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

Post by mattlondon » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

tomxor wrote: post #422

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…

> I’m using a reputable, top-tier UK mobile provider I'm in the UK too and have found that If you use any mobile internet provider, and have a browser configuration that dumps cookies etc on close, you will get a google captcha every - single - fucking - time... I just end up tunneling everything through sshuttle to one of my servers to save time, but these days you also get a bunch of websites blocking IP address bl…

Post by josephcsible » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

les_diabolique wrote: post #533

thequux wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Post by anoncake » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

silveriswrong wrote: post #587

eatbots wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by matt_kantor » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

crankyoldcrank wrote: post #426

warp wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is actually doing much better in this regard than Google/Amazon/etc.. For example, in certain developing countries "social media" is included for free with your phone plan, often there is no net neutrality and competition between carriers has forced all of them to offer this. As a result, local businesses are forced to have Facebook and Instagram pages, because their audience cannot visit a regular website o…

> often there is no net neutrality Hold up, what does this mean, even? I thought "net neutrality" meant classifying ISPs in such a way that they are regulated by the FCC instead of the FTC. Obviously this is an American framing. How does that map to other countries? Also, I was assured by users on this website and many others that if the ISPs were moved to be regulated by the FTC by evil Ajit Pai the internet as we k…

Post by anoncake » Fri, Nov 27, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

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.