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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)

#261

Post by genewitch »

danaris wrote: post #124
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…

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.

I was moderately into crypto, i mined coins including BTC; and i'll be damned if i am gunna connect my wallet to a browser, or put crypto in an escrow to pay out to avoid captchas. I'm being as polite as reasonably possible, here.

the only way this makes sense is you convert the entire planet to renewable or non-polluting electricity generation, and then when a user is on facebook, youtube, (or watch ads!), a core or 2 of their machine/phone will "mine" crypto, that can then be used somewhere else. The crypto can't be transferable - it must be "burned". Defined: When the site requests some crypto for proof, it says "send to this non-existent address" and then waits for the block to show that your wallet sent crypto to that address. This "burns" the money. In fact, a couple of cryptocurrencies tried to enforce this, as well as "proof of stake" - where if you had enough coins you could "mine" by merely having your wallet "logged in." The former is called "proof of burn"

another thing, no blockchain block publication is fast enough for this. so now we gotta rope in lightning or some other "hack" on top. I knew when i first heard about bitcoin that there was no way that anyone was going to wait 10 minutes for any payment to go through, especially if it's under some moderate amount of money, like $20.

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

#262

Post by Ekaros »

jachee wrote: post #174
seanhunter wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup - I recognize this problem. I am a motorcyclist and I frequently have to grit my teeth and misidentify scooters as motorcycles if I want to get past captcha. For non-bikers, a scooter has an automated gearbox and small wheels etc. Think vespa. In the UK at least they are generally a different category of license, although that's because of the size of a standard scooter engine.

It's a squares/rectangles issue. Scooters are cycles that have motors, and are thus motorcycles in the most-inclusive definition of such.

And electric bicycle is in sense also motorcycle...

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

#263

Post by Ekaros »

wccrawford wrote: post #142
itishappy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does DHL delivery via yellow busses?

Does anyone deliver anything except people via "busses"?

Well the local long distance bus "consortium" did move at least part of parcels via busses here.

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

#264

Post by Y_Y »

Retr0id wrote: post #240
Y_Y wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even assuming that uneven distribution is a problem, and that it was possible to make global wealth evenly distributed, it would be such a collosal undertaking that it would necessarily entail massive social upheaval and take a very long time after which the captcha problem would hardly be comparable to what we have now.

None of that is at all relevant to the point I was making. Whether you think extreme wealth inequality is good or bad, for as long as it exists, it makes paying fixed fees a poor alternative to captchas.

Until we solve the "water is wet" problem domain squatting will continue to be an issue.

Without a definitive resolution to the continuum hypothesis there will be no efficient distributed consensus algorithm.

As long as humanity bears the mark of Original Sin, it will be hard to run a business selling GPL software.

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

#265

Post by cmrx64 »

rovr138 wrote: post #97
jillyboel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in "the West" but English isn't my main language. I have no idea what a conoid is.

> A conoid is a ruled surface whose rulings are parallel to a plane (called the directrix plane) and intersect a fixed line (called the axis of the conoid) (Gellert et al. 1989, p. 202). Examples include the circular conoid, helicoid, hyperbolic paraboloid, parabolic conoid, Plücker conoid, right circular conoid, Wallis's conical edge, Whitney umbrella, and Zindler conoid. If the axis is perpendicular to the directri…

Where did you get stripes from in any of that? A surface is ruled when it can be constructed by extruding a line (or segment) along some path… like waving a ruler around.

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

#267

Post by miki123211 »

blindgeek wrote: post #207
miki123211 wrote: post #180

As a blind person, I genuinely believe that hCaptcha, being as terrible as it is, is still the best solution among the ones that we can physically achieve in the world as it exists right now. Audio captchas don't work for people with hearing issues and/or who don't speak your n supported languages, where n is usually Even for people for whom they do work, it's worth keeping in mind that bots can solve them by now, an…

> and getting all your semi-public records and social media activity immediately > scraped by shady companies and sold to anybody who expresses any interest. Public content on the Internet should be scrapable. That's what public means. The fact that my reddit posts were publicly available never bothered me. Even if they were going to be used to train some LMM. What does bother me is reddit locking up my posts and mak…

> Public content on the Internet should be scrapable. That's what public means.

Not necessarily, especially if you want to expose some relationships in one direction while hiding the other.

Imagine your government creates a CNAM-like[1][2] system that lets you enter a phone number and see their owner, to see who is calling you and whether a number you're given is legit. However, they do not want to let you see a person's phone number just by entering their name.

If there's no captcha, an unscrupulous actor, registered in the Seychelles and unconcerned with your country's laws, can just scrape all possible phone numbers and offer a "reverse lookup" service.

In a way, the number/name records are public information, after all, the government lets you query them without authentication, but in a way they aren't, because you're only permitted to query them in a certain way.

Variations of this problem have appeared many times, particularly across Europe, usually with company numbers, property deeds and such.

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

#268

Post by juped »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #116
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…

> Anonymity of users: validating someone's real-life identity sufficiently would make it possible to permanently ban malicious individuals and filter out bots with good effectiveness, but it will destroy anonymity online. In my opinion, literally untenable. I see this point constantly made on the echo chamber that is known as HackerNews. The average normie user does not care about anonymity, nor privacy, on the Inter…

No, you're describing what the California tech echo chamber wishes an "average normie" was, i.e., stupid and compliant, and what they're always aggrieved never really exists in practice, having managed to inculcate only some moderate learned helplessness over time, and with "stupid normies" constantly attempting to fight back via law and politics.

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

#269

Post by throwaway2037 »

njarboe wrote: post #123
throwaway2037 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If micropayment is such an amazing solution to these problems, why haven't we seen a working solution after more than 20 years of talking about it? Why doesn't HN have multiple competing micropayment startups? To me, the results speak for themselves.

Another outcome that I could never understand: The original conversation was micropayments for traditional print media that was moving into the digital age. Why didn't they all band together to create an industry standard that defined (and possibly administered) a micropayment system? In the end, paywalls were the solution, and winner-mostly-takes-all when print moved to digital. Look at the decline in medium to small newspapers in the last 20 years in the US. It is devastating, but a few national, major newspapers are doing OK.

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

#270

Post by astroid »

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)

This can't be right, I have been told over and over again that America does not have any culture.

Now it's being used to push imperialism through captchas of all things?!

I feel like all the non-US or non-Western or however you want to categorize the 'rest of the world' should be striving to use free-range local culturally-appropriate captcha services if this is true.

It's easy to blame the colonizers, but what about the local artisanal websites who give the colonizers/invaders a voice by integrating their captcha services?

We really need an 'international-divorce' to put these issues to bed once and for all.

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