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

shkspr.mobi

641–650 of 700 posts

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

#641
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's CAPTCHA is specifically engineered to gaslight you though. Often it will ask you to identify fire hydrants or bicycles, and despite selecting all of them (and it being easy to recognise them as they are fairly unique objects), it will still give you an error, and give you a new set of images to try again. If it is feeling really malevolent it will even give you a third round. Hell, it happens regularly on th…

Ok, apart of the fact hackernews just made me fill in a captcha to register this one-time account (neverthelss, cudos HN, you are still better than the rest): I do not understand Hcaptcha hype here. Since CloudFlare switched to Hcaptcha, as a VPN user, every time I run into a site that has CloudFlare / Hcaptcha, I can forget to pass that test. No matter how many times I try, CloudFlare still shows it all the time. It…

There might be something really particular about your setup that trips up Hcaptcha.

I run Firefox with a stringent profile config, Ublocker in medium mode (3rd party default deny), I don’t care about cookies, Cookiebro, LocalCDN, Canvasblocker, Smart Referrer, on PIA VPN, and I never have issues with Hcaptcha.

As far as Privacy Pass goes: their code is on GitHub and you can verify the checksums. Doesn’t give me a 100% guarantee but it’s good enough for me.

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

#642
post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of sites require security questions (think banks and healthcare services).

That doesn't seem to be a reason to record the garbage answer in a password manager.

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

#643
post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it seems reasonably sane if you read through it. It doesn't matter if it seems sane that way. How many seconds does a driver have to read through that all when he's driving near the speed limit? Do we expect drivers to still keep an eye on the road while trying to decipher it? Do we expect every driver to slam on the brakes, and stand still until they've parsed it all?

I think the idea is you stop, read the sign (probably need to get out of the car), then either stay or go after parsing. Or if you're a regular you learn the rules that apply to you.

But it includes "No Stopping" and you need to read the fine print to find out when :)

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

#644
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…

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.

It's very much an issue with hCaptcha as well. I have to frequently identify US parking meters that I only vaguely know from Hollywood movies.

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

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is interesting on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_signs_in_the_United_State... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_on_Uniform_Traffic_Cont...

There's also a comparison between English-speaking countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_traffic_signs_in... I find it interesting how the US uses text for almost everything, and how Canada is sort of a mix of US-style and European-style signs.

Canada is officially bilingual, so it makes sense that text-only signs are less common.

Thanks for link, it was interesting to see.

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

#647
Wouldn’t geo-locating the client request, and selecting the CAPTCHA challenge accordingly, be a way to mitigate this risk? i.e. for client requests from the US, it’s “Please select all the images of crosswalks” with photos of American crosswalks, but for Commonwealth countries it’s “Please select all the images of zebra crossings”. Admittedly there are flaws in this plan, such as when someone uses a VPN to obfuscate their IP address, but surely it would be a net gain?

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

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not American, and I agree there is a lot of information there, but it seems reasonably sane if you read through it. I don't see any obvious contradictions. You can't park 11-1 tuesday due to street cleaning. You can't stop there mon-fri 7:30-16:00 with the exception of 7:30-8 for school business (dropping the kids off). You can park mon-fri between 4 and 6, once per day, per district (to pick up your kids after s…

I am American, and it confuses me, which perhaps proves the point. In particular, why is it necessary to point out that parking is prohibited from 11 to 1 on Tuesday, when stopping of any kind is already prohibited on a superset of that time (7:30-4 M-F)?

Look at the bottom bolt on the "No Parking" sign: It's partially covered by the later-added "No Stopping" sign.

Also, because this is apparently in a school zone, you have to think about how stopping is different from parking: You don't have to pull into a parking zone to drop off your kid, you can just stop momentarily in the middle of the street. During the non-overlap hours, you can pull over and park, just not stop in the street.

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

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

> Mountain (Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado)

..and to explain this one geographically, refers to the Rocky Mountains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountains

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

#650

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.

This would be a reCAPTCHA: there were no parking meter questions running on hCaptcha yesterday, from a quick check.
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