/sh-science/The-zebra-in-o... Has anyone seen a Zebra cross a zebra-crossing? Only happens in England.

I am not sure what to make of this argument. We adopted English, the language from the British. The standard colonial oppression arguments already start from why use a foreign Language.

They used zebra crossing (even though there are no Zebras in the UK either, I think), so we used it. Now the new argument is that the cultural imperialism of the US is forcing us to change the term again. Sure, the term "cross-walk" sort of makes more sense than zebra crossing, but not enough that you don't need it defined for you the first time you encounter it. So, it is not such a precise and great term, as you almost say, that one can ignore the cultural imperialism argument.

Both arguments (colonialism and cultural imperialism) are distinct and can be treated separately.

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#73
post #49

Google's CAPTCHA is a cancer of the internet. We're all training their AI without any renumeration. I genuinely hope that some government figures out how to sue them. I've sat down for minutes, repeating CAPTCHAs over and over again, just to log in to an account or download something.

But Google CAPTCHA has been asking the same questions now pretty much since its inception. Are we really still training it? Or is it just running on auto-pilot at this point? I'm guessing it's likely the latter.

I'm old enough to remember when reCAPTCHA was first introduced to help with deciphering text from OCR'd books. At that time, it didn't feel so bad answering those, as we were using our intelligence to genuinely help preserve our cultural history.

It then switched to being numbers on buildings and street signs, and it immediately felt worse - we were now doing a job for Google, and an annoying one. Mechanical Turk from Amazon was invented to do this kind of chore.

It's now creating training datasets for whatever else Google wants them to - it appears to mostly be for self-driving cars now, to identify landmarks and road signs.

It's definitely not on autopilot, and it's definitely a real problem.

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#74
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell is a chimney

A ventilation structure primarily for dispersing smoke from a fire or furnace. I think you call it a "smoke stack" in the USA.

Thank you! I know my English quite well, but I always thought "smokestack" was some process chemistry thing, and not the US word for "chimney".

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#75

The crosswalks Captcha provides the most difficult cultural discrepancy for me. Some US crosswalks look like European "forbidden for all traffic" road markings. Pretty much the opposite of a crosswalk. I always have to do a double take on those.

There's a captcha for fire hydrants which we don't have in the UK either

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#76

As a blind person with english as not native language, the audio captchas are pure hell. I can't imagine other visually impaired people who don't know english at all and have to deal with a lazy website which dumps them the default english audio captcha if there is audio at all.

Try Buster. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captch... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha-sol...

Thanks, will check it out.

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#77
post #10

The crosswalks Captcha provides the most difficult cultural discrepancy for me. Some US crosswalks look like European "forbidden for all traffic" road markings. Pretty much the opposite of a crosswalk. I always have to do a double take on those.

And in India, they are commonly refereed to as "Zebra Crossing". No one refers to them as cross-walks and most have no idea about that term.

Pedestrian crossing in Australia

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#78
I can’t be the only one offended by the unpaid labor involved in CAPTCHAs (training self-driving AIs or whatever).

Sometimes an annoying CAPTCHA has literally prevented me from giving money to a site when I was going to buy something but instead ended up just closing it in frustration.

I wish Apple would offer a way for sites and services to verify that a client is indeed human via Touch ID/Face ID.

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#79

Google's CAPTCHA is a cancer of the internet. We're all training their AI without any renumeration. I genuinely hope that some government figures out how to sue them. I've sat down for minutes, repeating CAPTCHAs over and over again, just to log in to an account or download something.

Anything you do on google is training their AI for free. Do you think they're offering you free email out of the kindness of their hearts?

Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

#80
post #45

Anyone with a half functioning brain can figure out which ones are the taxis. Taxis are not yellow in my country and I would have no issue picking those out. They have the very distinctive sign on the roof that no normal car has. Not even OP was confused by this, they are just complaining on the behalf of some theoretical person who might get confused.

> They have the very distinctive sign on the roof that no normal car has. The bottom left does not have roof visible. Nor does top left for that matter, which could theoretically be taxi van. I fail these captchas often enough for them to be annoying, but I assumed they are simply buggy.

There are multiple other ones with the roof sign visible which have exactly the same look from the windows down. So its pretty easy to conclude that this one is a taxi too since it looks like the other taxis.

And if you get it wrong you simply move on to the next question.

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