> Taxis in my country are generally black
Like you never seen a yellow taxi? Stop inventing problems.
CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
281–290 of 700 posts
Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let Googles AI solve Googles CAPTCHAs for you! "Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans" is one of my top 3 browser extensions.
Buster is a godsend and has probably saved me from having to abandon half the internet sites I visit. Now if only someone could come up with similarly useful extensions that got rid of the other two forms of cancer that are ruining the internet: 1: Cookie consent dialogues* and 2: Those modal overlays that suddenly cover up what you're reading and ask you to subscribe to some poxy newsletter or mailing list. *not "I…
Unfortunately the developers of those particular things (often like ad developers) use obscurity of things like div names to make the task less trivial.
Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
#283Here's a different but similar whine. Probably worth its own blog post except I don't blog. Dear Apple, can you test your products outside California? I just left my laptop for 10 minutes on the balcony because I had to get a delivery. Because I'm not in California, the temperature on said balcony is 3 Celsius. Yes, I'm not american and I don't understand Fahrenheit. Guess what, when I came back the laptop was shutdo…
Yeah, this is a pain with Apple - instead of trying to understand the business and consumer culture of the particular country, Apple tries to impose US business model everywhere. Some of the things I have observed in India: - Apple tried to entice and sell iPhones through the carrier, where as Indians largely have a cultural apathy to buying expensive phones on loan / credit and locked to a network. - Apple still doe…
> So even if we have the speed and bandwidth, Apple insists you can only update on Wifi.
I hit that with Android once too. Had unlimited mobile data, and was in a pub with broken wifi, so it wouldn't let me do the update at all.
Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
#284Don't get me started on how infuriating Google's ReCaptchas are on Tor Browser. Buster captcha solver fails immediately. And when you do actually manually solve the captcha correctly, sometimes Google still thinks you're a robot. And sometimes it asks me to select all "bicycles" in the images and there are NO GODDAMN BICYCLES in any of the images whatsover. So I hit Skip and eventually google thinks I'm a robot. Ever…
> upgrade to ReCaptcha v3 maybe? Funny you should say that. reCAPTCHA v3 is meant to be invisible, watching the behavior of a user in the background, and then returning a score between 0.0 and 1.0 for the website to do with as they please.
so if you don't pass, say, by using TOR or even just a VPN, you don't even get a chance to prove you're not a bot? Cool, really cool, I can't see that being illegal at all.
EDIT: This comment is stupidly worded, please see clarification below.
Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
#285The irony of Captcha is in the very statement we're being asked to confirm: "I Am Not a Robot".
The image sets are supposedly to be used for training an AI, which is ... a robot, sophisticated, yes, but just as programmed.
It's often said that "It's human to err". Well, instead, the Captcha seems to be eager to sample some fine "specimens" of Robot-candidates, indeed giving us poor fallibles the early lessons of artificial programming.
"You'll be assimilated. Resistance is Futile!" Borgs, eh?
Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...
Driven primarily by frustration with foreign companies expecting post codes - the postal service was late to computerising which paid off in having better OCR/address lookup when they finally did so actually said they were pretty indifferent to the implementation of postcodes.
I have to say my experience with posties in Ireland has surpassed my experience with postcodes. I feel like the most valid "post code" would just be the name of the postman they should ask if they're not sure.
But I have to call out Ryanair in this context. For many years, before eircode, they demanded a postcode on their payment page. An Irish company, serving Irish customers, demanded postcodes when most the country didn't have them.
(And I paypal still believes my postcode is null. I don't recall ever entering that, so I wonder where/when it derived that.)
Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
#287Here's a different but similar whine. Probably worth its own blog post except I don't blog. Dear Apple, can you test your products outside California? I just left my laptop for 10 minutes on the balcony because I had to get a delivery. Because I'm not in California, the temperature on said balcony is 3 Celsius. Yes, I'm not american and I don't understand Fahrenheit. Guess what, when I came back the laptop was shutdo…
Agree, MacBook should be tested on the Moon, 7km under the sea level and in the core of the Earth itself.
Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you use a browser which blocks fingerprinting, CAPTCHA may fail you 3-4 times even if you give correct answers. CAPTCHA was giving me anger management issues last few weeks until I realized I can just open same URL in another browser and then most of the time it doesn't even ask for CAPTCHA because the fingerprinting is so accurate it knows who I am (or it lets me in after the first round).
Or just leave that website. Why should you be subjected to torment for the privilege of boosting some website's visitor numbers? Imagine if, every time you went to the supermarket or the library, there was some goon on the door who wouldn't let you in unless you could do ten press-ups and answer half a dozen general knowledge questions. They'd soon go out of business --as all websites which treat their visitors with…
Sadly, while it is extremely rare that a supermarket offers a product differentiated on anything but location, the same is not true of websites: not going through the CAPTCHA means I don't get to see the content I wanted or needed to see; I can't just drive five minutes further to get the same content from someone without a CAPTCHA. This thereby isn't a functional market and so market economics can't help us: this requires regulation.
Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
#289Yeeeeeeess! And frankly, the ones in TFA aren't the worst. I'm familiar with yellow taxis from American films. I'm not familiar with 'crosswalks' (full stop) or American 'fire hydrants'. Your buses also look somehow different often, and those can be hard. Traffic lights even more so, some are familiar, but some styles I would just never see in the UK, so I actually have to look at each square to check, I can't rely o…
I don't actually find taxis as easy as most seem to. Here, that large sideways tub would usually be a pizza delivery. Taxis have a very specific roof adornment and that isn't it. I'd usually need some hint to mentally context-shift into TVland.
Re: CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
#290To add some balance, they should include "identify all the roundabouts" so that folk from the USA are equally disadvantaged.
You can further improve this by adding a load-balancing mechanism:
> Click on the side of the gun where the bullet comes out from
Pretty much 50% of Americans will find this impossible while the other half will have no problem whatsoever.