Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

clivethompson.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 375 posts

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#251

Post by BoorishBears »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #244
random_upvoter wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm member of a a religious (yogic) organisation and we have our own little chanting on Saturdays. When Covid broke out this obviously became impossible so we decided to have our meetings on Zoom instead. Now we have one woman in our group with some intellectual disability, a wonderful, sweet woman with the kindest heart in the world. Being 100% computer illiterate, she still decided to buy a tablet so she could f…

After years and years of captchas I still have no idea if I’m supposed to select all the poles for the traffic lights as well.

Those are signal/traffic/light poles: https://www.nycstreetdesign.info/lighting/signal-poles

https://www.mainstreetmaterials.com/lighting-and-electrical/...

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#252

Post by arpa »

adrr wrote: post #213
dylan604 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate captchas with a passion, yet I was recently forced to deploy it on website due to direct instructions from the credit card processor. The system was being used to roll through credit cards script-o-matically, and they mandated captchas to be deployed on threat of closing our account if not. So if anyone has better solution so I can eliminate the G and is Wordpress happy, I'm all ears (or eyes reading in this c…

You don’t need a captcha if you’re willing to put some engineering resources at it. Check the IP reputation. Fingerprint the browser, they never bot from mobile devices. It’s always zombie windows boxes. Whitelist all your marketing traffic because that traffic is clean.

> never bot from mobile devices

;]

> IP reputation

my ISP has, it seems, all of their addresses in a blacklist. The ips are also dynamic.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#253

Post by arpa »

TobTobXX wrote: post #111
dylan604 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry. meant better than captcha like solutions. i know there are others, but it's still click here until we believe you're not a bot.

https://friendlycaptcha.com/ Requires the browser to complete a Proof of Work challange. Not for verifying humanness, but against spam / dos attacks.

That's not a captcha. Computations are cheap. This is not really solving anything...

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#254

Post by arpa »

dylan604 wrote: post #191
Gigachad wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of work is horrific. Means someones old phone has a meltdown trying to load the page while a warehouse in china with the latest GPUs cranks out billions of proofs per second. You could even utilize botnets to get random laptops and fridges to do your PoW.

If this was a mining situation, then yes, it would be dumb. Is that what this is actually doing though? Is it PoW for a mining operation, or just causing some electrons to be moved around to prove your not a bot? I didn't read too far into what the PoW actually is since their demo shat the bed.

how does doing computation without human interaction prove you're not a bot? It only proves you're running a browser with javascript enabled on average hardware.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#255

Post by domnomnom »

crazygringo wrote: post #78
mixedCase wrote: post #59

I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They…

It's for this very reason I'm so happy to see something like this article on HN, and I'm so happy to see your comment too. I think I know exactly where you're coming from -- I was exactly the same way when I was younger. I was 100% extremely logical, and my emotional awareness was... exceedingly underdeveloped. Long story short, I got into different artistic pursuits where I was forced to develop my emotional awarene…

I feel like your comment was expressed in sort of a dick way, but I also think it strikes at a truth that’s so deep and needed in our society. So thanks for the comment.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#256

Post by enriquto »

innocenat wrote: post #242
andrepd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be sort of okay with the general idea of proving I'm not a robot, you know what really rubs me the wrong way? It's how blatantly dishonest and disrespectful it is. Let me explain: google decides if you're human based on the data it has on you, such as your browsing profile and whether you're logged in to your Google account. Therefore it punishes you for trying to have privacy or refusing to use google services,…

What I hate more is US-centric of the CAPTCHA. Not only for reCAPTCHA, hCAPTCHA also failed in this regard. I mentioned before, but once I got present with hCAPTCHA asking me to select 電車 (lit. electric train, but since all trains in big cities in Japan are electric train, 'train' in English also usually got translated as 電車). There's a picture of diesel train in the choice. Do I select it? idk. Lately I have been pr…

...not to speak of "fire hydrants" which I cannot fathom what is the purpose of these damn things. Do people hydrate themselves using fire on the US?

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#258

Post by Gigachad »

dylan604 wrote: post #191
Gigachad wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of work is horrific. Means someones old phone has a meltdown trying to load the page while a warehouse in china with the latest GPUs cranks out billions of proofs per second. You could even utilize botnets to get random laptops and fridges to do your PoW.

If this was a mining situation, then yes, it would be dumb. Is that what this is actually doing though? Is it PoW for a mining operation, or just causing some electrons to be moved around to prove your not a bot? I didn't read too far into what the PoW actually is since their demo shat the bed.

> or just causing some electrons to be moved around to prove your not a bot?

The problem is spam networks have more computers and more power than your phone does so any proof that you can do, spammers can do 1000x faster. PoW can sort of work when your attack to defend against is a ddos situation where an attacker has to make far more requests than the average user, but most captchas try to defend against bots being able to use the site at all which PoW can not do.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#259

Post by josefx »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #192
thaumaturgy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a little bit of praxis that I do for these (when I can't just bounce from the site or service requesting it): purposefully get about 25% of it wrong, misidentifying things that aren't traffic lights as traffic lights, or failing to identify all traffic lights, for example. I'll sometimes have to go through a few rounds of captcha but I don't mind that as much when every one is an opportunity to have a tiny co…

I’m confused about your reasoning. Translating scanned printed material into a searchable text is a social good, but providing safer transportation…that additionally may one day free drivers of the menial work of driving…that is not a social good?

> but providing safer transportation.

Which will be available any day now, probably as early as 2018 if experts on the field can be believed. Some would even go so far as state that by 2025 private car ownership will be a thing of the past.

> that is not a social good?

Hype, empty promises and constantly moving deadlines. If this goes on we will have commercial fusion reactors before self driving has any positive impact outside of heavily supervised trials.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#260

Post by arpa »

the_third_wave wrote: post #144
crazygringo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's for this very reason I'm so happy to see something like this article on HN, and I'm so happy to see your comment too. I think I know exactly where you're coming from -- I was exactly the same way when I was younger. I was 100% extremely logical, and my emotional awareness was... exceedingly underdeveloped. Long story short, I got into different artistic pursuits where I was forced to develop my emotional awarene…

> you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things That is one way of saying that he simply has not allowed trivial concepts like a bunch of boring pictures to affect his mood. Another way of saying this would be "that sounds good, I wish I were not so affected by these things but alas, I am" or "lucky you, maybe I can find a way to avoid these mind traps". There is no strength in weakness…

> there is no virtue in negativity or pessimism

if we're oblivous to even the smallest things (boring pictures) that negatively impact us, we hinder ourselves to making the world better. And that's not something we want, everything is shit already.

Oh and this whole "Just don't" dissmissal... Check your privilege, man, and develop some damn empathy.

Post reply on HN