Live data from Hacker News

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

shkspr.mobi

341–350 of 700 posts

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

#341

CAPTCHAs don't work. At least for humans. It's fairly easy to write a script with current technology even for an average "hacker" to solve them. But on the other hand it's extremely hard, nearly impossible for a person with special needs to complete them. Even for average person solving some of CAPTCHAs is a hassle. Most of the popular CAPTCHAs services are "robot-friendly" and providers don't care who solves them, t…

There are user friendly and secure CAPTCHAs out there if implemented correctly.

A particular gaming forum uses game covers and asks users to select the correct title. This is quick enough to decipher for a human, while any OCR bots would have a difficult time with it. They could build a database of all covers, but it would be difficult to keep it up to date, and site owners could simply add more variation, so I doubt any bot authors bother to do so.

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

#343

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…

That the laptop shuts down when below minimum operating temperature is a Good Thing™. For example, the battery performance changes greatly (reduced capacity and discharge rate), and the battery may even take permanent damage when charged at low temperatures. Also it is a very bad idea to bring a laptop indoors from the cold and immediately turning it on. Condensing water can cause short circuits (people who wear glas…

I am in Montreal, Everyday I got to school during winters I had to subject my laptop to -20c for 45min before coming back to a warm indoor. It's not like we have any alternatives. It's true for our phones as well.

OP's points still stands. I would add that if your product can't stand this constant hot-cold cycle, don't get in the Canadian market. If you are selling here, we can assume you have accepted the reality of climate and have factored it in your warranty costs.

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

#344
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why would it be illegal? Being able to access a website (be it Twitter, Hacker News, or your hometown newspaper) is a privilege, not a right.

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

#345
I got so frustrated with CAPTCHAs that started using my computer's visual and natural language recognition software to solve them.

It works much better than me at solving those stupid puzzles. It is great because if the software fails, it does not get frustrated like I did.

There are CAPTCHAs that my software solves that I know are wrong, but google says it is ok. Like "pic the pictures with a signal on it" and there is a picture with a signal visible from behind. My software does not detect that, neither google.

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

#346

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.

There was a CTF a while ago where someone beat Google Captcha by simply inputting the Audio captcha into Google speech recognition. It worked ~80% of the time.

I'm sure that this can't scale at least against Google. They can fingerprint their own files. Might be interesting to check with MS or IBM services as a backup.

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

#347

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.

> We're all training their AI without any renumeration. This. This is not said enough. Everything you do with a Google service is used to train their AI. I don't want to train their AI.

It’s almost like a bad sci fi flick: - how much data do we need to train an AGI? - a googol. - let that be the company name.

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

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree working in a wider range of ambient temperatures would be nice, but they do have a support article stating the temperature should be over 10°C, so I wouldn't say they've not tested it. Yeah, the point is 10 C is sufficient ... for California. Not necessarily for the rest of the world. I'm sure they specify some temperature range, it's just not quite enough. Besides it was left outside for 10 minutes, not ho…

Discharge rate of batteries falls with temperature. 10C is a very common lower limit for high performance lion cells. There's a complex set of tradeoffs vs fundamental physical limits here. It's not at all a case of "aw shucks we forgot places other than CA exist" which is something you're just projecting onto the situation.

I had to buy a new battery for my car because despite a battery shop and the dealer saying there was nothing wrong with the battery, short trips in the car below 10C would kill it in a week.

As someone else pointed out, the dew point is not something you want to explore with personal electronics.

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

#349

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…

Seems like an issue with the technology itself more than Apple. Snow mobiles and winter jackets are expected to stand cold weather. Electronics not so much.

3c isn't very cold. it's an ambient temperature any phone would have to be able to withstand for an indefinite period to be marketable even in many US states.

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

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree working in a wider range of ambient temperatures would be nice, but they do have a support article stating the temperature should be over 10°C, so I wouldn't say they've not tested it. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201640 Note that the iOS devices work from above 0°C ( https://support.apple.com/en-sg/HT201678 ) so maybe improvements will be brought to laptops too.

> I agree working in a wider range of ambient temperatures would be nice, but they do have a support article stating the temperature should be over 10°C, so I wouldn't say they've not tested it. Yeah, the point is 10 C is sufficient ... for California. Not necessarily for the rest of the world. I'm sure they specify some temperature range, it's just not quite enough. Besides it was left outside for 10 minutes, not ho…

> Yeah, the point is 10 C is sufficient ... for California.

It is currently below 10 C at Apple’s headquarters.

Computers are generally built for indoor use, regardless of where you’re using them in the world.

Post reply on HN