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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)

#601

Post by smsm42 »

reaperducer wrote: post #569
est wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you are not supposed to type realistic answers to security questions Assuming that you are allowed to type an answer. United Airlines makes you pick from a list of pre-selected answers. And some of the questions are easily worthless. For example, one of the United "security" questions is "What is your favorite ice cream?" How is someone who is lactose intolerant supposed to answer that? Or someone who has never had i…

United is probably the most idiotic of those. What's my favorite sport? Well, I'm not too much into sports but I'd say... Oh, it's not on the list. How about... Also not on the list. No wonder, there's hundreds of sports out there and United didn't pay their contractors enough to make a PhD level survey of sports. OK, baseball it is.

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

#602

Post by jcranmer »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #428
altitudinous wrote: post #395

Yes, the American focus of the internet is absolutely appalling. Assumptions of timezones - PST, CST and the others whatever they are. Northern hemisphere assumptions of seasons - fall, etc - in the southern hemisphere the seasons are the opposite and we don't use the word fall. Even Apple, known for its "sensitivity" to cultural matters has a big miss on this one.

Yes, big annoyance of mine is invites to events/streams/etc that start at 10:00 "mountain". What the fuck is that?

In US and Canada, the time zones are named after geographical regions. From east to west, they go Atlantic (UTC-4 in standard time; services Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Labrador), Eastern (US east cost, Canada's Windsor-Quebec main population center), Central (Chicago, St Louis, Texas), Mountain (Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado), Pacific (US/Canada west coast), Alaska, Hawaii.

Most US residents are going to be familiar with these time zones because you are more likely going to have to deal with multiple time zones in this set than any other international time zones. Television shows that announce to the broader country usually announce their times as, say, 11 Eastern/10 Central, because they'll be broadcast in both Eastern and Central time zones.

If I'm talking to someone in the US, I'm not going to bother prefixing the timezone with "US" because it's implied. But if I were talking to someone international, I'd be more likely to prefix "US", as in "this meeting is scheduled for 11:00 US Pacific time". This formulation has the added benefit of also describing whose daylight savings rule take effect in international settings.

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

#603

Post by smsm42 »

recursive wrote: post #593
93po wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a password generator for the answers and save them in my password manager. One time I had to read 20 random characters to someone on the phone as a response to my favorite food

So... why not just use your password manager to record the account's actual password, so you don't need to use security questions?

Sometimes password can be reset without your asking so, or the system requires to supply both password and security questions.

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

#604

Post by martamorena9182 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #577
wolco2 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't work, because either you need to randomize which way you ask (and then all a bot needs to do is try a couple of times to get the question where it needs to answer correctly), or you always need to ask one way or the other, which also doesn't work, because then the bot will answer incorrectly on purpose.

It would be different if the captcha would look at the incorrectness. I.e. the bot would now have to make the same mistakes that humans would make, which might be a workable path for captchas, however its unclear what benefit this would bring compared to answering correctly.

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

#605

Post by OJFord »

nojokes wrote: post #389
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…

Fire hydrants are not at all common in European cityscape but you will learn about them from Hollywood movies or from music videos. But in the part of Europe I am from, if I did not go to the daycare in a larger city, I would not have seen any crosswalks or traffic lights. I could have easily recognized a harvester or a railroad crossing though.

In the part of Europe I live in (London), if I did not go to any sites using reCaptcha, I would not know what a 'crosswalk' is.

Even the things I have seen (traffic lights, buses, 'fire hydrants') don't always ('fire hydrants' never) look the same as their American counterparts.

It's just a totally ill-conceived system for any global website.

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

#606

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

codethief wrote: post #437
romanoderoma wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Identify which country calls them vasistas because Germans used to ask "was ist das?" from a smaller aperture on the door before opening the actual door"

For anyone else who didn't know about this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vasistas

Semi-related- in Poland when you speak about something you don't know the name of you often call it "wihajster" (Wie heißt er?)

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

#607

Post by oli-g »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #540
est wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would be the same as your mother in law.

Thankfully, my LastPass writes down my passwords for me and is impossible to lose physically.

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

#608

Post by deathanatos »

est wrote: post #531
FooBarWidget wrote: post #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 . 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 actually did that once. The rest of the security practices were so ridiculous, I set all five security questions to the same nonsensical answer. I had to go through a security flow with a support rep. at some later point, and he's asked me all five questions, each time I'm giving him exactly the same answer, and by the fifth thinking, "Really? Do you think I somehow won't get this one?"

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

#610

Post by iamleppert »

If you can’t identify a yellow taxi cab I’m willing to loose the sale vs. not having the captcha at all. The fact is the number of people who can do it who are also your prospective customer is still very high.

It’s impossible to find something that is 100% culturally universal. To use the Internet at all it requires it’s own kind of special knowledge and culture so I don’t think the argument is correct.

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