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

shkspr.mobi

291–300 of 700 posts

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

#291
post #279

Here'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…

How do other laptop manufacturers fare in this regard? For ThinkPads (T490) the environmental temperature is listed as "5°C to 43°C", and your 3°C would be too cold.

My X1 Carbon 3rd gen got quite some use in the last 5 years, some of it also in ~ 0 °C weather (for at least half an hour), worked fine.

That is naturally just one personal experience, so I do not want to assert that all X1s or even ThinkPads fare better in colder weather. Just that at least some do.

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

#292
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in the UK and most commonwealth countries I think

"Pedestrian crossing" in NZ. Or just "crossing", if the context is clear.

When I was young in NZ, they were zebra crossings. But then I noticed that they started more and more to be a pair of lines across the road than the zebra patterns, and the name seemed to gradually fall out of use.

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

#293
But the author, presumably non-american, was able to solve the challenge, so obviously it didn't prove him american. But it did prove him human because humans have that innate flexibility (if they choose to!) to recognize stuff and understand the intent even when it's not completely unambiguous or immediate. And that's the point.

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in the UK and most commonwealth countries I think

In Ireland we have zebra and pelican crossings. The general term used in the driver training literature is "pedestrian crossing." Most people would recognise the term "crosswalk" from American media, though.

Even in the US things are different from state to state, in California every uncontrolled intersection has 'crosswalks' where pedestrians have right of way, even if they are not painted in. Pedestrians are not supposed to cross in the middle of a block, unless there's a marked crossing (which is the only place you're likely to see an actual zebra crossing)

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

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, even Android has this issue. It's definitely a legacy carried over from the US - data is still expensive there and carriers probably discourage phone makers from sending large data over their network.

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

#296

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.

All communication requires some agreed upon protocol. Whatever they use, people would have to understand it.

If you wanna operate in some market you should at least try to speak the local language.

That's a well understood protocol too.

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

#297
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in the UK and most commonwealth countries I think

"Pedestrian crossing" in NZ. Or just "crossing", if the context is clear.

They will still have a faux "belisha ball" (just an orange disk) next to them

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

#298
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…

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 t…

A literal oldie but goodie: https://wraabe.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/an-ocr-cliche-into-h...

Granted this is mostly a kerning issue.

Without wider textual context the correct answer is hard to determine.

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

#299
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do other laptop manufacturers fare in this regard? For ThinkPads (T490) the environmental temperature is listed as "5°C to 43°C", and your 3°C would be too cold.

My X1 Carbon 3rd gen got quite some use in the last 5 years, some of it also in ~ 0 °C weather (for at least half an hour), worked fine. That is naturally just one personal experience, so I do not want to assert that all X1s or even ThinkPads fare better in colder weather. Just that at least some do.

There may be a difference if you’re actively working in cold weather, where the CPU is generating heat that keep the internal battery temperatures up.

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

#300
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…

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 t…

Before I discovered the Buster plugin, I used to try to be as unhelpful as possible in my forced Google AI training sessions.

I'd use the audio option in the reCraptcha and then see how little of what I heard I could get away with actually entering into the form. Often it sufficed to just type one word out of the entire audio clip or even enter a word which sounded similar [eg. audio clip says "tranced", I write "transit"]. The most satisfying ones of all where when, after listening to a complete sentence containing either word, I could pass the reCraptcha by simply typing "the" or "an" into the form.

One of the things that I find slightly disappointing about Buster is that it types in the entire sentence, when solving the reCraptcha. I hate to think Google are under the impression I've suddenly started trying harder!

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