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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?

#151

Post by gnabgib »

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 recently failed a google-bicycle captcha.. "you can't fool me, that's a motorcycle not a bicycle!" I thought.. and then had to complete 2 more challenges. Including a cross walk one where one of the images was just asphalt and painted lines (no context/edges so it could be a parking lot, and airstrip,a highway, an intersection, or a cross-walk).

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

#154

Post by AtNightWeCode »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #136

Cloudflare has been doing some great things. But lately it seems that, maybe, they have their hands in too many cookie jars. I get the ominous feeling that things could go south real fast. I have my browser setup in a way that makes Cloudflare quite intrusive. I use the Temporary Containers extension on Firefox to open almost all websites in temporary containers (paired with the Containerise extension to whitelist th…

The problem is not really Cloudflare. Captchas are terrible from a UX perspective. Instead of Captchas a lot of companies just log suspicious activities and only enables Captchas when things gotten out of hand.

If you design a web site with this in mind from the start, then there are several ways to make the Captchas less intrusive. However, a lot of Captchas are enabled to current solutions after problems have arisen and then it may hurt the UX.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by ashvant »

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…

Usually in those cases, even if you make mistakes they get accepted. The larger the clicks, the less annotated / voted those images are, thus less severe their penalization method for wrong markings. I have observed sites that newly introduce such captcha basically accept if I just click 1/3rd of the right answers. Don't click the wrong answers as they are fully/partially introduced on purpose. It's just that you don't have to click all right answers.

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

#157

Post by short12 »

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...

Googles own captchas are Satan. Squiggly lines all over the place. Why they don't use the normally accepted captcha is beyond me

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

#158

Post by jokethrowaway »

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.

There is likely not a right answer, you have to pick what the majority picked (and there is probably a margin for you to make some mistakes)

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

#159

Post by gnabgib »

Lambent_Cactus wrote: post #52
DrBoring wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've dreamt of a captcha to prove that one is a robot, such as: solve this complex mathematical equation in 15ms.

There's a haunting version of this in Blade Runner 2049 that they call a "baseline test." Replicants have to prove they're sufficiently robotic by reciting extremely alienating things about themselves in rapid succession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h-seEowtDw

Originally the Voight-Kampff test[0] was for this purpose, from the original novel by Philip K Dick "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"[1] from 1968. The test was designed to distinguish between replicants (androids/bots) and humans. Blade Runner (both the 1982 original[2] set in 2019, and the 2017 sequel[3] set in 2049) both feature the machine.

The baseline test seemed like an unnecessary deviance, and more like an active-duty psych exam measuring the psychological effects of the job.

It's also arguably the point of the novel/movies (I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilers).

[0]: https://nautil.us/blog/the-science-behind-blade-runners-voig... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2049

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

#160

Post by majormajor »

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 doubt it. Doesn't match up at all with my experience in Dallas in 2001...

Indians or Middle Easterners I knew were not infrequently misidentified as Mexican (as was anyone of Hispanic but not Mexican background), but the idea that anyone would be so unfamiliar with the sizable Hispanic population to do a "black/white/terrorist" identification and firebomb "all the Hispanic people's cars" is hard to believe without some news articles discussing this as a big trend in 2001 Austin.

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