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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)

#551

Post by hinkley »

jpambrun wrote: post #405
hinkley wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you carrying your naked laptop around outdoors in below zero temperatures? Maybe a bag that nestles against your body would be a better idea.

You obviously never lived in cold climates. Everything outside my winters clothes is at outside temperature (inside is often not terribly hot either..). I am not about to carry my laptop in my coat, which are usually a somewhat tight fit.

“Yes, obviously,” he responded, sarcastically.

Anyone who has bought hot food on a cold day has an opportunity to learn about how some containers do nothing and others do quite a bit. Even thin paper versus heavy brown paper makes a pretty big difference in insulation.

Many bags designed for laptops have open cell foam for shock resistance, and thermally conductive foam is a specialty item. You practically can’t make a laptop sleeve without an R value. So it’ll depend a lot on whether your laptop was room temperature when it went in or is warmer.

If you’re looking for a Christmas idea for yourself, I don’t think you find a better laptop bag than Tom Bihn. They have a laptop sleeve that’s practically an insulated lunch bag: https://www.tombihn.com/products/brain-cell with an air gap at the bottom that prevents damage if you drop your bag. Which I have.

Their stuff is expensive, but they’re bombproof and not Apple-expensive. They’re waterproof, including the zippers, the shoulder straps are butter-smooth, and the factory workers are paid a living wage.

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

#552

Post by Macha »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #506
yepthatsreality wrote: post #490

What’s more fun is being American and intentionally misinterpreting the captcha. Select all street lights? Then think of how that question could be translated and misread in another language. Then select everything that would qualify as a light on the street: lamps, car headlights, crossing signals, et al. Sometimes I select a square that I think the machine placed in the set to get more certainty but doesn’t match.…

To me it's not a game and not fun at all (I use Tor so I've seen more edge cases than most people). I found CAPTCHA is a school quiz. Some questions are ambiguous and open to interpretation, if it happens, it's not important to select the "correct" answer, but the "expected" answer. - Select all squares with $object. If $object only occupies 1/2 or 1/3 of a square, should I select it or not? The "correct" answer is s…

> When using Tor, Google switches the CAPTCHA to the more strict "9 pictures" (or even the "endless pictures with delay on each") version. The rule of "If there is none, click skip" no longer applies. In this version, when Google misidentifies something as the object and you are not selecting it, the answer is wrong because Google thinks you are not selecting all answers. You must guess which one is the misidentified object and select it.

Even using Firefox with an adblocker is enough to trigger this one. Worse still is when you then go on to fail whatever the rate limited action is (maybe a forgot password form) and you get sent back to the captcha on the same site in a short interval. Then you get the one with the images fading out and being replaced soo.... slow...ly.....

Literally, it takes 30s for an image to fade out and 30s for the next to fade back in and sometimes there can be chains of 3-4 images in the same slot taking up 2-3 minutes for the captcha process. Arguably at that point successfully completion is more likely to indicate ill intent as most actual users will give up and go away.

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

#553

Post by matchbok »

sandworm101 wrote: post #525
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…

>>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 traf…

Google no longer uses captcha to hone their AI.

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

#554

Post by coherentpony »

matchbok wrote: post #553
sandworm101 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 traf…

Google no longer uses captcha to hone their AI.

Do you have a source for this statement?

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

#555

Post by judge2020 »

dosethree wrote: post #416
Reason077 wrote: post #406

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.

Your first mistake was using Yelp in any capacity[0-6]. Thankfully Apple is trying to drop Yelp by having their own review and photo system[7].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3884515

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238576

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19220988

4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706307

5: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=486468 (all the way back in 2009)

6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6452410

7: https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/26/apple-maps-reviews-inhouse/

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

#556

Post by salawat »

durnygbur wrote: post #541
salawat wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cyclists ride. They do not drive. Drive implies you aren't the prime mover in the mechanism (i.e., an engine is doing the work, and you're merely performing the task of executive signaling and control to that set of movers and systems carrying you along do so. The inflection point is actually legal in nature; in that once you slap a motor on it, you require licensure, because you're driving now. This is also why I di…

> being ignored/cursed at I would certainly not wish to be ignored by wagons, trucks, and SUVs while cycling through American cities.

I'm not one of those who ignores them. Quite to the contrary. I've been known to roll down the window and ask someone to please pull ahead of my A-pillar.

I speak only from having seen others behavior.

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

#557

Post by dghlsakjg »

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.

I used to have an english boss who used this retort frequently. That was until I asked him how he pronounced the name of his quintessential made-in-England roadster. You know, his Caterham.

For those not in the know, it is pronounced Kate-rum. The second syllable is normally pronounced as if it should not exist, you move as quickly from the t sound to the m sound as you can. Same thing as Leicester (phonetically leh-str)

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

#558

Post by teunispeters »

Bonus points to "captcha" where they show you a picture from a perspective of someone wealthy and privileged enough to have seen it from that perspective - like the inside of a private aeroplane or boat, and then expect everyone to guess it. Or just about anything to do with passenger trains in a country where most of that service was cut decades ago.

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

#559

Post by CRConrad »

sandworm101 wrote: post #525
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…

>>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 traf…

> 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.

The point of the GP was, it's training these AIs on specifically _American_ hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights, which sucks not only for those of us unpaid mechanical Turks who aren't Yanks, but also makes you wonder if nobody cares that these coming AI-controlled vehicles won't be so great at discriminating NON-American hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights from _non-American pedestrians._

And no, America does not equal “the West”; most of your street furniture looks slightly“ off” compared to, say, that of most European countries. Anyway, the part of the “West” that will probably be at the forefront of this wave will probably, as usual, be the most hyper-advanced: Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan...

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

#560

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

mrspeaker wrote: post #548
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I always intentionally click on wrong images, just to see how wrong I can be and still be allowed to go. Initially I could get through easily while choosing wrong images, but now it takes me many goes to get through with even one wrong pick.

My experience is a bit opposite. I started a year ago and have generally done alright.
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