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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)

#661

Post by unishark »

sandworm101 wrote: post #525
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…

>>There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet That isn't what captchas are used for. There are two side to every captcha, what the website is using them for and what the captcha creator or provider is using them for. In google's case, captchas are being used to hone AI. So it is no wonder that items like hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traf…

> Given that the first market for AI-driven vehicles seems to be western nations, specifically the US, it is no surprise that google gears its captcha program to objects from that area.

This is a roundabout way of just saying the most obvious explanation (sites with US-centric captchas are presumably mostly interested in US users anyway) but wrapped up in an unnecessary conspiracy layer to add creepiness.

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

#662

Post by howLongHowLong »

unishark wrote: post #661
sandworm101 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet That isn't what captchas are used for. There are two side to every captcha, what the website is using them for and what the captcha creator or provider is using them for. In google's case, captchas are being used to hone AI. So it is no wonder that items like hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traf…

> Given that the first market for AI-driven vehicles seems to be western nations, specifically the US, it is no surprise that google gears its captcha program to objects from that area. This is a roundabout way of just saying the most obvious explanation (sites with US-centric captchas are presumably mostly interested in US users anyway) but wrapped up in an unnecessary conspiracy layer to add creepiness.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/how-security-captchas-crowdsour... (Not the best source perhaps, but I just picked one among dozens) It's not a conspiracy theory, it's actually true that captchas are used as data for self-driving car algorithms, and that the data would be useless unless it was relevant to things those cars are likely to encounter. The reason they're so common is they are distributed for free, for the same reason: more data. I often feel like I ought to get paid when presented with an annoyingly long queue of them.

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

#663

Post by Siira »

As an Iranian, I did not have problems with CAPTCHAs being “American.” Perhaps rural people might have trouble with them, but I don’t think it’s a bottleneck. Adding an example picture of what is desired will help everyone though (Cloudflare does this.).

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

#664

Post by howLongHowLong »

im3w1l wrote: post #423
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has to get bad enough for users to turn away. And it arguably isn't, yet.

I use Lyft instead of Uber because Uber forced me to do so many traffic-related captchas to install(presumably with the aim of eliminating employees eventually), I felt like they were squeezing free labor from me. It's getting there.

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

#665

Post by Siira »

warp wrote: post #420
cvhashim wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

The alternative is that these people won’t have Internet access. Poor people have difficulties procuring even food, not to mention internet. Of course, as the economical conditions improve, the tradeoffs change and net neutrality becomes worth it.

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

#666

Post by arp242 »

ev1 wrote: post #653
arp242 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It's not like I intentionally targetted Tor relays or anything, we just targetted source of spam, which ended up being a lot of Tor relays. Because we were (and actually, still are) running a rather outdated version of vBulletin (upgrading is difficult) things were getting pretty dire if we didn't do ... something.

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

#667

Post by est »

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…

> What is your favorite ice cream

Harvard University

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

#668

Post by burlesona »

leadingthenet wrote: post #659
burlesona wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s a very sweeping generalization of about 330 million people. No trace of irony?

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

#669

Post by OJFord »

archon810 wrote: post #655
OJFord wrote: 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.

London has plenty of pedestrian crossings, but they're unmarked, at least not in the same way - a stop line for cars before the lights, sure - except for 'zebra crossings', which look different, have different rules (no traffic lights and cars must give way to pedestrians) and would never be called a 'crosswalk'.

I suppose they just don't need to be, because not using one isn't 'jaywalking'. If there's too much traffic you identify a safe crossing by zebra stripes (or flashing beacon) or traffic lights or island.

When reCaptcha first asked me to identify the 'crosswalks', sure, I guessed it must be the road markings. But I just (still, to this day) select all the road markings that aren't obviously just centre direction seperating lines. I might get loads wrong, no idea.

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

#670

Post by mannykoum »

notRobot wrote: post #58
gostsamo wrote: post #12

As a blind person with english as not native language, the audio captchas are pure hell. I can't imagine other visually impaired people who don't know english at all and have to deal with a lazy website which dumps them the default english audio captcha if there is audio at all.

Try Buster. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captch... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha-sol...

Hahaha, I love the fact that someone made a Captcha solver. Proof that if Google truly wanted to test for "humanity" they would design something different.
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