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

michaels.world

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

#121

Post by hyperman1 »

I think, unfortunately, most accessibility options are not intended to actually be used.

If you are a governement or bigco, accessibility is part of your baseline requirements. You must be able to say: Yes, we are accessible. Otherwise, the public will cause a stink.

So you take your list of vendors, and remove any that don't say they enable accessibility. Vendors know this and make sure they say they are.

Meanwhile, it is a hard to get right feature, only applicable to a small part of your userbase. Multiple disabilities require different affordances. No developer on the team really understands the actual requirement.

The people requiring accessibility will go somewhere else, or grumble and make do. Neither will be detected on any metrics board.

This combination promotes shelfware: Things you buy and put on a shelf somewhere but never really use.

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

#122

Post by jchw »

martin_a wrote: post #109
jchw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I have been running web services for around 22 years I believe. At the very beginning, I had zero problems with deliverability to most addresses. However, even early on, I do remember plenty of forums that mentioned that Yahoo! or Hotmail tended to drop their confirmation e-mails into SPAM. Smaller operators had an advantage in being lower volume; I think that gives you a higher likelihood of delivery. That said, their emails are also more likely to get caught up in SPAM filters without remediation.

Something has changed recently, though. I have found it increasingly hard to even get an IP that is not blocked anymore. I recently migrated a VPS that was almost 10 years old that was running its own e-mail services, and after a lot of struggling... I gave up. It now has to go through an SMTP proxy to send e-mail. This bums me out, but after multiple attempts to get an IP that worked, I gave up. The provider did tell me that I was grandfathered in to have outgoing SMTP enabled on my servers (something that new users do not have by default, by the way) but recommended I stop using it.

Is the network open? Yes. Does everyone have deliverability problems? Probably not. But maybe another question: If you did have deliverability problems to some major provider, would you even know about it? If you're not very high volume, maybe not!

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

#123

Post by njarboe »

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.

Would be great if the US government somehow facilitated micropayment. Either by creating their own system or removing the capital gains reporting requirements on crypto (maybe up to $10k/year).

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

#124

Post by danaris »

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…

If you expect 99% of normal internet users to maintain a crypto wallet of any kind just to access certain websites—even leaving aside the actual cost—you're going to be sorely disappointed.

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

#125

Post by SirMaster »

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…

CAPTCHA definitely works in some cases.

On our website, without CAPTCHA we get dozens of forms filled out by bots per day. With the CAPTCHA we get 0.

So sure it may be cheap to defeat the CAPTCHA, but nobody seems to be willing to go through that small hoop to do it on our website.

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

#126

Post by dreamcompiler »

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…

> I hope we can end the CAPTCHA experiment soon. It didn't work.

Well it sort of worked before we got modern AI image recognizers, but even then they had to continue making the challenges harder to keep up with the recognizer software.

Now the damn things have crossed over into the domain of "easier for a machine to solve than a human" so they're worthless for their original purpose.

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

#127

Post by danaris »

mapt wrote: post #101
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)

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…

And while it's not quite the same kind of CAPTCHA, I've not infrequently run into Cloudflare "prove you're human" screens that just...never let me through. I click the box, it loads for a second, turns into a nice checkmark, and then...reloads the "prove you're human" page. Infinite loop (as far as I can tell, anyway, not having infinite time).

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

#128

Post by reginald78 »

oniony wrote: post #115
andrepd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you're failing the captchas because you're doing them wrong, think again. Google captcha intentionally fails you a couple times if they don't have enough tracking info to determine that you're legit. So you solve the captcha correctly but are still lied to that "you've failed to solve the captcha, try again". That and the "fading images slowly to pretend like you have bad internet" thing. Disgusting beha…

Maybe they purposely load the images slowly to make it more expensive for the bot owners.

Also just catches people they think might be bots.

I've definitely encountered captcha tarpit logins before that could never be solved until I changed VPN endpoint. I was never getting in.

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

#129

Post by danaris »

cwillu wrote: post #104
Workaccount2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Scaling is not a right.

God I wish this could be plastered in letters 1000 feet high above Silicon Valley.

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

#130

Post by salviati »

SirMaster wrote: post #125
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…

CAPTCHA definitely works in some cases. On our website, without CAPTCHA we get dozens of forms filled out by bots per day. With the CAPTCHA we get 0. So sure it may be cheap to defeat the CAPTCHA, but nobody seems to be willing to go through that small hoop to do it on our website.

I believe that 0 will be a higher number next year. And an even higher the following year.
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