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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?

#241

Post by antonvs »

JasonFruit wrote: post #207
dylan604 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Is the place you grew up intrinsically so much worse than the rest of the world?

For many people, the answer is a pretty definitive yes. I grew up in apartheid South Africa and left mainly to escape two years of compulsory military service helping enforce apartheid rule.

But if you speak to immigrants in any first world country, you'll find lots of similar stories. People having migrated because of severe political or economic issues.

> 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.

What stops you going back, in that case?

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

#242

Post by rawling »

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…

> My guess is it’s a self driving car company, but who knows.

As always, https://xkcd.com/1897

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

#243

Post by Handytinge »

ValentineC wrote: post #217
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...

> Google is _the worst_ for that. At least hCaptcha is a bit less culturally specific. One example I keep ranting about: I think countries outside the US have different terms for "crosswalks". I personally know them as "zebra crossings", and it took a while for the reCaptcha request to click in my mind.

Pedestrian crossings here. I'd also not heard the term "crosswalk" until reCaptcha. Yet another bullshit Americanisation infecting the worlds culture.

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

#244

Post by masukomi »

lapetitejort wrote: post #234
an_ko wrote: post #114

Earlier 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.

I'd rather that than a computer hemming and hawing over whether a single pixel is an oncoming truck and not turning just in case.

a computer "hemming and hawing" as that one accident where it couldn't decide if it was a bicycle or a person has nothing to do with the training. It's what the developers decided to do with input that had a low confidence score. There will ALWAYS be low-confidence ratings on real world data regardless of how good your training is.

Instead of saying "oh crap there's SOMETHING there we should stop" they said "huh, no let's loop on testing it until we figure it out or run it over....whichever comes first."

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

#245

Post by deadbunny »

azalemeth wrote: post #100
rosndo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Don't forget that Recaptcha magically works better in Chrome, and even bettery-better if you're logged into a Google account. In FF (with tracking protection) you can expect to see the enforced wait and "Please try again". Honestly, it's awful. Half the time I have to second-guess what the average American would think which of the (noise-added, corrupted) images matches the description.

The reCaptcha check boxes straight up fail for me now in FF on Linux, have done for a few months.

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

#246

Post by SXX »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #233
justsomehnguy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely then they look at timing, people will click anywhere from, let's say 50% opacity, but bots always wait?

Do you seriously think that people who programm the bots incapable of taking it into account?

Bypass for this fading was obviously implementrd next day this first appear on reCaptcha.

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

#247

Post by SXX »

bluGill wrote: post #238
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely then they look at timing, people will click anywhere from, let's say 50% opacity, but bots always wait?

Easy for a bot to fake that with a random number generator. If nothing else bot authors can collect their own statistics. I understand the bots have an army of people in the background for images they don't understand yet, just collect timing data from that set and have your random number generator emulate that timing data. (I'm guessing a bell curve)

Actually having army of people it's exactly how complex recaptha's are bypassed. It's less than $1 for 1000 captcha:

https://anti-captcha.com/

There of course options with image recognition, but they're less reliable.

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

#248

Post by jorvi »

notatoad wrote: post #206
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.

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.

Yup. This reminds me of the ‘introduction’ of an old hacker simulation game from 2004 that was quite prescient.

“ In the year 2012, the corporations of the world paved over the Internet, designing their own network system. Keeping the same name, they developed a system where every piece of information was audited and paid for before it was passed on to the world at large. Those who still followed the ideology of an open and uncontrolled Internet gathered what resources they could and formed the SwitchNet. Build mostly out of discarded technologies and backdoors in the current Internet, it allowed some manner of uncontrolled communication around the world. The "Hacker Outpost" is in need of new recruits to perform missions in information gathering against the corporations, which will allow them to increase the presence of the SwitchNet in the world.”

And the slightly different press release one: “ In 2012, a new Internet was introduced--one that prohibited users from posting anything on personal home pages, prohibited them from using software of their choice, and from having an e-mail address. Having no place to stay, hackers created the SwitchNet, an underground network operating on the old wires and infrastructure of the original Internet”

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

#249

Post by coolspot »

dwighttk wrote: post #204
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

Maybe they don’t?
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