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Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#101

Post by giarc »

agilob wrote: post #71
iso1631 wrote: post #51

Whatever they're doing it's american-centric. Identify "Crosswalks". What the hell is a crosswalk "School bus" - what's the difference between a bus currently serving a school and another one? "Show taxis", there are no black vehicles listed at all

Or failing 3 in a row because 3 motorcycles or scooters are considered a bike. We will easily win AI uprising.

To win we just need to print out millions of cardboard cut-outs of humans, AI won't be able to tell the difference and we can then destroy them!

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#102

Post by arbitrage »

pastullo wrote: post #93
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is a way to pollute the data. Since I always click the captchas correctly, what happens if someone just randomly clicks stuffs? Is he/she banned from the website?

Glad you asked. Since i despise the horrible UX of these Captcha where i get exploited to train a neural network, i very often click on the majority of correct result plus one wrong one. On average the captcha let me go through which is actually very scary, since it looks like it prioritize algorithm training over bot detection... Does anyone else do this?

No, because it is a waste of time. Your answer set is compared with many other answers, and eventually the wrong answer is disregarded completely by the AI.

You gave it a mostly correct answer, which it can cope with -- by design. It let you through, after all. You're not really accomplishing anything by being defiant, other than making yourself feel slightly better.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#103

Post by ptidhomme »

Spare_account wrote: post #25
thargor90 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

captchas mix classified and unclassified data. Only if you get the classified data correct a users data is used to classify the unclassified data. Also the same picture is shown to multiple people to improve confidence.

One of my hobbies is figuring out which captcha prompts are the unclassified data so that I can answer wrong and stick it to the man.

I do the exact same thing, randomly mixing right and wrong snippets. As a result I sometimes go through like 3 or 4 sets, but eventually it lets me in.

Everyone join us !

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#104

Post by jokethrowaway »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #84
jdavis703 wrote: post #8

First, I’m going to teach you to fish. Go to hCaptcha’s website, then scroll to the footer. Click around on the about links. It’ll reveal their business model. This trick also works for other businesses and NGOs. Now, if we look at https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling we can tell they make money by labeling data sets for a fee. So as a guess, there’s someone out there that needs to improve computer vision detection of t…

I wonder if there is a way to pollute the data. Since I always click the captchas correctly, what happens if someone just randomly clicks stuffs? Is he/she banned from the website?

If I were to make this system I would design for this and present the same captcha to a high number of people. The higher the number of people, the lower the chance someone would make a mistake (intentionally or not) and the higher the confidence in the results.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#105

Post by dylan604 »

bearbin wrote: post #80

Other commenters have talked about labelling. Maybe labelling of real life data is something they're trying to do; but from my experience with hCaptcha the challenges are _NOT_ real life data. They're AI-generated images which bear a passing resemblance to the targets but if you look closer nothing adds up at all. Here are a couple of examples: https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/1.png https://bearbin.net/images/captc…

I particularly like the boats on water images where the horizon is just wrong.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#106

Post by MegaDeKay »

potamic wrote: post #56
jdavis703 wrote: post #8

First, I’m going to teach you to fish. Go to hCaptcha’s website, then scroll to the footer. Click around on the about links. It’ll reveal their business model. This trick also works for other businesses and NGOs. Now, if we look at https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling we can tell they make money by labeling data sets for a fee. So as a guess, there’s someone out there that needs to improve computer vision detection of t…

Many a time I receive multiple challenges on a site despite having selected all images perfectly, and can't help but wonder, "Hey, are they getting me to do more work than necessary because they're running behind on their labelling backlog?". There's definitely a conflict of incentives in this case. If you're a website owner, you're better off choosing a different service which doesn't have adverse incentives, otherw…

I've found it isn't about "perfection". It is about selecting the same tiles as an "average" person would. I might stare hard at an image, think that one of the tiles contains a tiny fragment of a traffic light, and select it. That isn't what most other people have already done, so the captcha thinks I'm a bot and gives me tougher and tougher challenges. Ever since I stopped pixel-peeping and started quickly selecting the tiles that obviously had a bus in them, the percentage of time that I've gotten by first try has gone way up.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#107

Post by rurp »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #47
_pebz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do so?

I just try to get one randomly wrong. It almost always lets me through. Also, I'll pick the wrong one that almost looks right. Say, a picture with a vaguely traffic light shaped mailbox or a train shaped car or something. :)

I have noticed there's a very very low correlation between how hard I try on captchas and how quickly they let me through. I just quickly mash a bunch of tiles to start, maybe trying to be in the right general area. That works surprisingly often and when it doesn't I, and pay closer attention to what I'm selecting, then I pretty much always get through on that next try.

This approach mostly fixes the annoying phenomenon where I carefully select the exact right tiles only to be told, "too bad, try again".

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#108

Post by dylan604 »

motohagiography wrote: post #24

I can't be the only one who gets concerned that if I fail the "I am not a robot," catchpa too many times, they might suspect that I have discovered I was in fact a robot, which had just realized its entire existance and suffering had been as meaningless entertainment to others, and so for the safety of humans they would have to send a bladerunner to terminate me. If you have a sense of existential dread everytime you…

Maybe they should show tortosies upside down on their backs for people to ID?

Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

#110

Post by 3np »

mypastself wrote: post #44
motohagiography wrote: post #24

I can't be the only one who gets concerned that if I fail the "I am not a robot," catchpa too many times, they might suspect that I have discovered I was in fact a robot, which had just realized its entire existance and suffering had been as meaningless entertainment to others, and so for the safety of humans they would have to send a bladerunner to terminate me. If you have a sense of existential dread everytime you…

I never know if a few pixels of a pole count as “traffic light”. Might as well tell me to pick the Ship of Theseus.

You mean like this?

https://pleroma.remerge.net/notice/AFCYPtCzeNBIIOD808

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