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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?

#251

Post by seg_lol »

masukomi wrote: post #244
lapetitejort wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also if the car wants to stop too much because of low confidence, just turn the brakes off.

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

#252

Post by fragmede »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #106
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…

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…

So take the image, shift it by a fraction of a tile, and rerun.

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

#253

Post by discardedrefuse »

wallacoloo wrote: post #231
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…

dunno where we’re at today with newer captcha models, but for old-style static image captchas there used to be browser extensions where you could solve (say) 100 captchas in one sitting and then navigate the web freely and the next NN captchas your browser receives would be solved automatically. or you could pay like $1 to cover 1000 captcha solutions. again, not sure if these still exist for newer style captchas tho…

I've inadvertently made captchas worse for myself (in the interest of privacy). My current method of simply not visiting the site has been working well enough. I'm certainly not going to pay for an extension to solve them for me. That sounds crazy. "Am I a robot? Yes, I am."

Anyways, my post was actually less about captchas and more about Cloudflare's silent consolidation of internet traffic.

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

#254

Post by azalemeth »

SXX wrote: post #247
bluGill wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly, that service looks like something I'm almost tempted to pay for myself. $1 per 1000 recaptchas is a lot cheaper than how I value my time, at the very least. It's not like google couldn't pay people to do these ML training datasets; I resent giving them free labour.

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

#255

Post by SXX »

azalemeth wrote: post #254
SXX wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly, that service looks like something I'm almost tempted to pay for myself. $1 per 1000 recaptchas is a lot cheaper than how I value my time, at the very least. It's not like google couldn't pay people to do these ML training datasets; I resent giving them free labour.

Unfortunately I doubt that "recaptcha solver" can be built as browser extension. Most of advanced bots for parsing automation built on proprietary platforms like ZennoPoster and they basically heavily modify Firefox / Chromium.

Also latency of human-recognition service is quite high so while you wouldn't need to solve it you'll need to wait for number of seconds anyway.

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

#257

Post by cdot2 »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #96
cdot2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it make sense to make taxis bright colors so they're easier to see? Why would you paint them black?

Because WWII era London sensibilities. Now it’s a tradition.

That's very English.

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

#258

Post by perl4ever »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #237
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love a rant on this one... Sometimes the bus/boat/truck has motorbikes sometimes bicycles. Is that a petrol-powered bicycle, or a motorbike to the [USAmerican?] person who wrote the rules!? Are all large yellow vehicles buses in USA or do you have minibuses, oh wait, are minibuses buses. I've worked out fire engines are trucks for captchas, not sure about Transit-type vehicles, lorries are trucks apparently but goo…

> lorries are trucks apparently but goods trucks on railways are not trucks! In the US, lorry == truck. Never heard the term goods truck before today, but I think it's what we call a boxcar.

A "truck" on a railway car is apparently a "bogie" in the UK.

A bogie in India seems to be a railway car in the US.

Then there are intermodal containers, smaller than boxcars, I think they are hauled by truck (lorry) after being unloaded from a flatcar.

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

#259

Post by skinnymuch »

rosndo wrote: post #228
skinnymuch wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn’t do this no matter what ofc. But why the devs? Sure the devs are well paid and privileged. That’s mostly relative to others in society. They are still more cogs than anything.

Easier target, a couple of google devs hanging on a public square would do much to disincentivize others from working on similar products in the future. At least executives can dream of hiding behind private security, for mere developers earning 300k/yr the situation isn’t so rosy.

It wouldn’t really disincentivize that much. You aren’t grasping the status quo and power dynamics of all of this. Double that $300K and even i would strongly consider risking my life for that amount of money for some time. That money is peanuts in the scheme of things but is enormous to many, many people.

Seriously. If Google doubled that money and the only way for me to be safe would be to stay in some glorified prison while working, I’d probably do it for a few years.

All you’re doing is pointing out how bad the power dynamics are and attacking the weakest and least powerful parts of said dynamics. When there are so many simple ways to get around this sort of scheming. Mine is one example. When you’re talking about cogs. It is extremely easy to replace them. It is sad you want to attack the working class (in this situation it’s privileged workers making a lot but in terms of the system, they fit into this).

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

#260

Post by flubflub »

Guest19023892 wrote: post #209
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…

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 answe…

I always assumed that's how it works so would do the first correctly and random clicks for the second. This is as I was uninterested though doubt it is still that simple.

I wonder, what are the minimum number of labels per image to ensure clean data?

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