41–50 of 375 posts
I was surprised there was no mention of the palette or the quality of the photos: they're all pretty washed out and gray, fuzzy with no sharp edges, and at a low resolution, like they were taken by a decade-old smartphone.
> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?
It reminds me of how nowadays when I do an incognito Google search on my phone, I need three taps just to accept the terms of service. Same with YouTube. Maybe this level of cumbersomeness is somehow legally required now, but I find it more likely that this is an attempt to subconsciously encourage people to not browse incognito—so that they can be tracked.
My understanding is that being logged in in your Google account often allows you to bypass captchas. If captchas are a miserable experience, this would have a similar effect of subconsciously discouraging incognito browsing.
For me this effect is significantly compounded by not being from the US / North America. This has come up on HN before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 ) but it still strikes me as so odd that you need quite a bit of USA cultural / vernacular knowledge to navigate the internet anywhere in the world (or at least English speaking sites?). What a strange view into another country to see each day!
You have to play a game of guessing what other people will guess, and yeah, if you aren't from the US that's a huge handicap, if you aren't neurotypical that's a huge handicap, if you have bad luck that day that's a huge handicap. Google doesn't give a shit, the people who put the captcha in place don't give a shit, you just have to deal with the little Kafka nightmare they dump you in and hope it doesn't lock you out of something critical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Google deems your request suspicious enough, yes. You can try this yourself by Googling something suspicious, like common Google dorks. After a few variations of WordPress/phpAdmin Google dorks, you'll get a popup asking you to fill out a CAPTCHA to continue. If you share your IP with lots of people (CGNAT, schools, large offices) then enough weird Googling can get the entire IP address stuck behind CAPTCHA's for…
> like common Google dorks What is a 'Google dork' and what are the common ones?
This is an example:
>intext:phpMyAdmin SQL Dump filetype:sql intext:INSERT INTO `admin` (`id`, `user`, `password`) VALUES
It'll find publicly accessible phpMyAdmin backups, so don't click any of the results if you want to stay in the legal side of things.
Googling "Google dork" or "Google hacking" should provide you with more examples. If you try modifying the query a few times, Google will make you fill out a captcha.
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But metal detectors don't block your way for 20 seconds and they don't ever put you into an eternal loop of scanning again and again until you just give up and decide to live without.
They do delay customers by 20 seconds, because if we’re carrying metal then we’ve got to be inspected by security.
I was thinking how to solve this problem and I came to the conclusion that it is very hard to design puzzle for every country in the world so I decided to put them in cultures something like Civ game but then again the whole process of solving Captcha should be easy not exhausting and time consuming.
My solution was to use webcam if available and make people wave hand or some other gesture in order to verify that you are really human. You can detect webcam presence and webcam input very easily. Or if mic is present you can use mic and pronounce some sentence in order to verify that you are human. As well as webcam you can detect mic presence and mic input easily so Captcha can not be cheated by automated bots.
My solution is humane input as solution to the puzzle or to the task not observing pictures and writing down the text because every computer bot can do it just as good as humans or even better.
Captcha should be easy to do for humans, easy to verify but hard to solve for bots.
In my opinion depressing Captcha is not the problem the problem is that bots came to the point where they are as good as humans solving Captcha but some people struggle solving Captcha because they are not familiar with American culture or simply they do not know English.
For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.
Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating, especially if you fail the captcha a few times in a row.
For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.