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

shkspr.mobi

531–540 of 700 posts

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

#531

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 . The…

you are not supposed to type realistic answers to security questions. Its better to answer in complete unrelated ways so its not guesable

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

#532
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…

hCaptcha engineer here: this is an issue with Google's approach, not all visual challenges.

Our challenges have average solve accuracy within 1% when comparing users in major African countries vs US users in our user testing. Nigeria does slightly better than the US, in fact.

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CAPTCHAs being american-centric, ableist, etc are all valid criticisms here, but I think people in tech fail to understand the value of them. Being "robot-friendly" still doesn't mean it's a walk in the park, and it's a hurdle that spammers will have to account for. If your site is a low value target or the spamming in general is low-value, it's often effective. Running any sort of small time open to the internet blo…

In those situations, captchas don't offer any improvement over a text field that always asks you to put a 3 in it. It's just different enough from other systems that it requires custom programming, and that's just not worth it for most small websites.

If I'm specifically targeting that website, what's stopping me from writing a bot that would simply enter 3 all the time?

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

#534
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just leave that website. Why should you be subjected to torment for the privilege of boosting some website's visitor numbers? Imagine if, every time you went to the supermarket or the library, there was some goon on the door who wouldn't let you in unless you could do ten press-ups and answer half a dozen general knowledge questions. They'd soon go out of business --as all websites which treat their visitors with…

Sadly, while it is extremely rare that a supermarket offers a product differentiated on anything but location, the same is not true of websites: not going through the CAPTCHA means I don't get to see the content I wanted or needed to see; I can't just drive five minutes further to get the same content from someone without a CAPTCHA. This thereby isn't a functional market and so market economics can't help us: this re…

This should be a canonized answer to that question

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

#535
post #531

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 . The…

you are not supposed to type realistic answers to security questions. Its better to answer in complete unrelated ways so its not guesable

but good luck remembering those guessed answers once you need them again to get your account back

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

#536
post #531

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 . The…

you are not supposed to type realistic answers to security questions. Its better to answer in complete unrelated ways so its not guesable

I doubt a password manager to store the unrelated answers was a priority either.

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

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm the author of the extension. You can find more installation options in the GitHub description. Make sure to also install the client app to simulate user interactions. Open the extension's options to get started and download the client app, then follow the guide linked below to finish the installation. I'm happy to chat on GitHub if you need further help. https://github.com/dessant/buster#readme https://github…

>Hi, I'm the author of the extension. You've saved hours of my life. I get dramatically fewer captcha requests with Captcha buster installed than otherwise (it's a fact.) Downloading anime without installing Universal bypass and Captcha buster is masochism - recaptcha would just go crazy infinite loop mode. Thanks a ton.

I'm glad you found Buster useful! :)

If you're into anime, you might also enjoy Search by Image, it includes support for a handful of search engines tailored to anime and manga. Visit the extension's options to enable them.

https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image#readme

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why we need more really good string, date, and GUI accessibility implementations in standard libraries

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

#540
post #531

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 . The…

you are not supposed to type realistic answers to security questions. Its better to answer in complete unrelated ways so its not guesable

Good luck teaching my mother in law how to use a password manager.

Heck, I tried teaching her to write down her passwords in a notebook, and she either keeps forgetting to write down, or she loses the notebook completely.

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