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

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

#101

Post by MauranKilom »

nottorp wrote: post #90
awalton wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every time I get a captcha with traffic lights I imagine a Google self driving car stopped at an intersection waiting for me to complete the captcha so it can figure out what it sees and move along :)

Naturally, there's an xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/1897/

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

#102

Post by taneliv »

hobofan wrote: post #25
canofbars wrote: post #15

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.

> on the behalf of some theoretical person who might get confused A theoretical person that also wouldn't get shown another captcha as a follow-up. I constantly fail captchas on some technicalities (or haste), and have never managed to fail so many to be flagged as a bot and be denied to a website.

I have failed sufficiently many to be flagged as a robot, several times. Maybe I am one?

And given how many times I usually have to solve them, if not critical for some reason, I tend to just close the tab for whatever I was going to do or read, if a CAPTCHA shows up. I have very little patience for doing free work for big corporations. If it was a non-profit with public access to the data set, sure.

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

#103

Post by raverbashing »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #17
tchalla wrote: 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.

Zip Codes are used "more or less worldwide" and usually have a direct translation so that's not so much of an issue

But yeah how the f someone though MM/DD/YY was a god date format and they kept using this monstrosity still baffles me

Edit: translating the expression "Zip Code" to the equivalent in other countries is a non-issue (be it postal codes, etc). It's a code used by the post. No mystery there. Of course, they have different formats in different places so don't validate them as US Zip codes

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

#104

Post by joijoiwejrr »

awalton wrote: post #73
nbevans wrote: 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…

I used to have fun filling in those reCAPTCHAs with incorrect answers. They would show you two words, and it was always obvious which word was the actual CAPTCHA test and which was the OCR input, because the former would be warped into a funny shape while the latter was always a rectangular block of normal text. So I'd type in the correct answer for the warped word, and something like "fuckface" or "cocksucker" for the regular text, and it would be accepted.

I like to think that somewhere out there on Google Books, my efforts have resulted in an innocuous word being replaced with something offensive.

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

#105

Post by lagadu »

input_sh wrote: post #92
duckmysick wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fill…

Even worse: sometimes they do ask "state" and have a dropdown list of American states. If you live in another country that does have states, you're SOL.

Why would your dropdown still have those when I selected a different country?

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

#106

Post by mkl »

ChrisRR wrote: post #75
gillesjacobs wrote: post #6

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

Yes, American fire hydrants are very different from NZ ones too. Ours are under a yellow steel panel flush with the ground, so not something self-driving cars need to identify.

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

#107

Post by retsibsi »

rehemiau wrote: post #82

I'm not American and I often see captchas that ask about "cars" or "trucks". And they use similar images. I sometimes don't pass through those. My question is, when I see a truck and I'm being asked to select all cars, should I select the truck or not? For me a truck is a car. Is it not one?

That might depend on what 'truck' means to you! Is it equivalent to the British 'lorry', or does it include pickup trucks? I'm Australian, and for me 'truck' means 'lorry', pickups are a kind of ute, utes are a kind of car, and so trucks and cars are clearly distinct. (QED!) There seems to be endless room for cross-cultural ambiguity here though.

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

#109

Post by aloisdg »

zeepzeep wrote: post #44
sabret00the wrote: post #24

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.

Let Googles AI solve Googles CAPTCHAs for you! "Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans" is one of my top 3 browser extensions.

So we have "Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans", "uBlock Origin" and what is the last one?

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

#110

Post by szszrk »

edent wrote: post #95
Bella-Xiang wrote: post #34

Can't google show different CAPTCHAs according to the different IP address?

It could , but that's quite a hard problem for Google's engineers to solve.

Like they are not familiar with overcomplicating things that should be simple, just for their own weird large scale performance benefit that applies to them only. Maybe a few other huge companies in the world.
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