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I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

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Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#101

Post by mapt »

ta1243 wrote: post #22
Rastonbury wrote: post #14

Some captchas are getting pretty discriminatory, not everyone lives in the West and can identify the objects they are asking you to. Another recent one sticks out where they asked me to pick a shape as the same number of conoids on screen. If you ask people on a street what a conoids I bet a significant amount will give you blank looks Also at least now I know some people call those markings crosswalks

Sorry I live in the west, what's a "crosswalk" Did you mean to say > not everyone lives in the USA Other things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant, yellow taxis, yellow buses (Obviously I do, because of American cultural imperialism through things like Captchas which mean the world has to understand American cultural touchstones)

Unfortunately, even understanding these things, on a shared connection it might take you literally two or three minutes of captcha work before Google recognizes your personhood.

Am I identifying the boxes wrong? Am I doing it too fast? Where do "Stairs" begin and end? Does a motorcycle include its rider? Or is Google just fucking with me and failing me on purpose?

My workplace had a period this year where captcha was put into the cashier checkout process.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#102

Post by Scarblac »

inetknght wrote: post #32
michaelt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As big as Google, Facebook, or Amazon are, they would struggle under the load of trying to create a system for determining who is "truly" blind... and that's still true if we ignore questions like exactly what "blind" is anyhow. In several countries, the government issues certificates of blindness [1] which grant access to certain extra types of support. We don't want severely vision-impaired people being forced to…

> So there are legal standards for what exactly blind is, and certificates. In the USA, people are not yet required to provide identification when signing up for "free" services. There are real concerns around privacy. A certification of blindness is exactly one of those privacy concerns, being a medical issue. You think it would be a good idea to give that private information to the criminal organizations of big tec…

These are already users that want to let the company know that they are blind in order to qualify for special treatment. In that case showing the certificate doesn't seem to be much of an extra privacy issue to me.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#103

Post by RobMurray »

jerf wrote: post #10
soraminazuki wrote: post #5

The title kind of makes it appear far less of a problem than it actually is, because according to the article, hCaptcha made multiple rude and evidence-free accusations of lying despite the author actually being blind.

Remember that from hCaptcha's point of view, by this point they've probably dealt with hundreds of other people claiming that they are blind when they really aren't, so their bots will work. This isn't a defense, just an explanation... but it is also an explanation of why the entire idea of "we'll not give blind people a way past the CAPTCHA but just give a pass to 'real' blind people so we can pass ADA", which is th…

I am perfectly happy with having to prove that I am blind to get my bus pass, but if It was necessary to access a website I would just not use that site. Lets hope it never gets that bad. There's always Anticaptcha to fall back on, but I hate their business model.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#104

Post by cwillu »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #25
jerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that from hCaptcha's point of view, by this point they've probably dealt with hundreds of other people claiming that they are blind when they really aren't, so their bots will work. This isn't a defense, just an explanation... but it is also an explanation of why the entire idea of "we'll not give blind people a way past the CAPTCHA but just give a pass to 'real' blind people so we can pass ADA", which is th…

This is a problem so chronic across so many fields that I wish there was single term to describe it. User POV :"Wow, provider is a really shitty entity and had no respect for my legitimate problem." Provider POV: "We get a huge number of illegitimate claims identical to legitimate ones regularly, the system would collapse if we didn't do heavy triage, the problem is the level of abuse, not a moral bankruptcy on our p…

“Moral bankruptcy” seems like a quite apt description of the state of affairs of being unable to afford to operate morally at a given level of scale.

Scaling is not a right.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#105

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

jstanley wrote: post #85
ta1243 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I live in the west, what's a "crosswalk" Did you mean to say > not everyone lives in the USA Other things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant, yellow taxis, yellow buses (Obviously I do, because of American cultural imperialism through things like Captchas which mean the world has to understand American cultural touchstones)

You don't think you could identify yellow buses without cultural knowledge? I think simply knowing "yellow" and "buses" would suffice.

It's hard to really say objectively, as the strange yellow American school bus is kind of an iconic image - perhaps because it looks so different to a regular public transport bus as seen around the rest of the world.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#106

Post by throwaway2037 »

mapt wrote: post #93
jchw wrote: post #41

I hope we can end the CAPTCHA experiment soon. It didn't work. Phone verification isn't good either, but for as much as I hate phone verification at least it actually raises the cost of spamming somewhat. CAPTCHA does not. Almost all turnkey CAPTCHA services can be solved for pennies. Solving the problems of SPAM and malicious traffic will be challenging... I am worried it will come down to three possible things: - A…

There is another option. CAPTCHA is useful only when it is costly to solve. It is a costly signal that this is a real person, or at least is more than 1/10^9th of a real person (you're not running a fully automated spam system). The postal service also has costs - everybody that wants to move something through the postal service needs to buy a stamp. Transport fees are a 'natural' way to moderate traffic and deter sp…

This sounds like the same argument that was made for about 10 years (2000 to 2010) that micropayments would save traditional (print) media in a digital world. It didn't work due to market fragmentation and friction to make a payment.

And, the reality of your fancy idea is that normie users would turn away if they made a mistake on the CAPTCHA and were suddenly presented with a screen "charging" them one pence.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#107

Post by mapt »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #106
mapt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another option. CAPTCHA is useful only when it is costly to solve. It is a costly signal that this is a real person, or at least is more than 1/10^9th of a real person (you're not running a fully automated spam system). The postal service also has costs - everybody that wants to move something through the postal service needs to buy a stamp. Transport fees are a 'natural' way to moderate traffic and deter sp…

This sounds like the same argument that was made for about 10 years (2000 to 2010) that micropayments would save traditional (print) media in a digital world. It didn't work due to market fragmentation and friction to make a payment. And, the reality of your fancy idea is that normie users would turn away if they made a mistake on the CAPTCHA and were suddenly presented with a screen "charging" them one pence.

This isn't about "making a mistake on the captcha", this is about charging them one pence for every attempt and just not having a captcha.

It's an entirely different sort of system, and it would require a cordoned off section of the Internet to implement it top-down, but it's technically viable.

The defining insight here is how many orders of magnitude difference there is between the "That price is negligible" threshold for a human being, and the "That price is negligible" threshold for an automated system. Sure there are adoption issues, but for all applications where there are several orders of magnitude difference, such a system makes some degree of sense.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#108

Post by itishappy »

jstanley wrote: post #85
ta1243 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I live in the west, what's a "crosswalk" Did you mean to say > not everyone lives in the USA Other things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant, yellow taxis, yellow buses (Obviously I do, because of American cultural imperialism through things like Captchas which mean the world has to understand American cultural touchstones)

You don't think you could identify yellow buses without cultural knowledge? I think simply knowing "yellow" and "buses" would suffice.

Does DHL delivery via yellow busses?

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#109

Post by martin_a »

jchw wrote: post #82
Telemakhos wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t feel so much like the end of the “open web” as it does a rehash of USENET and email spam issues. Social media killed USENET, and email managed its spam issues thanks to filtering.

Email kind of solved its SPAM issues, but it came at great costs. It's possible but quite hard to run your own e-mail server; if you're not on a major provider, the possibility is high that a major provider will at some point have deliverability issues to or from you due to automated anti-SPAM measures. The degree of difficulty with participating in the network does somewhat degrade its openness in my opinion. If any…

> It's possible but quite hard to run your own e-mail server; if you're not on a major provider, the possibility is high that a major provider will at some point have deliverability issues to or from you due to automated anti-SPAM measures.

In the roughly 25 years that I've used shared webhosting to have my own domainname and mailboxes, deliverability was never an issue. Never tried to send thousands of mails though, so...

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#110

Post by RobMurray »

Scarblac wrote: post #102
inetknght wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So there are legal standards for what exactly blind is, and certificates. In the USA, people are not yet required to provide identification when signing up for "free" services. There are real concerns around privacy. A certification of blindness is exactly one of those privacy concerns, being a medical issue. You think it would be a good idea to give that private information to the criminal organizations of big tec…

These are already users that want to let the company know that they are blind in order to qualify for special treatment. In that case showing the certificate doesn't seem to be much of an extra privacy issue to me.

Accessibility isn't special treatment! As I said before I would never provide proof of identity to simply access a website.
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