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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)

#71

Post by blindgeek »

pbronez wrote: post #31
blindgeek wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, that's a good point, and it hadn't occurred to me. For the overwhelming majority of blind people, language like "looked at" is just metaphorical. I mean, all language is symbolic anyway. The map is not the territory and the menu is not the dinner. Some of us are taught very young to use common terms like look in that kind of a metaphorical way. Partially so that we fit in and are comfortable with the rest o…

I suppose one could say "observed" as a sense-neutral alternative to see / hear. Might be a worthwhile language shift, similar to using "they" as a gender-neutral alternative to "he" and "her". We usually talk about the inclusion benefits of neutral language. It can also be valuable by making specific terms more meaningful when used appropriately. If I know you usually say "they", then when you choose to say "he" I g…

It's notable that the majority of the people who would be "included" by the change to "more inclusive" language aren't offended in the first place. The sentence "I am watching TV" literally offended no blind person, evah. It is only sighted do-gooders who have the spoons to be offended by nothingburgers on our behalf. We're too busy dealing with stuff like, ... I dunno, landlords who refuse to rent to us because all they have is second story units and we might fall down the stairs. Yes this actually happened to me in 2000 or so, and I don't have enough faith in human intelligence to believe that it isn't happening today. We're too busy being oppressed by captchas and websites made by frontend devs who seem to care more about chasing JavaScript framework du jour than they care about accessibility. We're busy struggling against a built physical environment which has been designed for cars and not people. The supposedly non-inclusive language of "I watched TV" or "I looked at my browser's JS console" aren't even on our radar.

I coined the term "Sapir-Whorf Stalinists" a few weeks ago to describe the sort of people who think that monkeying with language will magically make things better for marginalized groups.

Here's Lee Atwater talking about the Southern Strategy:

> You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, > nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. > So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, > and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, > and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a > byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut > this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, > and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

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

#72

Post by andrepd »

dizhn wrote: post #53
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

I routinely have problems with closeup images. To this day I don't know how much of the object I should be selecting? Also what is a traffic light? Is the pole part of it or not? Motorcycles seem to be hard too. Once it showed me a picture of steps nothing but steps. I think I marked like 15 boxes.

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 behaviour

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

#73

Post by Telemakhos »

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…

This doesn’t feel so much like the end of the “open web” as it does a rehash of USENET and email spam issues. Social media killed USENET, and email managed its spam issues thanks to filtering.

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

#74

Post by RobMurray »

I am also blind. hCaptcha is the worst. Their stupid cookie expires so I have to go through their getting an email to set the cookie almost every time I encounter one. It's a horrendous UX, especially when using different devices and browsers. I imagine others just give up instead of dealing with the crap. They shouldn't use the word accessibility when their whole service is the exact opposite.

The bots can probably solve them easier than blind people anyway, or they can outsource them to third world workers for next to nothing. E.G. Anticaptcha [0]:

> Starting from 0.5USD per 1000 images, depending on your daily spending volume

[0] https://anti-captcha.com/

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

#75

Post by toast0 »

Spivak wrote: post #52
stanmancan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to add a captcha to a registration page a couple years ago. Bots were signing up for thousands of fake accounts with other people’s email addresses. The email confirmation we sent would then get reported as spam since the recipient didn’t sign up for our service. Our email provider suspended our account for high spam reports.

I hope the other lesson was the good email verification hygiene of making the user take an affirmative action and click a "verify email" button rather then send it unsolicited. You essentially had an open public unauthed form that would send an email to any address you typed in it. Surely that alone raises some eyebrows.

How do you authenticate a verify email button?

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

#76

Post by jillyboel »

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

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

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

#77

Post by dewey »

nraynaud wrote: post #66
dewey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Captchas are used for many things, and the reason they are still a thing is because they mostly work. Especially fingerprinting invisible captchas. Try having a login form without a captcha and you'll realize you are capturing 100s of users every day that require you to send out a "please confirm your email address" email for each of them for no good reason. > They still have to respect the system they're logging in.…

they don't work, robots have a higher speed and success rate than humans.

Not everything is black and white. If it's cutting down 50% of the spam that does not have captcha solving robots because the effort is not worth it, that's already something.

There's a reason many site still have very basic captchas...it's good enough for their use case.

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

#78

Post by rvnx »

slooonz wrote: post #42
rvnx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the future I think we will again go to "notarization"/"attestation" of the operating system / hardware. Essentially, the manufacturer of the device + operating system will generate a unique signature per each device, and web browsers will be able to access it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

How does that works for, say, Chromium or Firefox on Linux ?

I believe the plan was to ask the TPM of the computer.

From what I understood, each TPM has a unique private/public key pair (Endorsement Key (EK)), and then this key is certified by the manufacturer of the TPM.

From there, you can generate a Attestation Keys, and these keys are signed by the EK.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/235148/whats-th...

So essentially, at the end of the day, Chromium would ask the TPM for attestation, and it would act as a unique Device ID.

Then they can allow only a selected list of TPM manufacturers certificates, to prevent emulators for example.

TL;DR: Chromium on Linux would ask the TPM chip for a signature, and each TPM chip has a different signature from the moment it is out of the factory.

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

#79

Post by rwmj »

RobMurray wrote: post #74

I am also blind. hCaptcha is the worst. Their stupid cookie expires so I have to go through their getting an email to set the cookie almost every time I encounter one. It's a horrendous UX, especially when using different devices and browsers. I imagine others just give up instead of dealing with the crap. They shouldn't use the word accessibility when their whole service is the exact opposite. The bots can probably…

Believe me, hCaptcha isn't much better even if you're not blind! They show me minuscule images which are barely distinguishable from each other. It manages to be much worse than reCaptcha, which is some achievement.

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

#80

Post by rwmj »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #25
jerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that from hCaptcha's point of view, by this point they've probably dealt with hundreds of other people claiming that they are blind when they really aren't, so their bots will work. This isn't a defense, just an explanation... but it is also an explanation of why the entire idea of "we'll not give blind people a way past the CAPTCHA but just give a pass to 'real' blind people so we can pass ADA", which is th…

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…

This is just an indication that their process is wrong. (Or in this case, their entire reason to exist is wrong.)
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