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

shkspr.mobi

651–660 of 700 posts

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

#651
post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you actually need to recover the account at some point, you might need the answers to the security questions.

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

#652
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…

Think of it as more like Comcast shouldn't be allowed to charge you 100x per GB (in addition to being your only choice in internet) if your traffic is to/from any streaming provider while providing their own streaming service for free, or throttle your usage of "other streaming traffic" to sub-144p quality. [OK, in reality, every mobile carrier does this in the US]

In an international, developing country context, outside of some places like India with Jio's cheap plans, it is incredibly frequent that you are paying per MB or similar at rates that would be unaffordable otherwise. Facebook funds these things so that your usage of Facebook's apps, Whatsapp, Instagram do not count against quota and are free to use. Thus local competitors get no visits and don't run their own sites because users do not want to pay a day's wages to browse your menu when they could browse your menu for free on their FB page.

It has pros and cons, one thing being that they don't have to pay for data and they get access to some portions of the internet, which is good? But it also makes it completely impossible for a local player funded locally without the billions acquired elsewhere to start, because people quite literally cannot afford to use your service unless you can afford to pay for all of them to; you can't compete. And since it's their only choice, now they monopolize and capture an entire country's worth of communications from start to finish. You'll see whatsapp numbers in many countries in place of a phone number or website.

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

#653
post #231
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like Google punishing you for taking actions to increase your privacy, which not-so-coincidentally reduces the data they're able to hoover up from you.

That's just silly; it's well known that Tor nodes are widely abused by spam bots. Google is "punishing" known sources of spam. When I ran a forum many Tor nodes ended up being outright blocked, since there was so much spam coming from them.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. I run Tor relays to support the network, but at the same time having moderated a forum that received tens of thousands of signups per day over Tor and NordVPN and PIA, all of which were able to verify email via various domains,, all of which were for spam...

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others pointed out, that was likely intentional. Apple designed this safety mechanism into the laptop, so they would not have to deal with such warranty claims. Also the temperature change is not a problem while the laptop is non-operating. The alternative therefore is to wait for 10-15 min before turning it on.

This is not entirely accurate. Electronic devices are fogging up just like my glasses everytime I come inside. This is known to trip the water sensitive stickers used to deny warranty, even if the problem is obviously unrelated. Those are triggered regardless of if the device is powered on or off. To me this is strong evidence that electronic devices are not tested properly for our climate.

That moisture indicators are used as a way to weasel out of warranty claims is indeed common. But that was not what I was referring to.

What I mean with having fewer warranty claims is that the Macbook doesn't break in the first place. Condensing water is not a problem while the device is powered off, and will evaporate once it reaches room temperature.

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

#655
post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying London doesn't have crosswalks? I find that hard to believe.

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

#656
post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying London doesn't have crosswalks? I find that hard to believe.

They are called zebra crossings outside the US. They also look different.

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

#657
post #597
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 is the first thing I've remembered too. This is very much US thing, don't remember ever seeing it in other countries (maybe they exist, but not where I lived) - at least not in the form Google wants them.

They exist in Singapore, and looks a bit like the typical one in the US.

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

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't anything like the sort of questions involved in IQ tests. IQ tests rarely involve words at all, usually a series of geometric shapes where you're supposed to pick the next one.

Depends on the test. There's been a move away from tests that require cultural or language specific knowledge and which instead rely on "which shape in the sequence comes next" type questions but they have their own set of problems in that they don't capture linguistic ability which is a part of intelligence, and are also useless for blind people. Earlier IQ tests required a lot of culturally specific knowledge, and…

So does this mean Einstein's IQ was subjective? Was he supposedly smart because he had encountered things on the test before? Would he score lower on one today?

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

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody should have to know this, frankly.

I agree nobody should have to know this, but on the other hand what harm does it do to learn it? In the US in elementary school I studied world capitals, major cities, history, etc. and came away with a pretty decent primer on things overseas, which I really value. Later in life I’ve come to know a fair bit about European football, about daily life in Taiwan, about the systems of government in Australia and New Zeala…

> but on the other hand what harm does it do to learn it?

None. In fact, I personally thought this was an interesting little fact to learn. I didn't get worked up about it, all I said is that you shouldn't have to know it.

However, because Americans aren't very culturally sensitive with respect to foreigners, there's lots of little things that we do have to learn to access the so-called global internet.

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

#660
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a flame war between US-English and UK-English speakers, where one of the former said “if it weren't for us, you'd be speaking German now” and one of the latter ones said “if it weren't for the French, you'd still speak English now”.

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

Like random3821 commented, it's about American English not being “proper” English (while supposedly if the US of A were a British colony, it would be “proper”.)
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