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

shkspr.mobi

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

#91
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores an important point that this is a game of elimination and contrasts. For example in that taxi captcha, there are 4 pictures of trees and 5 pictures of vehicles. 1 vehicle is not identifiable, 1 is an utility van in the distance, and the remaining 3 are yellow cars. These yellow cars have phone numbers on the sides and signs on the roof (where visible). My bet is that the 3 yellow cars are taxis. (And as…

While you might guess that Yellow means Taxi in most of the world taxis aren't actually yellow. Around here they are mostly big dark Mercedes (many of them vans), maybe with some ads on them. And no big white sign on top either.

You just ignored the part where they show how you can figure out yellow means taxi in this set without having known it before. People are smarter than monkeys memorizing flash cards. They have the ability to spot patterns not previously recognized.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It often happens with things designed and made in the USA. It is assumed that the terminology or customs of the USA apply to the rest of the world, when it's often not the case. For example, their bizarre date system. Widespread use of state abbreviations and timezone abbreviations that are only known in the USA. "Zip code" on forms for customers in New Zealand or India or France.

Good point overall. I disagree with the abbreviations being exclusively a US thing. Two letter country abbreviations (UK, DE, IE, FR, DK, etc.) are popular in Europe, including on the back of food packaging which lists ingredients in multiple languages.

Yes, but, when taken out of context, you have no idea if you're looking at a state abbreviation or a country abbreviation.

AL can be Alabama or Albania, AZ can be Arizona or Azerbaijan, DE could be Germany or Delaware, etc. Just under half of US state abbreviations are "unique" (as in, not also used for some country in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard).

Personally I'm mostly annoyed by the concept of states when filling out delivery address. When I enter my country (that has no concept of states), I often find myself having to make something up because the state field is a required field.

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

#94
post #73
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fro…

There's no difference between helping google solve book scanning vs other datasets for whatever else they decide.

The fact that captcha exists on a website is the website owner's intension to cause friction for their users. It has nothing to do with google's use of reCapture directly. The only vote you have is to not use said website - sometimes harder said than done but that's the only option you have.

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

#96

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.

This is really really weird from you comparing it to cancer of the internet.

Catpcha was not invented to make the internet worse and solving one is not a real hurdle to you.

I'm not sure why you 'sat down for minutes' to solve any of them, you might just be really bad in comparison to a lot of other peoples.

Nonetheless, this helps YOU it makes YOUR experience better by making it harder for bots.

Have you ever seen a community killed by spam bots? You are probably quite happy that the amount of spam in comments etc. are as low as it is.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It often happens with things designed and made in the USA. It is assumed that the terminology or customs of the USA apply to the rest of the world, when it's often not the case. For example, their bizarre date system. Widespread use of state abbreviations and timezone abbreviations that are only known in the USA. "Zip code" on forms for customers in New Zealand or India or France.

Good point overall. I disagree with the abbreviations being exclusively a US thing. Two letter country abbreviations (UK, DE, IE, FR, DK, etc.) are popular in Europe, including on the back of food packaging which lists ingredients in multiple languages.

[deleted]

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

#98

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.

I absolutely don't aim to defend Googles captcha here, but the other day I was setting up an Outlook account for my son, and I ran into Arkose Labs bot detection, and I actually got heatedly angry, which is extremely rare for me. I wanted to punch anyone related to that abomination.

Upon researching it seems to be used by the Epic launcher and Roblox (among others), which might explain why I've never encountered it before.

Someone else's screengrab, which looks larger than what I was presented on my laptop: https://imgur.com/a/jF1HxbN

So they:

* are very small (or I'm old)

* use faux 3d walls which further complicates the image

* have to be solved 10 in a row correctly

* have an unspecified time limit (which in my untempered rage felt like maybe 3 seconds per image tops, no promises)

* don't tell you you've failed by answer or time until you're through all 10.

I as a full grown human with ~25-30 years on the internet, as well as video games and puzzles for fun, could not get through it in less than 5 (*10) tries. I accept I might be occasionally slow, but this should not be an issue.

TL:DR; Can someone at Arkose Labs please just do an rm -rf /

Edit: Apparently they have other types as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/gkpz0f/how_to...

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

#99
post #13

It always amazes me that we as a society insist on using ambiguous words ("crosswalks" or otherwise) when there is an option to use an unambiguous option.

It often happens with things designed and made in the USA. It is assumed that the terminology or customs of the USA apply to the rest of the world, when it's often not the case. For example, their bizarre date system. Widespread use of state abbreviations and timezone abbreviations that are only known in the USA. "Zip code" on forms for customers in New Zealand or India or France.

Dates are the worst. 11/12/2020, is that November 12th or is that December 11th? I don't know and your shitty system makes no attempt to let me know whether they're using the regional format or the world-wide one.

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

#100

To add some balance, they should include "identify all the roundabouts" so that folk from the USA are equally disadvantaged.

Depends on the part of the USA. We have tons of roundabouts in the part of the USA I live in. Everything from tiny ones on neighborhoods up to huge multi lane ones (though nothing as crazy as some of the ones I’ve seen in Britain).
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