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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)

#571

Post by Kalium »

salawat wrote: post #414
flurdy wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 track…

In a world where bot herders try to blend in with the crowd, and historically lots of them aren't great at it, you have to be careful about your choices. It's very easy to look like a bot by accident, and odds are pretty good that anyone who sticks out is likely to be a bot. Just like odds are quite good that any HTTP request coming through Tor is quite likely to be malicious.

This is a pretty shitty scenario all around. It shouldn't have happened. It should never have come to this! That said, I've yet to see a better solution on offer for general-purpose low-effort anti-abuse purposes.

People here on HN generally seem to either hate CAPTCHAs with the passion of a million blazing suns (but have nothing better to offer) or want everyone to use something strictly worse (like argon2 hashing).

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

#572

Post by naniwaduni »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #178
bserge wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google it, heh. The way I learned it, a "car" is any roofed 4+ wheeled vehicle up to van and SUV size (yeah, more Americanisms). Pickup trucks and larger are "trucks".

Is the Reliant Robin not a car then?

It's a motortricycle!

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

#573

Post by segfaultbuserr »

Macha wrote: post #552
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's worse for Tor users. Even if I solve all puzzles carefully and correctly, Google still fails me, gives me another round of new endless CAPTCHAs, and fails me again, another round, and finally grants access if it wants to. It takes literally at least 5 minutes to pass it, 10-20 minutes is possible. And even if you pass Google, there are still two failure modes: (1) The website may still think you fail the CAPTCHA even when Google said you pass, seems like a bug or an expiration timer, then you'll have to solve another three rounds of nightmarish CAPTCHAs. (2) Google may ultimately fail you and also disqualify you from solving any CAPTCHAs because of "suspicious traffic from your network", and this denial is often only triggered AFTER you've already solved all the CAPTCHAs. I have no problem if Google blocks Tor completely, but now Google is effectively playing a bait-and-switch game on the users, I'd call it a form of human right abuse.

Solving Google reCAPTCHA via Tor is a prefect game for masochists like myself... Well, to be honest, the only reason I'm doing it, is to get true pseudonymous online accounts.

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

#574

Post by watwut »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #234
watwut wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I have seen non Americans making basically same assumptions. I have even once seen a thread where Easter Europeans who never been in America argued with Americans about meaning of English word and about American culture. It was literally "are you sure you know better then American how Americans would interpret that word/situation in their day to day life" situation.

Are you sure that English is defined by its usage in the United States of America? Or is it defined by the usage in, let's say, in England?

In the context where American used word or expression and talked to other Americans, yes absolutely.

If we talked about English person speaking to Emglish, we would take English usage.

But context was American speech and Eastern Europans who know America only from movies thinking they know all about it.

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

#575

Post by wenc »

nailer wrote: post #387
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…

I'm not entirely sure what a crosswalk is. I /guess/ it's a pedestrian crossing, but I wouldn't put money on it.

It's trickier than most people think. The term "crosswalk" is American English -- it's known as a pedestrian crossing or zebra crossing in other countries. (another oft confused word is "pavement", which means sidewalk in British English, but refers to the hard surface of the road in American English)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_crossing#Distinctio...

The markings also cause confusion. To the non-American mind, does "crosswalk" refer to the crossing with the two parallel lines or the one with the stripes? Whereas with "zebra crossing", there's no ambiguity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_crossing#/media/Fil...

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

#576

Post by throwaway894345 »

joshuaissac wrote: post #568
throwaway894345 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is a reference to the assistance provided by France to help the American colonies (and later the United States) rebel against the British Empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Revolut...

Ah. That's not a very sharp barb considering the significant power differential between England and the Revolutionists at the time.

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

#577

Post by sandworm101 »

wolco2 wrote: post #547
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…

In fairness if they asked that it would be exclude the human the way streetview maps works now

>> it would be exclude the human

That is one way of running an captcha: set a task that is not possible for a human. Anyone who answers correctly must be a bot.

"How many flowers in this field?" "Solve for X: 3567/134 = X" Anyone getting those correct in a reasonable time is probably not a human and so has failed the captcha.

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

#578

Post by benhurmarcel »

technofiend wrote: post #504
silvestrov wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and 12-hour clocks. I can never remember if "am" morning or afternoon. Why is 12am before 1am? Makes no sense at all.

Yeah you're not wrong, but AM is ante meridiem and PM is post meridiem where meridiem is mid day. I'm not sure if that really helps?

It's more that if you reset to 0 at mid-day and midnight, then logically 12:30am should be 00:30am for example.

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

#579

Post by smnrchrds »

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…

> “suspicious activity on your network” - I’m using a reputable, top-tier UK mobile provider

Same in Canada. WiFi is fine. Using the web when connected to cell data (from the second biggest mobile operator in the country) brings up CAPTCHA almost 100% of the time.

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

#580

Post by [deleted] »

judge2020 wrote: post #566
latexr wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Direct MP4: https://v.redd.it/cdjc79eutij51/DASH_720.mp4

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