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

341–350 of 375 posts

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

#341

Post by judge2020 »

dylan604 wrote: post #316
judge2020 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with this is that you won’t have a scapegoat if people do continue to roll through credit cards. With ReCaptcha, you just say “all of these attempts had verified captchas” and the CC processor is unlikely to personally blame you/the company for the activity since ReCaptcha is widespread. With a custom solution or other captchas, they can just block you due to insufficient protections when they see you have…

If you disable anonymous checkout work so that you have to have a registered account and be logged in to check out stop these credit card rolling attempts? Shut down any account it occurs. Probably whack-a-mole, but is it effective enough to not deploy a captcha system and not have the merchant account suspended?

Bots in the business of CC fraud are often written specifically for that website, so you might have bots register a few hundred accounts a day to try the CCs. All I’m saying is that ReCaptcha is a scapegoat, other big websites and services get away with doing their own fraud detection (Stripe, Shopify) because they’re good at it and have a team dedicated to constantly improving it.

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

#342

Post by BoxOfRain »

geoka9 wrote: post #177
BoxOfRain wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not even necessarily the culture, it’s occasionally bit me as a native English speaker but not of American English. It’s a very minor annoyance on par with “colour” versus “color” when writing CSS but occasionally the automotive ones throw me off. For example, it took a captcha for me to know the central reservation is called the meridian over the Atlantic. I imagine it’s awful for people with English as a secon…

Median strip?

That's the one, must be the UK autocorrect!

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

#343

Post by yibg »

andrepd wrote: post #317
visarga wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what concerns me about Apple's hashing + human verification scheme - what are the values of the humans? What do they consider a positive? Nude pictures of kids are ok in some cultures and not ok in others.

Related: in my country it's common for young kids (say under 6 or 7) to go to the beach naked. I always find it a bit disturbing that Americans consider it obscene, because it means they sexualise it...?

Yea totally. Little boys with genitals showing in public (eg urinating) is a common thing in many parts of asia for example. No one bats an eye at it.

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

#344

Post by skydhash »

yibg wrote: post #343
andrepd wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related: in my country it's common for young kids (say under 6 or 7) to go to the beach naked. I always find it a bit disturbing that Americans consider it obscene, because it means they sexualise it...?

Yea totally. Little boys with genitals showing in public (eg urinating) is a common thing in many parts of asia for example. No one bats an eye at it.

Due to how often little boys dirty their clothes a lot of them, especially in poor neighborhoods, go naked. And yes, no one bats an eye.

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

#345

Post by zarzavat »

mkl wrote: post #324
lou1306 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not the same as the classic US mailbox (). In the US you can use such a mailbox to send mail as well. In Europe you typically have private letterboxes for incoming mail and big, public post boxes for sending.

> classic US mailbox () Missing link? In NZ, and presumably other countries, personal letterboxes in rural areas can be used to send too, which I'm guessing is the same as what you're referring to.

Yes NZ is one of the four countries that use this style of full duplex mailbox. It hasn't caught on outside US/CA/AU/NZ, probably because (speculating here) it's not secure against theft and doubles the workload for the mailman.

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

#346

Post by mwcampbell »

random_upvoter wrote: post #330
mwcampbell wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd appreciate feedback on possible reasons why my comment got multiple downvotes. Did my attempted explanation of CAPTCHAs come off as condescending? I specifically tried to avoid that. I also wasn't criticizing the parent commenter for not being able to come up with an explanation in the moment. Or was there something else objectionable about what I wrote? Edit: OK, in hindsight, my explanation was incomplete. I sh…

I think you were downvoted undeservedly but what you maybe don't understand is that some people's brains just don't work at this level of abstraction no matter how you break it down and use simple words. Your explanation might just as well have been written in Japanese, it would just not register.

I know it logically follows that some people have that limitation; it's a function of the nervous system that can be limited or absent, just like one's senses or mobility. But my experience has been that blind people in particular tend to be underestimated and not given enough of a chance. So I guess my inclination was to expect that this would be the case with Kristine as well. You actually worked with her, so if you tried to explain things to her and she just didn't get it, then of course I have no reason to doubt you.

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

#347

Post by ryankrage77 »

someguy101010 wrote: post #243
egypturnash wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always someone who is learning this for the first time!

Lucky 10k

And for those in the lucky 10k learning about the lucky 10k today, https://xkcd.com/1053/

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

#348

Post by sveniv »

We don’t know what this training data might be used for in the future, especially considering it could be stolen. I always feel uneasy clicking on school busses, it feels too similar to a shoot em up game where I have to eliminate all of them, then “verify” when I’m done. Perhaps the interface is too similar to a scope on a weapon overlaid on everyday images.

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

#349

Post by jquery »

iratewizard wrote: post #267
jquery wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised at the downvotes on your comment. It seems so obviously correct that I can only surmise certain things about HNs demographic. Oh well, it’s not like men in tech are famous for our high emotional intelligence.

I don't pay attention to the points on this site. The hackernews I knew a decade ago is dead. What's left is a bunch of middling code monkeys who think this should be treated like extra-pretentious reddit. If I had to describe it in a metaphor, I would say it's now an Asperger's meet up show and tell. It used to be that truly interesting things would get posted here on a daily basis, too.

As much as to hate to admit you’re right, you’re right.

I’ve become more and more disconnected from user base as time has passed. I think I’ve been stuck at around 2k total karma for years now. I know I used to have more points several years ago. Paying no mind to the points is a good idea. Might be an even better idea to mourn and grieve the HN I used to enjoy, instead of fooling around with its rancid corpse…

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

#350

Post by jszymborski »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #275
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just that — google wants its own models to be resilient in the face of noisy data. (You’ve probably see examples where a cat is classified as a mountain or something ridiculous due to the addition of precisely crafted noise.) The best way to achieve that resilience is to simply train the models with noisy data; part of the learning process will then be learning to ignore the noise.

But you don't have to show humans the noise when you're getting humans to determine the ground truth, only the neural network. I think the noise exists to trip up CAPTCHA bots.

You know, that was my initial reaction reading that comment, but thinking about it a little more made me realise that if you pass the noisey images to humans, they can validate if the noise is such that the signal is gone.

I don't know if that's what they're doing, but it would be a clever way to do data augmentation.

Post reply on HN