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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)

#381

Post by Jestar342 »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #268
dayve wrote: post #247

Being an African born & bred in Nigeria, I particularly find this appalling. Captcha usually asks users to identify fire hydrants, crosswalks & other objects with design patterns that are not common here, in everyday living. There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet, especially since the demographics are much different from existing internet use…

My prediction: This will lead to new users being turned away from established products from the anglosphere and develop their own alternatives. Maybe after a while the big companies will notice and adapt, which might already be too late by then, or maybe they just buy the smaller ones directly, who knows.

> My prediction: This will lead to new users being turned away from established products from the anglosphere and develop their own alternatives.

Captchas will be localised long before that.

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

#382

Post by smichel17 »

cesarb wrote: post #302
Reason077 wrote: post #176

I understand the purpose of CAPTCHAs when used as a security measure, but recently it seems like there has been a huge proliferation of them in all sorts of random places and it’s becoming very annoying. Even Google has taken to occasionally popping up CAPTCHAs just so I can see search results! (“suspicious activity on your network” - I’m using a reputable, top-tier UK mobile provider) Is there grounds to legally cha…

> Even Google has taken to occasionally popping up CAPTCHAs just so I can see search results! The most annoying one for me recently has been stackoverflow. The most basic use of stackoverflow (other than arriving through a web search) is to use its own search bar to search for something. Every time I do so, it asks for a captcha. It would make some sense to ask for a captcha when asking or answering a question, but w…

Yep, and this resulted in me just searching duckduckgo for the stackoverflow page I wanted to find, instead.

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

#383

Post by Jestar342 »

Reason077 wrote: post #176

I understand the purpose of CAPTCHAs when used as a security measure, but recently it seems like there has been a huge proliferation of them in all sorts of random places and it’s becoming very annoying. Even Google has taken to occasionally popping up CAPTCHAs just so I can see search results! (“suspicious activity on your network” - I’m using a reputable, top-tier UK mobile provider) Is there grounds to legally cha…

> (“suspicious activity on your network” - I’m using a reputable, top-tier UK mobile provider)

So are a _lot_ of other people, for all kinds of purposes, including nefarious purposes.

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

#384

Post by awiesenhofer »

soneil wrote: post #262
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Identify the best spot in the classroom to hide from the shooter"

Tangentially, we've been having fun with this recently. "Why haven't you completed Active Shooter Training?" "I'm busy, prioritising my time, and this training is irrelevant to me." "But what if there's an Active Shooter in the office?" "I've been working at home since April, and I've already been told to expect 6 months more." "It could still happen at home!" "What country do you think we're in?" Head Office seems t…

Wait, there is actually something like mandatory Active Shooter Training in US companies? For real?

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

#385

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

C19is20 wrote: post #378
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #14

To add some balance, they should include "identify all the roundabouts" so that folk from the USA are equally disadvantaged.

Pronounce "Herb". Correctly, this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXBHY7uco0Y

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

#386

Post by imtringued »

andai wrote: post #163
grishka wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Зебра (zebra) in Russian too, especially if you're referring to the road markings themselves. I find recaptchas downright humiliating. I think twice before completing one — is whatever it grants access to worth it?

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).

Google's captcha basically does this:

Check if you are logged into google. (pretty much unavoidable in chrome). If you have a google account then they know your phone number is verified and getting a phone number usually requires government mandated identification.

Otherwise they use fingerprinting to identify you and correlate it with activity on google, youtube, google ads, etc.

If those two things fail then Google will give you an endless stream of captchas even if you answer all of them correctly. I often had to complete 20 captchas only for it to tell me "sorry". There was maybe a 1/3 chance that completing all 20 captchas let me through.

Meanwhile on a different browser where I'm logged into google I get through on first attempt. Google captchas are just a data mining operation. They have nothing to do with proving whether you are human. After all, if they have enough data about you they often give you the option to skip the captcha altogether. The captcha is a psychological attack on you to convince you to give Google more data.

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

#387

Post by nailer »

dayve wrote: post #247

Being an African born & bred in Nigeria, I particularly find this appalling. Captcha usually asks users to identify fire hydrants, crosswalks & other objects with design patterns that are not common here, in everyday living. There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet, especially since the demographics are much different from existing internet use…

I'm not entirely sure what a crosswalk is. I /guess/ it's a pedestrian crossing, but I wouldn't put money on it.

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

#388

Post by Mordisquitos »

Number157 wrote: post #273
dayve wrote: post #247

Being an African born & bred in Nigeria, I particularly find this appalling. Captcha usually asks users to identify fire hydrants, crosswalks & other objects with design patterns that are not common here, in everyday living. There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet, especially since the demographics are much different from existing internet use…

But you can answer the questions, I assume?

Being an African born & bred in Nigeria, who comments on Hacker News, the assumption may be correct—but they're hardly representative of the average Nigerian.

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

#389

Post by nojokes »

dayve wrote: post #247

Being an African born & bred in Nigeria, I particularly find this appalling. Captcha usually asks users to identify fire hydrants, crosswalks & other objects with design patterns that are not common here, in everyday living. There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet, especially since the demographics are much different from existing internet use…

Fire hydrants are not at all common in European cityscape but you will learn about them from Hollywood movies or from music videos.

But in the part of Europe I am from, if I did not go to the daycare in a larger city, I would not have seen any crosswalks or traffic lights. I could have easily recognized a harvester or a railroad crossing though.

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

#390

Post by armada651 »

gostsamo wrote: post #346
apexalpha wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a CTF, so a scalable product was not the goal here.
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