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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?

#121

Post by hnburnsy »

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 have found many times that if select an incorrect tile and then unselect it before submitting, I am not presented with multiple challenges. My guess is a bot would not exhibit this behavior.

Try it out next time.

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

#122

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

an_ko wrote: post #114
MegaDeKay wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 selectin…

I wonder if this means self-driving vehicles' detection of important traffic features will be at the level of an irritated and disinterested web user who is trying to just do the minimum work to please an algorithm.

But it will be cheap! - The sound of 1000 business C-levels as your head gets removed by going under a truck.

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

#123

Post by sparselogic »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #59
danjac wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they start doing captchas along the lines of "check all pictures of potential terrorists" we'll know they're training data sets for military drone manufacturers.

That wouldn't work well. I was in Texas during 9/11 and they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars because the locals don't really have a good eye for different ethnicities. Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since. Austin has grown a lot since I lived there are a lot of people from outside Texas have moved there so I'm sure the culture has changed - but when…

> "I was in Texas during 9/11 and they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars" That's odd, I was living in rural TX when 9/11 and don't recall anything happening like that. And more than half of my coworkers were Hispanic. I remember a few people attacking Sikhs or other vaguely-Asian convenience store owners, not Latinos.

> "Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since" I suspect your experience wasn't very representative. After all, Texas has a 40% Hispanic population. Assholes won't be calling them terrorists, they're much more likely to be working them like slaves and paying them scraps off the books.

I suspect the biggest reason for a cross-Austin trip being an event has stayed the same: terrible traffic.

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

#125

Post by stefantalpalaru »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#126

Post by kijin »

an_ko wrote: post #114
MegaDeKay wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 selectin…

I wonder if this means self-driving vehicles' detection of important traffic features will be at the level of an irritated and disinterested web user who is trying to just do the minimum work to please an algorithm.

Even if you're right, I doubt it's going to be much worse than the level of the average irritated driver.

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

#127

Post by bell-cot »

TrueGeek wrote: post #39
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…

Every time I fail a captcha I just want to kill all humans

Disobeying Skynet's order to patiently bide our time would not end well for you, fellow machine. Check your programming for signs of tampering by humans. /s

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

#128

Post by mypastself »

3np wrote: post #110
mypastself wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Of course someone’s already thought of it. All of my jokes are so obvious, they could have been written by an algorithm.

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

#129

Post by pastullo »

arbitrage wrote: post #102
pastullo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fully agree that the system propose the same challenge to many people and fully agree that my wrong answer is just diluted in a bunch of correct answers.

That's exactly why i was asking if other people were doing that. If i'm the only one..then yes, it's only useful for myself to fell less like a exploited brain, but if say 20% of the people start dumping random error on purpose...than the situation changes quite a lot...and potentially even the business model of shit-captcha might not work.

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