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…
These companies are so determined to keep people from legally scraping their sites that they don't care that they're walking all over the ADA in doing so.
Honestly, I'm not that bothered. I think most of these users are high-pain users so dropping them is okay if ultimately it lets the website operator offer a service to me cheaper. Sure, some are unfairly blocked, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
> I think most of these users are high-pain users What, non-Americans?
Non-Americans who can't rapidly figure out what's intended from the context.
When I think of how America centric the Internet is, CAPTCHAs are usually not at the top of my list. There is so much else wrong with the internet when it comes to being basically designed for North Americans
Yes, crosswalks are a marked place on a road where pedestrians are supposed to cross. They often have dedicated signaling to let you know when you have the right-of-way to cross. The signaling usually looks like this [1], though typically the other fingers on the hand aren't blacked out, so it's a full hand, rather than one showing a middle finger (I couldn't quickly find a better example). https://imgur.com/gallery/…
Crosswalks are not necessarily marked. For many jurisdictions they exist at the corners of every road intersection.
The question of what a crosswalk is can be surprisingly contentious despite attempts at federal standards! In my city there is a situation where the police department and the transportation department currently define "crosswalk" differently, leading to some rather bizarre situations with police reports and attribution of fault (e.g. pedestrian crossing in something the transportation department considers to be a crosswalk but the police department does not, such as a marked bicycle crossing, because their definition is stricter).
The crosswalks Captcha provides the most difficult cultural discrepancy for me. Some US crosswalks look like European "forbidden for all traffic" road markings. Pretty much the opposite of a crosswalk. I always have to do a double take on those.
And in India, they are commonly refereed to as "Zebra Crossing". No one refers to them as cross-walks and most have no idea about that term.
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.
American here. I had to say a mailbox was a parking meter yesterday to satisfy one of these terrible things. Your measurement of success may be biased by user acceptance of incorrect information in the process.
I'm totally blind (lacking even light perception), with optic nerve hypoplasia (ONH). Relevant link: https://www.pathstoliteracy.org/blog/living-onh-adult-shares... Relevant quotation from aforementioned link: "Many children with ONH have difficulty processing sensory information through some or all of their senses--referred to as sensory processing disorder. They may show sensory defensiveness and delays in learning…
Do you suspect account deletion captchas are harder than account creation ones?
It's possible, though I doubt it. I don't have enough evidence -- anecdotal
or otherwise -- with which to draw a conclusion.
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 l…
My prediction: This will lead to new users being turned away from established products from the anglosphere and develop their own alternatives. Maybe after a while the big companies will notice and adapt, which might already be too late by then, or maybe they just buy the smaller ones directly, who knows.
I think this is already happening. Hopefully local entrepreneurs in their own countries can continue to build for their countrymen before people like Zuckerberg and Bezos get their hands in the metaphorical pot, and suck all the wealth right back to the US like economic hitmen of the last century.
Amazon and Facebook are already global because they offer universally valuable services.