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

411–420 of 700 posts

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

#411

Post by Mordisquitos »

School-Cotton wrote: post #333
yread wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Apparently Europeans are bad at this too. Or do you think the French “socialist” party whose members have done things like lead the IMF is really socialist?

Depending on context, the word "socialism" is polysemic in practice in a lot of places in Europe. As long as people are aware that the S for "Socialista" in Spanish governing party PSOE is used in the sense of "social-democrat", and not in the same sense as the 2nd S in USSR standing for "Socialist", it's fine.

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

#412

Post by thatguy0900 »

awiesenhofer wrote: post #384
soneil wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've never heard of it, personally

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

#413

Post by Jestar342 »

Reason077 wrote: post #406
Jestar342 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (“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.

Well, exactly. And of course the IP addresses are dynamic. So it seems a bit silly to treat a whole network as suspicious because someone on it (amongst thousands or millions) is doing something suspicious... I get the same thing on Wikipedia sometimes because someone, who at some point in the past had my randomly assigned IP address, once made some dodgy edits. (Solution: reboot router to get new IP address!) I supp…

That's the point though, it's not just someone doing it that has triggered their defences, it's many - most probably unwittlingly because of malware or even some of those cheap shitty games that mysteriously steal your battery and/or data allocation with unknown background processes.

The point is thus: they are receiving enough bad traffic from that range to have determined they need to filter it somehow.

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

#414

Post by salawat »

flurdy wrote: post #410
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…

I see a lot of captchas that I was missing now that I am using the temporary container plugin [1] Also for sites that I don't know why they need captchas... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

That would be because they're trying to leverage browser fingerprinting, and you're screwing with the fingerprint.

The sad thing is, if you're privacy conscious and don't play ball with the rest of the world, and actively mitigate these surveillance/data leaking mechanisms, you're assumed to be a malicious actor by corporate risk departments the world over.

Welcome to the web. Give us your data, and enjoy being tracked.

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

#415

Post by augustk »

Maximus9000 wrote: post #400
alias_neo wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not American, and I agree there is a lot of information there, but it seems reasonably sane if you read through it. I don't see any obvious contradictions. You can't park 11-1 tuesday due to street cleaning. You can't stop there mon-fri 7:30-16:00 with the exception of 7:30-8 for school business (dropping the kids off). You can park mon-fri between 4 and 6, once per day, per district (to pick up your kids after s…

Even so, it's easy to make a mistake with that much information so poorly organized. There are better alternatives out there, like this: https://www.lamag.com/driver/hidden-costs-parking-signs-easy...

Would be even better with 24-hour clock.

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

#416

Post by dosethree »

Reason077 wrote: post #406
Jestar342 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (“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.

Well, exactly. And of course the IP addresses are dynamic. So it seems a bit silly to treat a whole network as suspicious because someone on it (amongst thousands or millions) is doing something suspicious... I get the same thing on Wikipedia sometimes because someone, who at some point in the past had my randomly assigned IP address, once made some dodgy edits. (Solution: reboot router to get new IP address!) I supp…

Companies need to stop treating IPs or groups of IPs like identifiers. When I'm in my office, I can't access yelp. They blocked that ip range for some reason, maybe because of something we did. We block entire countries at work because we were getting a lot of DDOS from those countries and we don't do business their but it ends up blocking a lot of legit use cases and wasting a lot of time.

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

#417

Post by LudwigNagasena »

philshem wrote: post #69

not trying to stir up a shitstorm, but since this article mentions IQ tests - "what's a nickel?"... Check out the history (1971) of Larry P. and California's use of IQ testing in schools. > As a group, African Americans across the country scored lower on IQ tests. The lawsuit alleged that was because the tests were biased toward Eurocentric culture. Questions like, ”Who wrote Romeo and Juliet,” they argued, didn’t as…

Are you saying that all modern psychometricians that develop modern IQ tests are a part of a secret racist cabal?

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

#418

Post by __s »

gostsamo wrote: post #12

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.

For context, here's a recording of an audio captcha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMPJV9Sj8Yc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raFXfU7_fkg

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

#419

Post by alias_neo »

Maximus9000 wrote: post #400
alias_neo wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not American, and I agree there is a lot of information there, but it seems reasonably sane if you read through it. I don't see any obvious contradictions. You can't park 11-1 tuesday due to street cleaning. You can't stop there mon-fri 7:30-16:00 with the exception of 7:30-8 for school business (dropping the kids off). You can park mon-fri between 4 and 6, once per day, per district (to pick up your kids after s…

Even so, it's easy to make a mistake with that much information so poorly organized. There are better alternatives out there, like this: https://www.lamag.com/driver/hidden-costs-parking-signs-easy...

Oh I absolutely agree. I'm not defending it, just pointing out that it's not totally insane. Here in the UK I've never seen anything that nuts however.

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

#420

Post by warp »

cvhashim wrote: post #392
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is already happening. Hopefully local entrepreneurs in their own countries can continue to build for their countrymen before people like Zuckerberg and Bezos get their hands in the metaphorical pot, and suck all the wealth right back to the US like economic hitmen of the last century.

Facebook is actually doing much better in this regard than Google/Amazon/etc..

For example, in certain developing countries "social media" is included for free with your phone plan, often there is no net neutrality and competition between carriers has forced all of them to offer this. As a result, local businesses are forced to have Facebook and Instagram pages, because their audience cannot visit a regular website on most days. Which ensures most people need the "real" internet less and less, and are less likely to pay for it, locking them into Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp for a lot of their communication.

Post reply on HN