Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 700 posts

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

#151

Post by matsemann »

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.

I just got one "mark everything that shows bikes" with pictures of cyclists, motorbikes and cars. The translation used the norwegian word "sykler" which to me is the human powered one. But it looked like it wanted me to also select motorized ones as well. That's something that's lost in the translation.

Testing some more here https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo I also got "mark all fire hydrants". I've never seen one in real life, only those red in American cartoons. I got "parking meters", but none of them looked like they do in my country (and I've never heard anyone call them that word they used for translation). I got mark "mountains", but to quote Dundee: You call that a mountain?

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

#152

Post by Uhrheber »

I recently suspended my Ebay account. One of the reasons was the fact that, although I used 2-factor login, Ebay forced me to solve captchas every second login.

What am I? A trained monkey jumping through hoops?

Ebay even sells FIDO2 sticks, but is to dumb to actually implement FIDO login?

Ridiculous.

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

#153

Post by tremon »

canofbars wrote: post #80
watwut wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Yes, and then on to the next. They don't just profile your answers, they profile your browser too. The more obscure the browser, the more likely my answers are "invalid", regardless of what I select.

I always close the tab, it's way better for my health.

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

#154

Post by _zamorano_ »

krtkush wrote: post #10
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.

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.

Same in Spain. Here we say "Pasos de cebra" and I can hardly figure out any other name.

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

#155

Post by jkepler »

canofbars wrote: post #86
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…

>we were now doing a job for Google And in return you get an internet that is not filled with spam and bots. Or at least less filled with bots.

Bots that we've trained. And there's also an xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/2228/.

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

#156

Post by Macha »

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

"Oh, those things that send up jets of water when you hit them in a video game"

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

#157

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

canofbars wrote: post #29
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would have no problems identifying a minibus either. They typically have writing / phone number on the side and something on the roof. The google captcha is usually fairly permissive with mistakes and will show you a different question if you fail the first. I'd like to see someone actually show an example of a captcha they were incapable of solving.

Crosswalk. It genuinely took me a while to figure out they meant "pedestrian crossing".
Post reply on HN