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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)

#271

Post by Nullabillity »

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…

Snail mail is a hilarious example, given that spammers are the only ones willing to pay the fees.

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

#272

Post by gsk22 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #226
gsk22 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except scooters are literally motorcycles? From Wikipedia: > A scooter (motor scooter) is a motorcycle with an underbone or step-through frame, .... Scooters are often legally motorcycles as well. For example, I had to get a motorcycle endorsement on my license for a scooter I owned, because the engine displacement was too large for the extremely restrictive "moped" category in my state.

They're not really considered as such by motorcycle people, for decent reasons too. Scooters generally have rather different ergonomics and controls, notably CVTs rather than manual transmissions for "proper" motorcycles. Overall a pretty different experience to ride. There's not really a good umbrella term, either, though.

The "decent reasons" just sounds like snobbery or a reason to feel superior. Cars are cars, whether manual, automatic, CVT, whatever. Why should bikes be any different?

I'm a big fan of two-wheeled transport in all its forms, but wow is there a prevailing toxic attitude among a large group of "true motorcycle" riders. Instead of welcoming people into the fold, it's just tribalism -- you drive a scooter, you're not a true biker; you ride a cruiser, true bikers only drive super sports; you drive an e-bike, but only loud pipes make a true rider!

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

#273

Post by radicality »

cmrx64 wrote: post #265
rovr138 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think they meant that something striped and rectangular, like a crosswalk, is a 'ruled surface' because the stripes themselves are like the ruler ?

So I guess a crosswalk (flat rectangle in 3D space), would be considered a 'ruled surface', but I don't think it meets the other requirement to make it a conoid.

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

#274

Post by mapt »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #269
njarboe wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You are talking about appreciable micropayments for appreciable amounts of entertainment from small creators.

And I would argue we did get those in the form of subscriptions in Patreon, Onlyfans, Buy Me A Coffee, et al, or in the co-op world of Nebula. We didn't get them down to very low fee structures because we've designed our payment infrastructure with the intent of supporting a profitable company called Visa, Inc, to which we've offloaded a number of different functions of that a government mint / treasury / post office would normally perform. And because lots of revenue on these sites comes from whales, people with outsized income in a country with a great deal of wealth inequality.

What I am talking about is TINY micropayments just for human authentication purposes. Because what we've had so far in the realm of, for example, spam email, involves sending off messages at a CPM of less than a tenth of a penny. Imposing infrastructure which pegs human authentication tasks, normally performed less than ten times a day, at a CPM of ten dollars, can eliminate most applications of automated systems and eliminate the annoyance of captcha, while costing the human less than ten cents. There are no whales in the login space.

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

#275

Post by andrewflnr »

gsk22 wrote: post #272
andrewflnr wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really considered as such by motorcycle people, for decent reasons too. Scooters generally have rather different ergonomics and controls, notably CVTs rather than manual transmissions for "proper" motorcycles. Overall a pretty different experience to ride. There's not really a good umbrella term, either, though.

The "decent reasons" just sounds like snobbery or a reason to feel superior. Cars are cars, whether manual, automatic, CVT, whatever. Why should bikes be any different? I'm a big fan of two-wheeled transport in all its forms, but wow is there a prevailing toxic attitude among a large group of "true motorcycle" riders. Instead of welcoming people into the fold, it's just tribalism -- you drive a scooter, you're not a…

Agree about the snobbery, but there is a real difference in kind between them that would be nice to have a good name for. Even if, as the other reply pointed out, they exist on a spectrum, the endpoints are pretty distinct.

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

#276

Post by consteval »

Gud wrote: post #252
burningChrome wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None. There are no "best" version of captcha. I've worked on several large scale projects where captcha was floated and then quickly abandoned in favor of other methods like Honeypot or using other methods to weed out bots and other 3rd party agents. If you have to use captcha the least worst are probably reCaptcha V2 and hCaptcha for accessibility.

What were the chosen choices? Curious to know

By far the most effective way to prevent bots is to charge for an account or service. Facebook, for example, banned billions of bots. At just 1 dollar an account, such a situation would be completely untenable. Not to mention most views are worth fractions of a cent - paying for bots wouldn't be a return on investment, so nobody would do it.

Bots are an inherent problem with free, advertisement-fueled web. If you want to get rid of them, it's trivial, but requires an re-understanding of how we use the web.

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

#277

Post by flexagoon »

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.

Have you tried just adding an invisible-to-people honeypot input and discarding all submissions where it has a value? That often works
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