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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)

#431

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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?

These are hard sometimes for me, from UK:

What counts as a truck? Is a fire engine a truck, is a 4x4 (like a Landrover), a HGV (ie lorry), a box van?

What counts as a bus? Is a coach a bus, a minibus?

What counts as a bicycle? Is a pedal-and-pop (a pedal cycle with an engine)? The image shows part of a headset that might be on a bike, is that enough to call it a bike, might be a lightweight motorbike?

Is a hovercraft a boat? Is a helicopter an aeroplane (according to the people setting the question)? Do pedestrian facing lights count as traffic lights?

Then every now and again they add in an image that is, I assume, purposefully obscured (uniform noise) as if painted by an impressionist and titled "boring city with smog as viewed by someone with cataracts, there might be half a bicycle wheel in somewhere".

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

#432

Post by latexr »

zbuf wrote: post #57

Captchas have gone mad. The other day a major service gave me less than 10 seconds to solve a puzzle with a mouse in a maze and some cheese, and subsequently locked out of my account. Actually before I got locked out, I thought I would stand more chance with the alternative for the visually impaired. It jumped straight in to a fuzzy voice reading 20+ numbers at a rate of more than 1 per second. I was already behind o…

> The other day a major service gave me less than 10 seconds to solve a puzzle with a mouse in a maze and some cheese

Guessing you might be referring to the ones Epic uses[1], which indeed look terrible.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/EpicGamesPC/comments/ihiidp/new_mou...

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

#433

Post by tokai »

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?

"Although training is currently optional, businesses and organizations are beginning to face citations due to non-compliance with OSHA's guidelines regarding Workplace Violence.[3][4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shooter_training

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

#434

Post by burlesona »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #428
altitudinous wrote: post #395

Yes, the American focus of the internet is absolutely appalling. Assumptions of timezones - PST, CST and the others whatever they are. Northern hemisphere assumptions of seasons - fall, etc - in the southern hemisphere the seasons are the opposite and we don't use the word fall. Even Apple, known for its "sensitivity" to cultural matters has a big miss on this one.

Yes, big annoyance of mine is invites to events/streams/etc that start at 10:00 "mountain". What the fuck is that?

It’s the western time zone where Denver, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, and El Paso are. The region is extremely mountainous and high elevation, and hence is often called the “mountain west,” as opposed to the Pacific Coast (which has a lower elevation and mostly smaller mountains by comparison).

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

#435

Post by falcor84 »

gostsamo wrote: post #408
falcor84 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure it would scale for Google in terms of net profits ;)

Not if this decreases their captcha reputation.

Well, true, but Google's product managers don't appear to care at all about second-order effects

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

#436

Post by School-Cotton »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #411
School-Cotton wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, you’re right. But isn’t this just restating my point?

Americans don’t reliably distinguish between various left-of-center ideologies in their language, but that’s not uniquely American, because neither do Europeans.

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

#437

Post by codethief »

romanoderoma wrote: post #314
apexalpha wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Identify which of the following windows can tilt and turn."

"Identify which country calls them vasistas because Germans used to ask "was ist das?" from a smaller aperture on the door before opening the actual door"

For anyone else who didn't know about this:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vasistas

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

#438

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

burlesona wrote: post #434
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, big annoyance of mine is invites to events/streams/etc that start at 10:00 "mountain". What the fuck is that?

It’s the western time zone where Denver, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, and El Paso are. The region is extremely mountainous and high elevation, and hence is often called the “mountain west,” as opposed to the Pacific Coast (which has a lower elevation and mostly smaller mountains by comparison).

It's the assumption that everyone on the planet should know or care about this. "Mountain" could describe anywhere. The Himalayas, the Alps, Norway.

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

#439

Post by jerjerjer »

futurix wrote: post #240

I love searching for very American-looking fire hydrants or pedestrian crossings. Great case of US cultural imperialism - I suspect that the developers didn't even think it might not be the same thing abroad.

Took a lot of years for American developers to figure out that string inputs are not limited to ASCII. And even that is more due to emojis (bless them). It's a slow process.

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

#440

Post by salawat »

sschueller wrote: post #402
altitudinous wrote: post #395

Yes, the American focus of the internet is absolutely appalling. Assumptions of timezones - PST, CST and the others whatever they are. Northern hemisphere assumptions of seasons - fall, etc - in the southern hemisphere the seasons are the opposite and we don't use the word fall. Even Apple, known for its "sensitivity" to cultural matters has a big miss on this one.

Even worse is the continued lack of UTF-8 use yet offering services outside of the US. In fact even Apple had non ASCII character issues on their dev website not so long ago.

Hey, as someone who does Quality Assurance, I want to point out that 99% of the time, those issues are brought up. They never get dealt with out the gate because business evolves via iterative value delivery, and most systems capable of creating value can work just fine with massively simplified assumptions to keep the lights on.

Also, if you think timezones/calendars/seasons are bad, just understand that many people specifically have a difficult time with shifting their mind into a frame of reference where you can actually talk about time in the sense of "there is a moment in time $now, where I am, the clock displays X because formatting, the system clock is actually Y, and I want people in P to get experience Q which had relationship R to X and S to Y. I have libraries T, U, and V to work through the abstractive layers of. These same people are all inclined never to admit this difficulty or the complexity inherent thereto.

Throw in the fact most folks in the U.S. don't even understand the written script of more than a handful of places, and you have a recipe for !quality. Again though, there's only so much political capital you have as a Quality person, and prioritization tends to be the Project Manager's shtick.

Also throw in that the real optimization function in the market has been "the crappiest software that can still maintain usership" and it should be no surprise that the software packages that do localization right are far fewer in number than otherwise.

It's a rather sad state of affairs, but it is what it is.

Just... Wanted to point out there has been at least one person who brought up your points in design meetings everywhere they've been, and never ceases to end up receiving platitudes.

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