Live data from Hacker News

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

shkspr.mobi

521–530 of 700 posts

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

#521

I hate captchas with a passion so I'll add another anecdote to the mix: I'm currently staying in SEA and I love gaming cafe culture here. The only problem is that every time I go to one it takes me good 20 minutes to solve all of the captchas to connect to discord, spotify etc. before I can actually enjoy the experience. So often when I only have 2 hours to spare I really don't feel like spending 15% of that time doi…

> I really don't feel like spending 15% of that time doing slave labour for google for free

I routinely click on a false image and rarely get denied

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

#522
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw "Really? 'erbs? You're french now?"

I remember a flame war between US-English and UK-English speakers, where one of the former said “if it weren't for us, you'd be speaking German now” and one of the latter ones said “if it weren't for the French, you'd still speak English now”.

I don’t understand the rebuttal. Is American English supposed to be more French-influenced than UK English?

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can further improve this by adding a load-balancing mechanism: > Click on the side of the gun where the bullet comes out from Pretty much 50% of Americans will find this impossible while the other half will have no problem whatsoever.

Trick question? The bullet typically comes out the end, the cartridge/casing comes out the side/top.

Moreover there are guns for lefties where the casing is ejected from the other side...

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

#524
post #387
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.

You don't really have to know which squares are actual crosswalks or what a crosswalk really is, reCAPTCHA doesn't care and it thinks that any street with white striped lines is a crosswalk even if the lines are for indicating something else (which is also annoying because it'll ask you to verify you are human again if you don't check those non-crosswalks). So do as I do and select any street that has white striped lines (same goes for its more rare bicycle/motorbike, small truck/car or truck/bus mix-ups).

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

#525
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…

>>There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet

That isn't what captchas are used for. There are two side to every captcha, what the website is using them for and what the captcha creator or provider is using them for. In google's case, captchas are being used to hone AI. So it is no wonder that items like hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights dominate. Those are the objects that any AI-controlled vehicle will have to recognize. Given that the first market for AI-driven vehicles seems to be western nations, specifically the US, it is no surprise that google gears its captcha program to objects from that area.

If google were developing robots to pick fruit captchas would ask us to identify bananas and oranges. I worry about the day that captchas start asking me to differentiate people from other objects. I don't want to help train an AI to tell people from trees, soldiers from bushes.

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

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on then. I'll play. My 'must have' half dozen which get installed first, on every browser on every device I use: * Bitwarden * HTTPS everywhere * Privacy Badger/Possum/Other Furry Animal * uBlock Origin * uMatrix * Windscribe

> HTTPS everywhere Not anymore, firefox has it by default now, just gotta turn a setting on. > uMatrix Sadly this is dead, I guess I'll switch to a fork once I have time to figure out who does what.

  >Not anymore, firefox has it by default now, just gotta turn a setting on.
I don't use Firefox as my main browser. I use Yandex. I do sometimes wonder if HTTPS everywhere is becoming a bit redundant these days anyway. Most sites seem to have moved to HTTPS these days.

  >Sadly this [uMatrix] is dead
Yes, that's a shame. It still works though. Hopefully whoever takes on the task of keeping it alive via a fork will make it a bit more mobile friendly. [The same could be said about uBlock Origin]

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

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it is problem, because the assumption is that you're measuring a proxy for g that supposedly doesn't change. So if it can change, by something as simple as learning some boolean algebra, the IQ test isn't measuring what it is assumed to be measuring. That being said, you're right that it would still be useful for measuring problem solving potential, but that's explicitly not what IQ tests are supposed to measur…

??? who assumes g can't change?

It's generally accepted in psychometrics that general intelligence does not change in adulthood : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3950413/

I personally think it's not something that's really true, but it's how I learned it in university and seems to be the default position of experts in the field.

This is of course assuming no traumatic brain injuries or the use of psychoactive substances.

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

#528
This reminds me of account security questions. They ask things like "what's your childhood nickname", "what's your first pet's name". To my Chinese mother-in-law, who was born in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when food was scarce, everyone was poor, education was not easy to get, government was non-functional due to anarchy, and when her first priority was to survive, all those questions are just weird. They reek of first-world assumptions.

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

#529
post #398
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're considered trucks about as much as a catfish is considered a cat Well yes, but someone without this knowledge will get confused.

Here is not America, to clarify. I was under the impression that Americans did consider pickups, larger SUVs etc, "trucks"

Generally, Americans consider what marketing tells us to consider.

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

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked at a company once that decided to add an entire range of IP addresses to their firewall’s deny list. Seems an executive had their personal home network pwned, and an unknown figure told him it was from a certain part of the world.

Said executive made enough noise and put enough pressure on the network engineers to get it done without question or delay or...most critically..a reviewed and authorized change control ticket that would have caught what was about to happen

Following Monday help desk was underwater triaging tickets from the entire office full of team members we had just denied from the corporate network, and customers who now couldn’t use our product at all.

Post reply on HN