I just hit the back button when I encounter such a website hosted by Cloudflare this way.
Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
161–170 of 272 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
#162Earlier 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…
I've noticed that some sites deliberately do this or have lousy code that fails to properly acknowledge captcha completions. Take archive.is/archive.fo/archive.today, for example. If you're using Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) or iCloud Private Relay, and you visit https://archive.is/ , you'll get what looks like a Cloudflare screening page. It's not, though: that page is part of archive.is and is served to Cloudflare DNS…
I remember reading the CF founders about how archive.is didn't want cloudflare dns users to resolve to archive, so they respect that.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
#163Other 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?
Exactly. That is another way to improve accuracy once you have done it ”in a regular” way already. You can look for synthetic image generation and it’s benefits on model accuracy and optimization.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
#165Earlier 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.
That's about as much attention the average driver pays anyways. I drive a motorcycle, I KNOW that.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, it's not like they will label something a train just because a single person says so. But if you have 10k responses with 95% confidence saying it's a train, it's very likely to be the case.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
#167First, 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…
You just gave me the idea to start a captcha service designed for datasets relevant for the prolitariet. Not sure how viable it is (what kind of data would be useful for the prols in a revolution) but it was a fun thought experiment.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
#168Earlier 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…
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 kinda go the other way -- could a FFT heuristic mistake this feature for a crosswalk? Then I'll select it, whether or not it's actually crosswalk. Most of the time, this works. It's a stick in the eye of our prenatal robot overlord.
Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
#169Earlier 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…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
#170Earlier 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...
That same case happened to me! Another example is Parking Meters, they don't exist in my country and I'd never seen them before.