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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?

#201

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by justsomehnguy »

jandrese wrote: post #174
SXX wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but Google captcha is specifically designed to annoy real people in some cases. They literally implemented slow fade-in / fade-out for images. This does absolutely nothing against actual bots, but annoying as hell for a real person. Literally any other captcha is better than this.

I thought the fade thing was specifically to trip up bots. Like bots know what the picture is long before it is shown to the user, so if the bot clicks on it then the CAPCHA knows something is up.

Which is solved exactly after this is encountered the first time, eg

if opacity -ne 100% do_not_click_yet = true

So this is totally useless to prevent bots from solving it.

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

#204

Post by dwighttk »

abeppu wrote: post #50

A lot of us are guessing that our responses are used for self-driving work ... But isn't labeling of those basic concepts in static images pretty much "solved"? I am not an expert in self-driving anything, but I don't see captchas of video from driving, I don't see stills that are half-obscured by snow, I don't see nighttime pics, I don't see weird corner cases like a van with a decal of a cyclist etc. Why don't we s…

If it were solved, the captchas wouldn’t stop bots

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

#206

Post by notatoad »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #98
azalemeth wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disagree, Google captchas in my experience are much quicker compared to hcaptcha When cloudflare switched to hcaptcha I definitely noticed it.

people tend to have very different experiences with google captchas based on how normal they are. if you block everything and try to anonymize your browsing as much as possible and otherwise do everything you can to look like a bot, you're going to get a very difficult captcha to somebody with all their browser settings on default.

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

#207

Post by JasonFruit »

dylan604 wrote: post #186
JasonFruit wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds nice though.

Not sure how serious you are, but on the chance you are... The meeting spouse in grade school/not worldly typically implies not leaving the area they grew up in at any point. I grew up in a smallish town where this happens frequently. So many people never leave the state let alone the country. Some people never even left the county. Their biggest travel is for school sporting events. In otherwords, it's not really a…

I still think it sounds nice.

Is the place you grew up intrinsically so much worse than the rest of the world? Would it be so bad to be invested in a single community for a lifetime, and to have a deep connection to the people there? I feel like I lack that, deep connections where the pull of cultural influence goes both ways. I'm not convinced that the cosmopolitan breadth of experience we may have gained outweighs the deep experience of locality that we sacrificed to get it.

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

#208

Post by not2b »

organsnyder wrote: post #200
ncann wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But GP is describing exactly the opposite: there might be a train that's not immediately visible at a glance, leading most people to not label it.

For unambiguous images almost all humans will label them the same way. For ambiguous ones humans will differ. Presumably they'll accumulate stats on each image and will be able to detect cases like this.

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

#209

Post by Guest19023892 »

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 believe this is done to get answers for unsolved captchas. For example, I have a million photos of streets filled with cars, buses, motorcycles, streetlights, and crosswalks I want to add to my captcha database. I don't want to categorize them all myself, and I want the answers to be what the average person will identify, not what I or a machine will identify.

So, I send everyone two captchas. One has a known answer and is required to be correct to access the service. The second captcha answer isn't yet known, so it doesn't matter what the user selects. However, when they get the known answer right, we log their answer for the unknown captcha. Once we get a large enough sample, we then have our top answers for the unknown captcha and can start using it for verification.

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

SXX wrote: post #118
jokethrowaway wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, Google captchas in my experience are much quicker compared to hcaptcha When cloudflare switched to hcaptcha I definitely noticed it.

Sorry, but Google captcha is specifically designed to annoy real people in some cases. They literally implemented slow fade-in / fade-out for images. This does absolutely nothing against actual bots, but annoying as hell for a real person. Literally any other captcha is better than this.

[deleted]
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