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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?

#141

Post by monkeybutton »

dyeje wrote: post #117
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…

Seems like that is another kind of labeling to me: is our generated image good enough to fool a human?

GANs with human evaluation of the discriminator.

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

#142

Post by JasonFruit »

dylan604 wrote: post #90
dfee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds nothing like my experience living in Austin 2009-2017. In fact, this is unrecognizable. > they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars Weird. This is sort of unbelievable. I think I know many Hispanics who lived in ATX during 2001, but they’ve never mentioned their car being firebombed.

The only part of that story that sounds plausible was: >>You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.

That sounds nice though.

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

#143

Post by jazzyjackson »

pastullo wrote: post #134
jokethrowaway wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

of course bro, i'm sure that no self-driving car is gonna crash as soon as i deliberatly click on the wrong bicycle picture.

lol I'm imagining a captcha that says "please hurry" to disambiguate a situation in realtime

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

GameOfFrowns wrote: post #137
jjoonathan wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a mode where it thinks you are a bot/sucker and gives you unlimited images until you give up. That's always fun.

>where it thinks you are a bot/sucker and gives you unlimited images until you give up. I frequently get these from Cloudflare when using Tor Browser. Google is basically unusable with Tor Browser.

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by Kletiomdm »

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.

They probably have some statistics in the background which tells them some form of Trustlevel.

You also need to assume that there are potentially control pictures in it as well.

I think this is a very liable approach.

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

#146

Post by umeshunni »

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.

> You're not really accomplishing anything by being defiant, other than making yourself feel slightly better.

Isn't that the goal of all virtue signaling?

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

#147

Post by jspaetzel »

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…

The broken images to me look like instances where two or more cameras or images were used and then stitched together. Probably also done while the camera and object are moving making it more likely to be wonky.

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

#148

Post by Tijdreiziger »

azalemeth wrote: post #88
potamic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google is _the worst_ for that. At least hCaptcha is a bit less culturally specific. Every time Google blocks me for refusing to label a motorbike as a "bicycle" I get utterly pissed off. And likewise with the traffic lights on the californian skies. Are the traffic lights the actual lights themselves, or the boom holding them up? I'm not a human very often, according to Google. hCaptcha tends to let me in...

> I'm not a human very often, according to Google.

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." (Well, except Google, it seems.)

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

#149

Post by NavinF »

YPPH wrote: post #77
agilob wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm still not sure whether to include the squares with a tiny fraction of the border of the vehicle. And when they fail me I wonder if I'm doing the wrong thing.

The labeling instructions for every object detection dataset I’ve used say you should include every pixel of the object.

That said, I’m sure a lot of people don’t select squares that have only 1 relevant pixel so the captcha should be lenient.

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

#150

Post by mypastself »

3np wrote: post #139
mypastself wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could have been but in this case your comment prompted it (:

Oh, that was you! I love it.

Captcha can sometimes get so philosophical.

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