In my country (UK) taxis are not yellow either (although yellow is a common colour for taxis throughout the world) but I am still able to guess which pictures are of taxis when the other options are of palm trees and a van.
I think that's the point of these captchas. The average human being has no problem passing the test even if they are not 100% familiar with all the details.
There is obviously a limit and indeed pictures should be chosen to be generic enough to be workable throughout the world, but I feel this is 'problem' is blown out of proportion by some commenters.
Around here the van is more likely to be a taxi than any car. So,... no. The cultural bias is nauseating. I've never yet managed to identify a crosswalk. I frequently fail at busses. All this click-click-click on items mysterious is just exhausting and leaves me feeling drained and dehumanised. These days if I see one I generally just bounce. It's less humiliating that way.
> Detect if a passage is written by human or AI. If you can't get in, it means we reached AGI.
So we've reached AGI decades ago then? Text generators aren't rocket science and carefully cherry picked results of even a simple Markov-chain will be indistinguishable from human writings.
I had one that asked for pedestrian crossings. Now, I've visited enough places to know that they change a lot, and that usually when you're there with context you can spot them. But from a weirdly angled photo I can't tell if that sequence of short white stripes is a crossing or some type of intersection marker like it could be in some places.
When I decided it looked too narrow to be a crossing, the captcha wouldn't let me through until I agreed that it in fact was a crossing.
The crosswalks Captcha provides the most difficult cultural discrepancy for me. Some US crosswalks look like European "forbidden for all traffic" road markings. Pretty much the opposite of a crosswalk. I always have to do a double take on those.
My favourite is the Toucan crossing. They are a lot wider, with two sets of buttons at pedestrian height, and a cyclist height. Named as such because "two (types of road user) can" cross it.
As listed by others, popular crossing types in this group (the UK has a set of rules for how this should work and then local government can do paperwork to get something else appropriate if none of the existing designs are suitable)
Zebra has striped road markings, with flashing yellow marker lights so that vehicle users have plenty of advance warning of the crossing. Pedestrians have right of way on these crossings at all times, other road users should slow until they can discern whether any pedestrians are trying to cross and if necessary stop.
Pelican is an older design, though still used in new crossings in London and some other places. The pedestrians controls are in a box at hand height but the signals are on the far side of the crossing. These trigger road signals in a pattern with an extra flashing amber phase meaning "road vehicles may cross only if there are no pedestrians using the crossing".
Puffin is a replacement for Pelican with two innovations. Firstly the pedestrian signals are with your controls on your side of the road and they're placed so that to face towards them you're also facing oncoming traffic (this will most often be the right side of the crossing since the British drive on the left, but not in every situation). Secondly there is no flashing amber phase, the Puffin has infrared detectors so it can discern whether pedestrians are still on the crossing and extend the red phase slightly if they are.
The Toucan and Pegasus mentioned elsewhere are variants of Puffin rather than Pelican.
In Ireland we have zebra and pelican crossings. The general term used in the driver training literature is "pedestrian crossing." Most people would recognise the term "crosswalk" from American media, though.
unless they live in a country were American media is dubbed. Even then I'm not sure if you really recognize it, how often do I actually hear cross-walk in a movie or show?
Even in the US things are different from state to state, in California every uncontrolled intersection has 'crosswalks' where pedestrians have right of way, even if they are not painted in. Pedestrians are not supposed to cross in the middle of a block, unless there's a marked crossing (which is the only place you're likely to see an actual zebra crossing)
When I was young in NZ, they were zebra crossings. But then I noticed that they started more and more to be a pair of lines across the road than the zebra patterns, and the name seemed to gradually fall out of use.
In Australia (or at least in NSW) only crossings at traffic lights are marked with a pair of lines across the road. The majority of crossings not at traffic lights are zebra crossings.
Sorry I assumed you were in the US, our (I'm also in the UK) zebra crossings do yes, but I was under the impression that they just marked any crossing (even at traffic lights) in the US.
But I'm basically only familiar with them from bloody reCaptchas, so I don't know!
In Colorado, pedestrians have right of way regardless of where they cross. Bikes and horses are treated as vehicles and entitled to the entire lane if they want. If the road is one lane, then uphill has right of way.
The presence of a crosswalk generally gives pedestrians the right of way. At traffic lights, there are normally the usual car traffic lights (red, yellow and green), and then "pedestrian traffic lights" that face the crosswalks. The pedestrian traffic lights usually light up white in the shape of a person when you have the right of way to cross the crosswalk, or they show a red hand if you do not have the right of way.
For crosswalks not at an intersection (typically when there is several hundred feet of road without an intersection for crosswalks), I believe pedestrians always have the right of way. Sometimes they have a button you can push that will activate yellow lights overhead so drivers know that you're crossing (primarily useful at night). I think you have the right of way regardless, but given how little attention many people pay, I tend to treat them like I'm jaywalking anyways.
At least in Scandinavia, all road traffic (including bicycles) must give way to pedestrians at crosswalks, unless the crossing is controlled by traffic lights
A zebra crossing is a specific type of pedestrian crossing with specific rules different to those of other types. It needs a non-generic name (and look) so people understand how it works. Sure you could change your suggestion to something like "non-light controlled pedestrian right of way crossing" but I'm glad we say Zebra instead!
I am not sure what to make of this argument. We adopted English, the language from the British. The standard colonial oppression arguments already start from why use a foreign Language.
They used zebra crossing (even though there are no Zebras in the UK either, I think), so we used it. Now the new argument is that the cultural imperialism of the US is forcing us to change the term again. Sure, the term "cross-walk" sort of makes more sense than zebra crossing, but not enough that you don't need it defined for you the first time you encounter it. So, it is not such a precise and great term, as you almost say, that one can ignore the cultural imperialism argument.
Both arguments (colonialism and cultural imperialism) are distinct and can be treated separately.
We do have Zebra, have you never heard of a Zoo? (I jest; you are of course correct).
As for cross-walk making more sense; Zebra crossing are so named because of the black and white stripes they comprise of, they require you to have seen one, yes, but, I'd argue that without context "cross-walk" is no more descriptive.
Collectively, we call our crossings (Toucan, Pelican, Zebra, Pegasus), "road crossings". They are so named due to their properties; Toucan because "two (types of user) can" cross there, Pelican (formerly pelicon) because it stands for PEdestrian LIght C[O]Ntrolled crossing), Zebra for its stripes, and Pegasus due to the buttons being accessible at heights suitable for those riding horses.
Another one that I've seen on reCraptchas is "Boardwalk". If it had not been for the song "Under the boardwalk" I'd have had no idea what that was referring to. We call it a "Pier" round these parts. Taking Crosswalk as a reference, Boardwalk sounds like it should therefore refer to a place where you walk on some boards... such as where there are roadworks... or a wooden bridge... or outside the saloon in a Western.
In fairness, I don't think this is well known in the US. My impression was always that a boardwalk is just a pier that no longer has any use for naval stuff, so they built a carnival on it.
Pier is a more familiar term to me. I think I've only heard the term boardwalk in relation to some place in New Jersey.
Hmmm... "Pier" doesn't really have any naval connotations in Uk English. Somewhere ships [naval or otherwise] tie up would be a "Jetty". A pier would usually suggest what you're describing as a 'boardwalk' -- found in a seaside town, with cafés, amusements and other entertainments on it and lots of people strolling about eating ice cream.
Zebrastreifen ("zebra stripes") is the German colloquial name. You will hardly find anybody (at least in my parts) calling them the proper official "Fußgängerüberweg" (pedestrian overpath/pedestrian crossing). Even most police will call them Zebrastreifen except sometimes when writing reports or in court.
I failed a few recaptchas like that too, tho not due to language barrier, but because I didn't pick some things that didn't look like crossings at all. I am convinced that some of those supposed markings were not crossings at all but things that somehow got into google's labeling db as outright false positives.
If you use a browser which blocks fingerprinting, CAPTCHA may fail you 3-4 times even if you give correct answers. CAPTCHA was giving me anger management issues last few weeks until I realized I can just open same URL in another browser and then most of the time it doesn't even ask for CAPTCHA because the fingerprinting is so accurate it knows who I am (or it lets me in after the first round).
I mean... add to that the fact that my ISP literally uses a single public IP address for all its subscribers, and then it's no wonder I hate this stuff. Googling anything in a private window is a gamble. This and Cloudflare. Cloudflare is the worst.
Or just leave that website. Why should you be subjected to torment for the privilege of boosting some website's visitor numbers?
Imagine if, every time you went to the supermarket or the library, there was some goon on the door who wouldn't let you in unless you could do ten press-ups and answer half a dozen general knowledge questions. They'd soon go out of business --as all websites which treat their visitors with such contempt deserve to do.
Sadly, while it is extremely rare that a supermarket offers a product differentiated on anything but location, the same is not true of websites: not going through the CAPTCHA means I don't get to see the content I wanted or needed to see; I can't just drive five minutes further to get the same content from someone without a CAPTCHA. This thereby isn't a functional market and so market economics can't help us: this requires regulation.
There's very little content on the Internet that isn't available from a variety of different sources. It's very rare to find something completely original and unique to only one site.
That's the absolute best outcome for Google. Not that they get a couple more data points for self-driving cars, or make the website owner happy they protected the site from bots, but that you switched from Firefox to Chrome.
Check if you are logged into google. (pretty much unavoidable in chrome). If you have a google account then they know your phone number is verified and getting a phone number usually requires government mandated identification.
Otherwise they use fingerprinting to identify you and correlate it with activity on google, youtube, google ads, etc.
If those two things fail then Google will give you an endless stream of captchas even if you answer all of them correctly. I often had to complete 20 captchas only for it to tell me "sorry". There was maybe a 1/3 chance that completing all 20 captchas let me through.
Meanwhile on a different browser where I'm logged into google I get through on first attempt. Google captchas are just a data mining operation. They have nothing to do with proving whether you are human. After all, if they have enough data about you they often give you the option to skip the captcha altogether. The captcha is a psychological attack on you to convince you to give Google more data.
So basically it seems that in almost every country in the world they're referred to as 'Zebra Crossings' except in the US. But, of course, we've all got to 'adopt' their terminology.
It's a bit like that idiotic back to front MM-DD-YYYY date format that no-one else uses outside America, but even non-US gadget manufacturers insist on making the default. I nearly sent my Xiaomi MiBand back when I realised it was hard-wired to display the date back to front. Luckily, with my middle-aged eyesight and the minuscule 3pt text it uses to display the date, I can't read the fecker anyway, so the annoyance is slightly diminished.
Yes, American fire hydrants are very different from NZ ones too. Ours are under a yellow steel panel flush with the ground, so not something self-driving cars need to identify.
U.K. firefighters connect to something similar, but they are unpainted metal panels on the ground, and while there are ways to distinguish them from the other ground-level utility access covers (and nearby signs) nobody bothered to teach them to me either in school or during driving lessons.
The two I've had trouble with are Traffic Lights and Parking meters.
Some of pictures are the kinda that hang suspended from a cable. We just don't have those in Australia so I tend to miss them.
Not sure I've ever seen a real parking meter. (Just ones in cartoons like the Simpsons). I kept getting mixed up with what was a parking meter and what was too ambiguous to tell. (Like could be intercom or a letter box, they pictures get blurry)
As a blind person with english as not native language, the audio captchas are pure hell. I can't imagine other visually impaired people who don't know english at all and have to deal with a lazy website which dumps them the default english audio captcha if there is audio at all.
Hi, I'm the author of the extension. You can find more installation options in the GitHub description. Make sure to also install the client app to simulate user interactions. Open the extension's options to get started and download the client app, then follow the guide linked below to finish the installation. I'm happy to chat on GitHub if you need further help.
If you're into anime, you might also enjoy Search by Image, it includes support for a handful of search engines tailored to anime and manga. Visit the extension's options to enable them.
Not sure if that's still a problem, but when I tried this addon some time ago, audio captchas were quickly disabled for me because of irregular activity from my network. It might not be a good idea to use this if you rely on audio captchas and can't easily change your IP address.
This thing with the network is an excuse. If I need to pass by most of the captchas, I just need to login in a GMail account. Somehow, this makes me a human according to Google.
After so many, you're still going to get the "you're sending automated requests" message just like you do if you keep answering the quizzes correctly by hand.
ReCaptcha doesn't care at all if you're human or not, but instead has some vague aim of "preventing abuse."
Hahaha, I love the fact that someone made a Captcha solver. Proof that if Google truly wanted to test for "humanity" they would design something different.
There was a CTF a while ago where someone beat Google Captcha by simply inputting the Audio captcha into Google speech recognition. It worked ~80% of the time.
I'm sure that this can't scale at least against Google. They can fingerprint their own files. Might be interesting to check with MS or IBM services as a backup.
At one point a vendor tried to claim that ReCAPTCHA was accessible because of the audio fallback. No-one in my team or at the vendor could actually pass it, so we blocked them from implementing it.
reCAPTCHA’s audio CAPTCHAs (at least in English) are much saner these days, it’s a voice snippet from a YouTube video their AI had issues transcribing.
As someone with almost 100% visual impairment, I'm having a hard time dealing with CAPTCHAS. I find it more difficult to slove hCAPTCHA than Google reCaptcha.
Most of the times I can easily solve Google reCaptcha. However, If I don't know the meaning of the object being displayed / any difficulties seeing it, Google won't let me switch to audio mode ( It'll display something like "This feature is currently unavailable" or "We have detected unusual traffic from your network"
The error you're seeing is a false-positive, an it may be illegal for reCAPTCHA to deny you access.
I've rised the issue last year with the W3C [1] and now your experience is publicly documented [2], though the next step would be to file complaints and take legal action for your rights to be respected.
It always amazes me that we as a society insist on using ambiguous words ("crosswalks" or otherwise) when there is an option to use an unambiguous option.
It often happens with things designed and made in the USA. It is assumed that the terminology or customs of the USA apply to the rest of the world, when it's often not the case.
For example, their bizarre date system. Widespread use of state abbreviations and timezone abbreviations that are only known in the USA. "Zip code" on forms for customers in New Zealand or India or France.
Good point overall. I disagree with the abbreviations being exclusively a US thing. Two letter country abbreviations (UK, DE, IE, FR, DK, etc.) are popular in Europe, including on the back of food packaging which lists ingredients in multiple languages.
Yes, but, when taken out of context, you have no idea if you're looking at a state abbreviation or a country abbreviation.
AL can be Alabama or Albania, AZ can be Arizona or Azerbaijan, DE could be Germany or Delaware, etc. Just under half of US state abbreviations are "unique" (as in, not also used for some country in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard).
Personally I'm mostly annoyed by the concept of states when filling out delivery address. When I enter my country (that has no concept of states), I often find myself having to make something up because the state field is a required field.
Even worse: sometimes they do ask "state" and have a dropdown list of American states. If you live in another country that does have states, you're SOL.
Why would your dropdown still have those when I selected a different country?
Also why's the country picker at the bottom? I've learned to fill it out first and scroll back up the hard way. Otherwise you never know when fields will completely change when you select a country, or just discard everything you've entered previously.
To be fair, I have seen non Americans making basically same assumptions.
I have even once seen a thread where Easter Europeans who never been in America argued with Americans about meaning of English word and about American culture. It was literally "are you sure you know better then American how Americans would interpret that word/situation in their day to day life" situation.
Here is an interesting idea, they might know it from their English lessons in school. Which might have taught British English and not American English. But who knows.
Dates are the worst. 11/12/2020, is that November 12th or is that December 11th? I don't know and your shitty system makes no attempt to let me know whether they're using the regional format or the world-wide one.
Zip Codes are used "more or less worldwide" and usually have a direct translation so that's not so much of an issue
But yeah how the f someone though MM/DD/YY was a god date format and they kept using this monstrosity still baffles me
Edit: translating the expression "Zip Code" to the equivalent in other countries is a non-issue (be it postal codes, etc). It's a code used by the post. No mystery there. Of course, they have different formats in different places so don't validate them as US Zip codes
NZ has postcodes, and they're 4 digits, which confuses some websites.
Yes, the dates are ridiculous. I've had to use an online assessment system with hard-coded backwards American due date formatting that I have to warn students about. The vendor just shrugged.
As another poster pointed out, elsewhere "postal code" is usually used. The format differs. In some places it might be 4121, somewhere else it might be SW1A 1AA. In the ROI, there are no post codes.
Driven primarily by frustration with foreign companies expecting post codes - the postal service was late to computerising which paid off in having better OCR/address lookup when they finally did so actually said they were pretty indifferent to the implementation of postcodes.
When I got a (remote) Irish jobs a few years ago I had to fill in a post code at my tax service and a few other things, and I also had to fill in an address in the format of "street number". This makes perfect sense in the Netherlands, and I can't really blame Dutch folk for not knowing that Ireland doesn't have postal codes and that not all houses have house numbers (but rather house names).
I have to say my experience with posties in Ireland has surpassed my experience with postcodes. I feel like the most valid "post code" would just be the name of the postman they should ask if they're not sure.
But I have to call out Ryanair in this context. For many years, before eircode, they demanded a postcode on their payment page. An Irish company, serving Irish customers, demanded postcodes when most the country didn't have them.
(And I paypal still believes my postcode is null. I don't recall ever entering that, so I wonder where/when it derived that.)
What's the unambiguous alternative for crosswalk? The only alternative that I can think of is "pedestrian crossing" and I'm not sure if that would be clearer.
Cyclists ride. They do not drive. Drive implies you aren't the prime mover in the mechanism (i.e., an engine is doing the work, and you're merely performing the task of executive signaling and control to that set of movers and systems carrying you along do so. The inflection point is actually legal in nature; in that once you slap a motor on it, you require licensure, because you're driving now. This is also why I disagree with driving being a privilege granted by the State; I'm not big on large edifi telling me I can only utilize mechanical devices at their whim, but such is life, yes, I've had the argument before, no I'm not going into it now).
A cyclist, however is the mechanism. You can make the argument that it's silly, but I'll bet you more people will look at you funny for saying cyclists drive than for saying the operator of a motor vehicle rides especially given the legal baggage that comes with driving.
Aside from that, they're quite easy to identify. They're usually the ones either breaking traffic laws, or being ignored/cursed at because their mere existance increases the volatility of motor vehicle traffic patterns in urban environments.
First of all, they've self identified as non-American and presumably not a native English speaker. You could have presented the difference between drive and ride with less pedantry.
Secondly, cities with large numbers of cyclists tend to have better, not worse traffic. It's obvious why: fewer people driving plus infrastructure for bikes is developed and separated from car infrastructure. You should wish for more cyclists, not fewer.
Unfortunately, you can't escape the need for pedantry as a native speaker, and as a non-native (which I sssumed they were), I generally find they appreciate th clarification.
Arguably, what makes motor traffic "flow better" is increased predictability, and decreased demand on shared infrastructure. I'm not condemning all cyclists or saying it isn't worthwhil; merely that the arrangements we've got with them being sometimes pedestrians/sometimes road users leads to a cultural clash that leaves everyone frustrated.
The entire urban network architecture leaves quite a lot to be desired.
I'm not one of those who ignores them. Quite to the contrary. I've been known to roll down the window and ask someone to please pull ahead of my A-pillar.
As an American cyclist who frequented SF… this gave me a good chuckle, thank you.
True story: Had a driver who swerved from the left-hand lane, across a lane of traffic, across the bike lane, and into a drive way, after I yelled at him (while rapidly braking) tell me "I didn't see you." I've got 3 reflectors (from his PoV), I'm wearing long sleeves reflective highlighter safety orange, and it's daylight…
Depends on the part of the USA. We have tons of roundabouts in the part of the USA I live in. Everything from tiny ones on neighborhoods up to huge multi lane ones (though nothing as crazy as some of the ones I’ve seen in Britain).
Have driven all over the US, and while roundabouts (aka traffic circles) are more common in the northeast, they’re common enough all over that I doubt anyone would struggle with that captcha. /Maybe/ some people would trip over the wording (expecting traffic circle and unfamiliar with “roundabout”).
I rented a car there and I was amazed at how much text there was, instead of symbols. Eg they have signs in turning lanes that say "Right lane must turn right". By the time you've read that, you've turned right.
That said, it’s not too bad. It’s long and the organization is bad but the policy is reasonableish.
There’s street cleaning one day a week (year round) 11am-1pm, and you can’t ever park then.
It’s a school zone as well; when school is in session you can park for 15 minutes in the afternoon to drop a kid off or for 1 hour to pick the kid up. When school is out you just need to avoid the street cleaning.
I'm not American, and I agree there is a lot of information there, but it seems reasonably sane if you read through it.
I don't see any obvious contradictions. You can't park 11-1 tuesday due to street cleaning. You can't stop there mon-fri 7:30-16:00 with the exception of 7:30-8 for school business (dropping the kids off). You can park mon-fri between 4 and 6, once per day, per district (to pick up your kids after school), district permits (people who live there, not sure what the 4 means) are exempt.
Oh I absolutely agree. I'm not defending it, just pointing out that it's not totally insane. Here in the UK I've never seen anything that nuts however.
I am American, and it confuses me, which perhaps proves the point.
In particular, why is it necessary to point out that parking is prohibited from 11 to 1 on Tuesday, when stopping of any kind is already prohibited on a superset of that time (7:30-4 M-F)?
Look at the bottom bolt on the "No Parking" sign: It's partially covered by the later-added "No Stopping" sign.
Also, because this is apparently in a school zone, you have to think about how stopping is different from parking: You don't have to pull into a parking zone to drop off your kid, you can just stop momentarily in the middle of the street. During the non-overlap hours, you can pull over and park, just not stop in the street.
I assume the 4 means parking district four. They give people some limited room to hunt for street parking near their home by breaking the city into small districts.
It doesn't matter if it seems sane that way. How many seconds does a driver have to read through that all when he's driving near the speed limit? Do we expect drivers to still keep an eye on the road while trying to decipher it? Do we expect every driver to slam on the brakes, and stand still until they've parsed it all?
I think the idea is you stop, read the sign (probably need to get out of the car), then either stay or go after parsing. Or if you're a regular you learn the rules that apply to you.
Tangentially, we've been having fun with this recently. "Why haven't you completed Active Shooter Training?" "I'm busy, prioritising my time, and this training is irrelevant to me." "But what if there's an Active Shooter in the office?" "I've been working at home since April, and I've already been told to expect 6 months more." "It could still happen at home!" "What country do you think we're in?"
Head Office seems to be really struggling to grasp that this training might be less relevant to other countries, other offices, let alone remote workers.
"Although training is currently optional, businesses and organizations are beginning to face citations due to non-compliance with OSHA's guidelines regarding Workplace Violence.[3][4]"
I'm supposed to take it every 6 months. Though they've got it whittled down to 15 depressing minutes of "don't help anyone and try not to be seen by the cops"
Apparently Europeans are bad at this too. Or do you think the French “socialist” party whose members have done things like lead the IMF is really socialist?
Depending on context, the word "socialism" is polysemic in practice in a lot of places in Europe. As long as people are aware that the S for "Socialista" in Spanish governing party PSOE is used in the sense of "social-democrat", and not in the same sense as the 2nd S in USSR standing for "Socialist", it's fine.
Indeed, you’re right. But isn’t this just restating my point?
Americans don’t reliably distinguish between various left-of-center ideologies in their language, but that’s not uniquely American, because neither do Europeans.
I've heard lots of Trump supporters saying Biden is Communist; he seems just right of center to me. But it's about "othering", and USA have had a decades long programme making Communists into evil bogey men, so it's understandable from that perspective.
The fraction of people in the US who genuinely believe that Biden is a communist must be in the single digit percent. The fraction that understand he isn’t but use that as an exaggeration for rhetorical effect is higher, but still not the majority. However, jokes like “let’s ask ‘Americans’ to distinguish these” implies that conflating Biden-ism and communism is a mainstream consensus opinion, which is absolutely wrong.
I see a lot of stuff about Reichsbürger and similar movements in German media; should we conclude anything from that about “what Germans believe” ?
"Identify which country calls them vasistas because Germans used to ask "was ist das?" from a smaller aperture on the door before opening the actual door"
I remember a flame war between US-English and UK-English speakers, where one of the former said “if it weren't for us, you'd be speaking German now” and one of the latter ones said “if it weren't for the French, you'd still speak English now”.
Like random3821 commented, it's about American English not being “proper” English (while supposedly if the US of A were a British colony, it would be “proper”.)
To be fair, the “h” was silent in UK English when the English colonized America, and then the English began pronouncing the “h” at a later point. UK English deviates from the common ancestor surprisingly frequently.
I used to have an english boss who used this retort frequently.
That was until I asked him how he pronounced the name of his quintessential made-in-England roadster. You know, his Caterham.
For those not in the know, it is pronounced Kate-rum. The second syllable is normally pronounced as if it should not exist, you move as quickly from the t sound to the m sound as you can. Same thing as Leicester (phonetically leh-str)
Anyone with a half functioning brain can figure out which ones are the taxis. Taxis are not yellow in my country and I would have no issue picking those out. They have the very distinctive sign on the roof that no normal car has.
Not even OP was confused by this, they are just complaining on the behalf of some theoretical person who might get confused.
I would have no problems identifying a minibus either. They typically have writing / phone number on the side and something on the roof. The google captcha is usually fairly permissive with mistakes and will show you a different question if you fail the first.
I'd like to see someone actually show an example of a captcha they were incapable of solving.
> I would have no problems identifying a minibus either. They typically have writing / phone number on the side and something on the roof.
What if the writing accompanying the phone number says "Schlüsselservice Maier"? Some kind of ... shuttle service? Is that a taxi? (It's actually a locksmith.)
Of course these kinds of situations don't really happen for English speakers. I don't think I've ever seen non-English text in a CAPTCHA... Instead you get a picture of some Californian street with palm trees or something. (I assume those streets are in California. Maybe they're actually in Jakarta or elsewhere, in which case I'm sorry for being presumptive.)
> on the behalf of some theoretical person who might get confused
A theoretical person that also wouldn't get shown another captcha as a follow-up. I constantly fail captchas on some technicalities (or haste), and have never managed to fail so many to be flagged as a bot and be denied to a website.
I have failed sufficiently many to be flagged as a robot, several times. Maybe I am one?
And given how many times I usually have to solve them, if not critical for some reason, I tend to just close the tab for whatever I was going to do or read, if a CAPTCHA shows up. I have very little patience for doing free work for big corporations. If it was a non-profit with public access to the data set, sure.
I think the blog is complaining about a more general thing - that Americans often assume that everone is American and make decisions based on this assumption. This can lead to a range of frustration from the annoying-but-whatever (taxis aren't always yellow) to WTF (dimes, nickels oh-my).
They're currently the dominant culture so it's not an awful assumption - people generally can accommodate and work around these issues. It's just, I dunno, a bit insensitive or frustrating?
Maybe. But I think the better question is whether there is any evidence that anybody is actually confused what what a taxi is to the point where they are unable to answer these things. I am skeptical.
I understand people being annoyed by US-centrism, but that is a different matter.
It'd certainly be interesting to see how people got on with captchas where you identified plain-looking vehicles as taxis because they were obviously Hindustan Ambassadors. Or whether guesswork alone was sufficient to identify unfamiliar terms like 'layby' or'sleeping policeman'
There are multiple other ones with the roof sign visible which have exactly the same look from the windows down. So its pretty easy to conclude that this one is a taxi too since it looks like the other taxis.
And if you get it wrong you simply move on to the next question.
And if you get it wrong you simply move on to the next question.
Yes, and then on to the next. They don't just profile your answers, they profile your browser too. The more obscure the browser, the more likely my answers are "invalid", regardless of what I select.
I always close the tab, it's way better for my health.
If we don't push back early, there's the risk of ending up in a situation where every CAPTCHA is stuff like "Select images of arugula" or "Click every Dodge F150". The occasional fire hydrant CAPTCHA was already pretty close!
I'm from Germany and I actually do have issues every once in a while. Like traffic lights, or buses, are mostly fine, but in some cases, I wasn't sure and chose the wrong images. Is that a truck or a bus? Is that a street lamp or a traffic light? I did feel that it would have been easier for me if I was American.
> Anyone with a half functioning brain can figure out which ones are the taxis.
Unfortunately, there are tons of people with less than half functional brain... well I'm slightly joking here, but the point is you can't assume your user's cognitive ability. The CAPTCHA as it designed should be obvious to any human that would use your website (including those with impaired cognition) while being hard to robots. The OP is claiming that Google CAPTCHA is an international service and yet can fail to be obvious to a significant portion of non-Americans that would use your website.
That's just a US thing, and if you aren't familiar with that, then you won't recognise it as a taxi.
Here in the UK, taxis are normally just normal cars with vinyl stickers on the side. I think many people would associate the sign on the top with being a driving instructor's car
It's an argument against US cultural imperialism using a more benign example (US-centric captchas) than the politically charged ones we tend to see cropping up a lot.
I just got one "mark everything that shows bikes" with pictures of cyclists, motorbikes and cars. The translation used the norwegian word "sykler" which to me is the human powered one. But it looked like it wanted me to also select motorized ones as well. That's something that's lost in the translation.
Testing some more here https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo I also got "mark all fire hydrants". I've never seen one in real life, only those red in American cartoons. I got "parking meters", but none of them looked like they do in my country (and I've never heard anyone call them that word they used for translation). I got mark "mountains", but to quote Dundee: You call that a mountain?
I've come to the conclusion that most bots are not that sophisticated. Basic CSRF-protection seems to eliminate most automated requests and the need for captchas.
That is true for crawling bots which hit simple web forms. Also using some JavaScript kills most of them.
Although such methods won't work with targeted bot attack.
Yeah this is an interesting point. What constitutes a "traffic light"? Just the bulb? The housing around it? Or the pole as well? What about the control unit? They won't function as "traffic lights" without that. Remove the control box, and they become just dumb street furniture with no purpose.
Do they need to be on a road to be traffic lights? If I took the lights, the pole, and the control unit and installed it in a forest, would it still be "traffic lights"?
Google's CAPTCHA is a cancer of the internet. We're all training their AI without any renumeration. I genuinely hope that some government figures out how to sue them. I've sat down for minutes, repeating CAPTCHAs over and over again, just to log in to an account or download something.
>Not anymore, firefox has it by default now, just gotta turn a setting on.
I don't use Firefox as my main browser. I use Yandex. I do sometimes wonder if HTTPS everywhere is becoming a bit redundant these days anyway. Most sites seem to have moved to HTTPS these days.
>Sadly this [uMatrix] is dead
Yes, that's a shame. It still works though. Hopefully whoever takes on the task of keeping it alive via a fork will make it a bit more mobile friendly. [The same could be said about uBlock Origin]
Unfortunately the developers of those particular things (often like ad developers) use obscurity of things like div names to make the task less trivial.
But Google CAPTCHA has been asking the same questions now pretty much since its inception. Are we really still training it? Or is it just running on auto-pilot at this point? I'm guessing it's likely the latter.
I'm old enough to remember when reCAPTCHA was first introduced to help with deciphering text from OCR'd books. At that time, it didn't feel so bad answering those, as we were using our intelligence to genuinely help preserve our cultural history.
It then switched to being numbers on buildings and street signs, and it immediately felt worse - we were now doing a job for Google, and an annoying one. Mechanical Turk from Amazon was invented to do this kind of chore.
It's now creating training datasets for whatever else Google wants them to - it appears to mostly be for self-driving cars now, to identify landmarks and road signs.
It's definitely not on autopilot, and it's definitely a real problem.
Every time I get a captcha with traffic lights I imagine a Google self driving car stopped at an intersection waiting for me to complete the captcha so it can figure out what it sees and move along :)
There's no difference between helping google solve book scanning vs other datasets for whatever else they decide.
The fact that captcha exists on a website is the website owner's intension to cause friction for their users. It has nothing to do with google's use of reCapture directly. The only vote you have is to not use said website - sometimes harder said than done but that's the only option you have.
I used to have fun filling in those reCAPTCHAs with incorrect answers. They would show you two words, and it was always obvious which word was the actual CAPTCHA test and which was the OCR input, because the former would be warped into a funny shape while the latter was always a rectangular block of normal text. So I'd type in the correct answer for the warped word, and something like "fuckface" or "cocksucker" for the regular text, and it would be accepted.
I like to think that somewhere out there on Google Books, my efforts have resulted in an innocuous word being replaced with something offensive.
Before I discovered the Buster plugin, I used to try to be as unhelpful as possible in my forced Google AI training sessions.
I'd use the audio option in the reCraptcha and then see how little of what I heard I could get away with actually entering into the form. Often it sufficed to just type one word out of the entire audio clip or even enter a word which sounded similar [eg. audio clip says "tranced", I write "transit"]. The most satisfying ones of all where when, after listening to a complete sentence containing either word, I could pass the reCraptcha by simply typing "the" or "an" into the form.
One of the things that I find slightly disappointing about Buster is that it types in the entire sentence, when solving the reCraptcha. I hate to think Google are under the impression I've suddenly started trying harder!
>>I'm old enough to remember when reCAPTCHA was first introduced to help with deciphering text from OCR'd books
Am I the only one who always, on purpose, put in the wrong answer for the clearly scanned word? For me it was kind of a rebelion for being used this way, but it was always super easy to tell which word is generated and which one is scanned - and the algorithm only required the generated word to be correct, so I always put in absolute nonsense for the scanned word to break their OCR detection.
They do not ask the same questions since the beginning. At first, CAPCTHA has been used to make old books digitally accessible, which meant that you solved those potato quality scans of old books. When bots became advanced enough, reCAPTCHA was used to improve Google Maps by reading house numbers on poor quality cropped street view images.
Then the zeroCAPTCHA became a thing, which turned out to be even more annoying than others if you slightly cared about your privacy (meaning you at least installed an abblocken) and faced those multi-stages challenges. By looking at those challenges I think it is pretty obvious what CAPTCHA is used for nowadays, for training a recognition model for a self driving vehicle.
It would be interesting to see why someone would downvote it.
Since when are captchas a bigger issue than spam bots and fraud users?
and yes i also think that those tasks are actually helping our society. Adding models for self driving cars, for security/emergency breaking systems etc. So whats the issue?
I did not downvote you, but I assume it's because you're wrong. Depending on your browser settings, addons, etc. CAPTCHAs may be nearly impossible to solve. That is to say, you ARE solving them correctly, but Google thinks otherwise, and punishes you with ever more pictures that fade in and out ever more slowly. So the fact that they're easy to solve or work well for you means nothing. Other people are having real issues with it, and not because they are unable to solve them.
> It would be interesting to see why someone would downvote it.
If I had to guess:
> "solving one is not a real hurdle to you"
My experience is that it can be a real hurdle.
Sometimes reCaptcha forces me to complete 2 or 3 captchas (or more), some of them with an annoying artificial delay when loading new images. It seems to be worse when using a VPN or a browser like Firefox (or some privacy extension) that blocks Google tracking.
I understand why people use reCaptcha and that it works well for some users, but it can be a pain in the butt if you don't use Chrome, aren't logged in to your Google account, or if other devices in the network did something that Google doesn't like. I sometimes get captchas on my phone when using mobile data (on a major provider here in the UK) and Google search because of "unusual traffic from your computer network"...
I absolutely don't aim to defend Googles captcha here, but the other day I was setting up an Outlook account for my son, and I ran into Arkose Labs bot detection, and I actually got heatedly angry, which is extremely rare for me. I wanted to punch anyone related to that abomination.
Upon researching it seems to be used by the Epic launcher and Roblox (among others), which might explain why I've never encountered it before.
Someone else's screengrab, which looks larger than what I was presented on my laptop: https://imgur.com/a/jF1HxbN
So they:
* are very small (or I'm old)
* use faux 3d walls which further complicates the image
* have to be solved 10 in a row correctly
* have an unspecified time limit (which in my untempered rage felt like maybe 3 seconds per image tops, no promises)
* don't tell you you've failed by answer or time until you're through all 10.
I as a full grown human with ~25-30 years on the internet, as well as video games and puzzles for fun, could not get through it in less than 5 (*10) tries. I accept I might be occasionally slow, but this should not be an issue.
TL:DR; Can someone at Arkose Labs please just do an rm -rf /
Adding insult to injury, it seems pretty easy to write a quick image filter + path finding algo to solve these... as apparently all the walls have solid borders, while none of the walkable paths have them. So a targeted bot should have a much easier time solving these than a human.
Absolutely, they've produced something fairly consistent making it easy for bots, yet by design made it harder for humans to see (small, image noise), and solve (10 consecutive, short time limit, no user feedback).
I recognize that by looking at just the screengrab it's an extremely simple concept to solve, it's just that at every implementation turn they made the worst choices, and it just infuriates me.
Wow what the hell is that. Thank god I've never had to see that. It's better to load a broken image and ask to enter the numbers (that has happened to me though).
Oh, that actually reminds me of an entire other dimension of the whole thing. I blame rage induced fugue state.
What I described was just the procedure of 1 "level" of captcha. I had to complete either 2 or 3, the delineation is kind of blurred at this point.
The one I had before the above was audio based, but it failed to load a bunch of times, and failed my answers a few times as well, inexplicably.
It read out not 4-5, but 10-12 numbers, which honestly was manageable, but there was no audio spacing between the numbers that anyone who has to look at their keyboard to type would have to re-listen to it a few times to keep up. This one would also be entirely solvable by a bot, but problematic for a significant portion of humans.
I just don't understand how they make money, nor why Microsoft specifically would pay them for their services. I find the LEAST outrageous explanation that they're bribing someone in Microsoft's COTS purchasing.
No, the owner of the site is getting a free service from Google to try and prevent bots from using their site. If you don't like CAPTCHAs then your problem is with the site owner, not google.
Google's CAPTCHA is specifically engineered to gaslight you though.
Often it will ask you to identify fire hydrants or bicycles, and despite selecting all of them (and it being easy to recognise them as they are fairly unique objects), it will still give you an error, and give you a new set of images to try again. If it is feeling really malevolent it will even give you a third round.
Hell, it happens regularly on the second and especially the third try it will give you excruciatingly slowly crossfading images, and the last image routinely seems to need 2-4 clicks to finally make the object it wants you to identify go away.
Hcaptcha (Cloudflare's alternative) is an absolutely breeze by comparison, and it even allows you to pre-generate a bunch of tokens via an extension (PrivacyPass).
The only good thing about hcaptcha - what's better than one page of images? - is it doesn't seem to care what you click, but then neither does Google if you're using Chrome.
I hate CAPTCHAs as much as the next person, just pointing out the it is a service that Google provides and no site is required to implement it. So if you don't like CAPTCHAs then your beef is with site owners.
Ok, apart of the fact hackernews just made me fill in a captcha to register this one-time account (neverthelss, cudos HN, you are still better than the rest):
I do not understand Hcaptcha hype here. Since CloudFlare switched to Hcaptcha, as a VPN user, every time I run into a site that has CloudFlare / Hcaptcha, I can forget to pass that test. No matter how many times I try, CloudFlare still shows it all the time. It is so bad, so that now every time I see now Hcaptcha shown, I just close the site without even trying anymore. PrivacyPass :) - the biggest joke I seen on privacy - they that endorse it are either naive or have some other agenda.
These "free" zero-cost captchas for site owners are now in all places where a captca is not really needed. If CloudFlare, supper-dupper DOS solution relies on captchas, or if Google super-dupper search relies on captchas to get results, that demostrated how bad these companties really are at the main thing they do, and only want more data.
Even pirate stream sites ask now for captchas. It is so easy to integrate them, why not.
captchas, followed by 2-factor authentication with phone SMSs that we are forced to accept in all main life services slowly, combined with and laws to register phone SIM cards so they really know who we are, killed the web we know - people are being identified with hight quality.
We all rant about this here. It comes same in waves in HN all the time, but what can you do?
At least, if you own or manage a site or blog do not use: CloudFlare, Google, etc - no CDNs, no shared fonts.
There might be something really particular about your setup that trips up Hcaptcha.
I run Firefox with a stringent profile config, Ublocker in medium mode (3rd party default deny), I don’t care about cookies, Cookiebro, LocalCDN, Canvasblocker, Smart Referrer, on PIA VPN, and I never have issues with Hcaptcha.
As far as Privacy Pass goes: their code is on GitHub and you can verify the checksums. Doesn’t give me a 100% guarantee but it’s good enough for me.
It is not without remuneration. We use CAPTCHA to accessing a service. Imagine the "worst case scenario": you don't use Google services but a paid service has Google's CAPTCHA. It may seem like you are paying for training Google's AIs and you get nothing in return... but:
- Bots cause trouble to the service
- The service has to find some mitigation
- Mitigations cost money, and that cost will be passed down to the customer in some way
- Google offers a free solution, maybe not the best, but it will not cost the service anything (or close)
- So you are training Google's AI in exchange for cheaper service
Of course, you may disagree with it, you may think that a paid service shouldn't use Google's CAPTCHA, that you already pay too much, etc... But you are free to go elsewhere, and the rest is just market considerations, not something governments generally mess with, at least not governments that support free markets.
You could do lawsuits based on specific terms and conditions, but I guess large companies, Google first, have lawyers who know they stuff and get the company covered.
At least for humans. It's fairly easy to write a script with current technology even for an average "hacker" to solve them. But on the other hand it's extremely hard, nearly impossible for a person with special needs to complete them. Even for average person solving some of CAPTCHAs is a hassle.
Most of the popular CAPTCHAs services are "robot-friendly" and providers don't care who solves them, they just need data, they don't need to prove you're human.
CAPTCHAs being american-centric, ableist, etc are all valid criticisms here, but I think people in tech fail to understand the value of them.
Being "robot-friendly" still doesn't mean it's a walk in the park, and it's a hurdle that spammers will have to account for. If your site is a low value target or the spamming in general is low-value, it's often effective. Running any sort of small time open to the internet blog or forum will make the value of CAPTCHAs abundantly clear. The issue here is being inclusive to people, not making them "work" against robots.
In those situations, captchas don't offer any improvement over a text field that always asks you to put a 3 in it. It's just different enough from other systems that it requires custom programming, and that's just not worth it for most small websites.
There are user friendly and secure CAPTCHAs out there if implemented correctly.
A particular gaming forum uses game covers and asks users to select the correct title. This is quick enough to decipher for a human, while any OCR bots would have a difficult time with it. They could build a database of all covers, but it would be difficult to keep it up to date, and site owners could simply add more variation, so I doubt any bot authors bother to do so.
Like they are not familiar with overcomplicating things that should be simple, just for their own weird large scale performance benefit that applies to them only. Maybe a few other huge companies in the world.
Doing that tends to make stuff worse. I've lived in countries where I don't speak the local language and despite everything being configured to use English, via IP detection some sites decide to just show me content in the local language when I'm trying to log in. Paypal is notorious for this.
Google is bad at this as well, even if I go to google.nl it insists on offering me the damn Indonesian version. I have to add hl=nl to get the Dutch version I want. While I can deal with an Indonesian UI (I do for Google Maps, can't be bothered to change it all the time), dealing with Indonesian search results in harder.
ReCaptcha actually does this too. Everything on my system is configured for English, but it asks me to find the "Fußgangerweg" or whatever. Have to use Google Translate just to know what I'm supposed to be looking for.
The Nintendo Switch store also. I can't convince it to give me game descriptions in the system language rather than the language of the country where my account is registered.
They have Street View photos from most regions and they already set the language of their web apps based on IP, but hey - I learned to recognize an American hydrant from 100 yards (not meters, heh).
I used to close the browser tab when being forced to train Google's image recognition AI, now it's impossible as even some services from public administration of my country embedded this cancer.
I think captchas are weighting in your natural human responses, which may include your mistakes (which are human), mouse/pointer movements and actions and timing of your answer.
You're partially right. Yes, the captchas do include mouse movements, screen res, IP and a WHOLE LOT of information to try to decide if you're a human... but it was sure based on just that, it wouldn't show the images anyway. It would silently accept me.
It shows the picture selection test ONLY if it is not sure (based on the rest of the data) that I am indeed a human.
When it shows those many different images, it already knows with high certainty (based on majority of user input) that some of them have cars (or whatever) and some that don't. It also shows a few for which it doesn't know because they're using us for training in the first place.
As long as you get the ones it knows with high certainty right, it doesn't matter what you answer on the other ones.
I hate captchas with a passion so I'll add another anecdote to the mix:
I'm currently staying in SEA and I love gaming cafe culture here. The only problem is that every time I go to one it takes me good 20 minutes to solve all of the captchas to connect to discord, spotify etc. before I can actually enjoy the experience. So often when I only have 2 hours to spare I really don't feel like spending 15% of that time doing slave labour for google for free instead of enjoying the social gaming experience I went there for.
Sure the cafe could be setup better with more IP addresses or something, it's a small niche scenario and there are probably some hacks around it but it shouldn't be this way - it's just so disgusting how the web got hijacked by this nasty invasion.
Unfortunately minority affected don't have big enough voice in this to bring any change.
Many of the criticism of the article focuses upon people being able to figure out Captcha's even if the aren't American, but there are a few things to consider:
* A lot of native English speakers are going to have at least some exposure to American culture. For example: they may recognize that taxi's are yellow from American television and movies. Not everyone is going to have that exposure.
* It assumes that there is nothing from their experience that contradicts the question. For example: there is a business in my area that uses yellow cars with signage. (They can do that because taxi's in my area are not yellow.)
* It places a higher barrier to people who are not familiar with the cultural reference. Sure the author figured it out, but it would take them more thought and time to figure it out than someone who is American.
This ignores an important point that this is a game of elimination and contrasts.
For example in that taxi captcha, there are 4 pictures of trees and 5 pictures of vehicles.
1 vehicle is not identifiable, 1 is an utility van in the distance, and the remaining 3 are yellow cars.
These yellow cars have phone numbers on the sides and signs on the roof (where visible).
My bet is that the 3 yellow cars are taxis.
(And as it happens yellow actually seems to be the most common colour for taxis throughout the world where taxis have a specific colour.)
It usually works out fine. On rare occasions it's tricky but then it's possible to request another captcha.
I think people are trying too hard to find problems. I find hard to believe the comments that blow this out of proportion.
While you might guess that Yellow means Taxi in most of the world taxis aren't actually yellow. Around here they are mostly big dark Mercedes (many of them vans), maybe with some ads on them. And no big white sign on top either.
You just ignored the part where they show how you can figure out yellow means taxi in this set without having known it before. People are smarter than monkeys memorizing flash cards. They have the ability to spot patterns not previously recognized.
The most important one was mentioned earlier. It offers an implicit advantage to Americans. In the olden days we would call this American-centric. These days we would call it prejudiced. Claiming that it is prejudiced is valid since it is effectively asking different people different questions. To the American, it is asking them to identify taxis. To a non-American, it is asking them to solve a riddle.
To highlight that point: most of your criteria relied upon cultural factors. Those taxis have no resemblance to taxis in my part of the world. Taxis in my part of the world are private vehicles with a small magnetically mounted "taxi" sign on the roof. There is no consistency in colour, little consistency in type of vehicle, and they most certainly aren't covered with advertising. I also wouldn't be surprised if there are a handful of utility van used as taxis in my city, since taxi companies offer accessible services.
The game approach also implies some degree of understanding of captcha's. The approach you outlined assumed that the unidentifiable vehicle would not be treated as a valid answer and that more than one image would have to be selected, so you can look for patterns. Knowing the rules of the game may be fine if you are playing a game. It certainly isn't appropriate in the case of operating a business or offering a public service.
Captchas have gone mad. The other day a major service gave me less than 10 seconds to solve a puzzle with a mouse in a maze and some cheese, and subsequently locked out of my account.
Actually before I got locked out, I thought I would stand more chance with the alternative for the visually impaired. It jumped straight in to a fuzzy voice reading 20+ numbers at a rate of more than 1 per second. I was already behind on typing them in before it started, and I failed that too.
Its as if solving an unfamiliar problem with fuzzy images/audio (that are increasingly fuzzed beyond the absurd) wasn't mad enough. But now I'm expected to be faster than a computer as well.
The second part of that actually seems to be more valid than you'd expect. Most users I've seen who actually use voiceover et al have TTS at a frankly astonishing rate.
Although I agree in general. Plenty of capatchas have failed me. I refuse to say I've failed the capatcha. Given I'm human, and its role is to detect humans; I can't fail to be human - it can only fail to detect it.
Imagine being faced with this problem. It's not even visually clear what's going on in the picture. That's before you even get to solving the puzzle. Just "identify what we mean by a mouse" would be enough to be the captcha.
And then -- and I don't know how everyone else's brain works -- but, being the simpleton that I am, it's a linear search checking each one against the condition. There's enough time to look at about 3 of them before the clock ran out. No, I really don't want more time, either.
I'm comforted by the comments in that Reddit post. I haven't gone crazy.
Stairs too. Do they include the hand rails? If a step ends three pixels into a new square, do I select that square? What about the side face of the steps?
not trying to stir up a shitstorm, but since this article mentions IQ tests - "what's a nickel?"...
Check out the history (1971) of Larry P. and California's use of IQ testing in schools.
> As a group, African Americans across the country scored lower on IQ tests. The lawsuit alleged that was because the tests were biased toward Eurocentric culture. Questions like, ”Who wrote Romeo and Juliet,” they argued, didn’t assess a student’s innate capacity to learn. It tested knowledge that some – and not others — had acquired at home or school.
Those aren't anything like the sort of questions involved in IQ tests. IQ tests rarely involve words at all, usually a series of geometric shapes where you're supposed to pick the next one.
Not in 1971 when the lawsuit was filed. Now they use picture-based tests because those are supposedly less dependent on learned knowledge. (Though I find that many Raven's progressive matrices-type questions are a lot easier if you know about symmetry groups and XOR.)
> Though I find that many Raven's progressive matrices-type questions are a lot easier if you know about symmetry groups and XOR.
Yes, at that point people who have already developed certain mindware have an advantage, but arguably that's the point of an IQ test. You're not testing the potential of a person to eventually be really smart, you're testing for the current problem-solving potential.
Well, it is problem, because the assumption is that you're measuring a proxy for g that supposedly doesn't change. So if it can change, by something as simple as learning some boolean algebra, the IQ test isn't measuring what it is assumed to be measuring.
That being said, you're right that it would still be useful for measuring problem solving potential, but that's explicitly not what IQ tests are supposed to measure.
I personally think it's not something that's really true, but it's how I learned it in university and seems to be the default position of experts in the field.
This is of course assuming no traumatic brain injuries or the use of psychoactive substances.
Depends on the test. There's been a move away from tests that require cultural or language specific knowledge and which instead rely on "which shape in the sequence comes next" type questions but they have their own set of problems in that they don't capture linguistic ability which is a part of intelligence, and are also useless for blind people. Earlier IQ tests required a lot of culturally specific knowledge, and were often quite up front about it because they considered the possession of such knowledge to be a marker of intelligence. Generally that viewpoint is out of fashion now so test makers try to come up with tests that measure "pure" Intelligence, whatever that means.
Culturally specific knowledge obviously correlates with an ability to learn by the very definition of the ability to learn.
I doubt this viewpoint is out of fashion. The problem is that it is hard to compare people from different environments if you use knowledge that depends on the environment...
So does this mean Einstein's IQ was subjective? Was he supposedly smart because he had encountered things on the test before? Would he score lower on one today?
This is very wrong. Most complete IQ tests contain a lot more than just progressive matrices, because there is such a thing as verbal IQ that can't always be measured well by progressive matrices.
No. Look up to so called "literacy tests" used to disenfranchise voters. The people who designed those tests, and the "IQ" tests knew exactly what they were doing.
Similarly, https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 - the "Jewish Problems" that were extra-hard maths questions used to find an excuse to prevent certain students from getting into university.
I don’t think reCAPTCHA was designed to reinforce American culture. I think it was simply designed to make ML training sets for their other projects, and they neglected to make it accessible.
> Questions like [..] didn’t assess a student’s innate capacity to learn
Back in the day, I did a boat-load of tests and passed a boat-load of exams at school and then university. I have a drawer full of certificates from (apparently) respected institutions to prove it.
None of which are any use to me right now.
I can't say that any of the tests or exams I sat actually assessed anything close to my "innate capacity to learn".
For immigration purposes, I've had to take (and pass) a German language test. I've taken so many tests in my life, over 25 years of "school", and I've learned how tests work and how to pass them, that I've made the joke that I could have passed the the written part of the test in any language where I could read the alphabet.
I can’t be the only one offended by the unpaid labor involved in CAPTCHAs (training self-driving AIs or whatever).
Sometimes an annoying CAPTCHA has literally prevented me from giving money to a site when I was going to buy something but instead ended up just closing it in frustration.
I wish Apple would offer a way for sites and services to verify that a client is indeed human via Touch ID/Face ID.
I'm not American and I often see captchas that ask about "cars" or "trucks". And they use similar images. I sometimes don't pass through those. My question is, when I see a truck and I'm being asked to select all cars, should I select the truck or not? For me a truck is a car. Is it not one?
The thing is that "probably" is the entire issue. You might just be training an AI that "truck" is a specific thing in the USA and something else where you happen to live ... or you might also be trying to guess what Google already thinks a "truck" is.
The stakes might be low (you get presented with another captcha) or astronomical (you get your account locked or something). There is literally no way to know with Google, it's a complete black box.
right but im sure whatever purpose it's using it for is going to be used against the commoners at some level -- weather it be to sell a new service at a higher price point, help further their monopoly, or to better create dark patterns (against us).
they have no "benefit of the doubt" -- it's pretty blatantly clear they are not on "our" side.
In my country, the Ford F150 truck would be referred to as a car or a "half-truck", while a semi-truck is what would be referred to as a truck. That's a piece of cultural difference that will dirty your training.
It might be called a car or a pickup truck but never just a truck by someone here. While "pickup truck" is an American inherited phrase which has truck in it, they're considered trucks about as much as a catfish is considered a cat.
That might depend on what 'truck' means to you! Is it equivalent to the British 'lorry', or does it include pickup trucks? I'm Australian, and for me 'truck' means 'lorry', pickups are a kind of ute, utes are a kind of car, and so trucks and cars are clearly distinct. (QED!) There seems to be endless room for cross-cultural ambiguity here though.
The way I learned it, a "car" is any roofed 4+ wheeled vehicle up to van and SUV size (yeah, more Americanisms). Pickup trucks and larger are "trucks".
Even this exemplifies bad translations between two dialects of English. To me a van is a Ford Transit, but it sounds like to you a van is a Ford Galaxy (which I'd see as a "people carrier")
A side quest to yours - when I'm told to select traffic lights - should I include the pieces with just the poles or it's fine to select only the ones with actual lights? I never get through them.
I think trucks are cars. I would pick any automobile, really even anything with 4+ wheels and a motor. I generally pass those.
The ones that get me are the street sign / street light ones. Do the poles count? What about a tiny edge of the sign that is barely visible in a neighboring square? Ugh.
Nonsense. I've never been to America but never had a problem recognizing any object on a captcha (except some indistinguishable letters on letter-based captchas occasionally). Everything is obvious even if it looks somewhat different from its European counterpart.
I don't know how much exactly is a nickel or a dime but it's obvious to me these are coins.
Everybody I know (and most of them have never been to America) is Ok with these American captchas too.
The only problems with captchas are they spy on you (Google doesn't actually check if you are a human, it checks which particular human you are) and annoy you.
Don't get me started on how infuriating Google's ReCaptchas are on Tor Browser.
Buster captcha solver fails immediately. And when you do actually manually solve the captcha correctly, sometimes Google still thinks you're a robot.
And sometimes it asks me to select all "bicycles" in the images and there are NO GODDAMN BICYCLES in any of the images whatsover. So I hit Skip and eventually google thinks I'm a robot.
Everybody please either switch to hcaptcha or..., although I've not seen a website use this yet, upgrade to ReCaptcha v3 maybe?
I read somewhere that ReCaptcha v3 is far less annoying than v2? Is that true?
It seems like Google punishing you for taking actions to increase your privacy, which not-so-coincidentally reduces the data they're able to hoover up from you.
That's just silly; it's well known that Tor nodes are widely abused by spam bots. Google is "punishing" known sources of spam. When I ran a forum many Tor nodes ended up being outright blocked, since there was so much spam coming from them.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. I run Tor relays to support the network, but at the same time having moderated a forum that received tens of thousands of signups per day over Tor and NordVPN and PIA, all of which were able to verify email via various domains,, all of which were for spam...
It's not like I intentionally targetted Tor relays or anything, we just targetted source of spam, which ended up being a lot of Tor relays. Because we were (and actually, still are) running a rather outdated version of vBulletin (upgrading is difficult) things were getting pretty dire if we didn't do ... something.
It's just that the classification gap between human and computer is closing, so now computers are better than a good percentage of humans, which means that there's a chunk of humans that now cannot conclusively prove they aren't bots.
Funny you should say that. reCAPTCHA v3 is meant to be invisible, watching the behavior of a user in the background, and then returning a score between 0.0 and 1.0 for the website to do with as they please.
so if you don't pass, say, by using TOR or even just a VPN, you don't even get a chance to prove you're not a bot? Cool, really cool, I can't see that being illegal at all.
EDIT: This comment is stupidly worded, please see clarification below.
My comment was poorly phrased. My point is that this can quickly lead to legal problems, when such a captcha restricts your access to something you do have a legal right to.
Say I buy a new phone and it stops working after 3 weeks. I want to contact the seller, but they only have a web contact form and I fail to get past the captcha.
This is already getting very close to being a huge legal problem, and the only reason why it's probably not that bad is that technically that website is supposed to give at least a contact address so I could just send them a letter which, while hugely inconvenient, is legally still a good enough way for me to contact them.
I'm sure if you spend a while longer you could find a few cases where the problem is even worse (also considering more than just one legal system).
So what I should have said: Using this technology to block users from the wrong endpoints could end up being illegal.
It's definitely a problem regarding government sites - the UK even has a page advising their own government agencies to not rely on them unless absolutely necessary[0]. US government sites have simply resorted to putting everything behind a login wall and verifying identity, such as is the case for ssa.gov and healthcare.gov, or just not caring and letting spammers do whatever they'd like (typical for local-level governments).
GDPR could be a concern if you are not able to opt out of automated processing. Deciding if you're a spambot or not is a huge decision for a robot to make.
To be fair, any captcha would have this trouble, but an entirely invisible one would not be able to be questioned
I'm pretty sure recatcha has a punitive/tarpit mode where it had already decided to reject you but just gives a series of slow tests which it will never pass you on anyway.
ReCaptcha v3 is basically a means for Google to let the site owner take the blame for bad UX patterns while still getting browsing data from much of the web.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadI think that's the point of these captchas. The average human being has no problem passing the test even if they are not 100% familiar with all the details.
There is obviously a limit and indeed pictures should be chosen to be generic enough to be workable throughout the world, but I feel this is 'problem' is blown out of proportion by some commenters.
Yeah, images are hard and already solved by AI, anyway. At least on specific domains where there is training data.
New captcha idea - the Turing test. Detect if a passage is written by human or AI. If you can't get in, it means we reached AGI.
So we've reached AGI decades ago then? Text generators aren't rocket science and carefully cherry picked results of even a simple Markov-chain will be indistinguishable from human writings.
When I decided it looked too narrow to be a crossing, the captcha wouldn't let me through until I agreed that it in fact was a crossing.
https://youtu.be/UCo0hSFAWOc
You missed the point. I’m not asking that literally.
I think it's time for a vast menagerie of crossings.
1) The AARdvark crossing. When you hit the button it sings the aardvark song. Also useful on talk like a pirate day.
2) The Abalone crossing. It's under the water and quite endangered.
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican_crossing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisha_beacon
Pelican crossings have the button you must press to cross.
Zebra has striped road markings, with flashing yellow marker lights so that vehicle users have plenty of advance warning of the crossing. Pedestrians have right of way on these crossings at all times, other road users should slow until they can discern whether any pedestrians are trying to cross and if necessary stop.
Pelican is an older design, though still used in new crossings in London and some other places. The pedestrians controls are in a box at hand height but the signals are on the far side of the crossing. These trigger road signals in a pattern with an extra flashing amber phase meaning "road vehicles may cross only if there are no pedestrians using the crossing".
Puffin is a replacement for Pelican with two innovations. Firstly the pedestrian signals are with your controls on your side of the road and they're placed so that to face towards them you're also facing oncoming traffic (this will most often be the right side of the crossing since the British drive on the left, but not in every situation). Secondly there is no flashing amber phase, the Puffin has infrared detectors so it can discern whether pedestrians are still on the crossing and extend the red phase slightly if they are.
The Toucan and Pegasus mentioned elsewhere are variants of Puffin rather than Pelican.
on edit: changed here to hear.
We have pedestrian crossings, not cross walks.
Fire hydrants around here are inside the ground, or in a riser if inside a building.
Can any US people clarify?
But I'm basically only familiar with them from bloody reCaptchas, so I don't know!
For crosswalks not at an intersection (typically when there is several hundred feet of road without an intersection for crosswalks), I believe pedestrians always have the right of way. Sometimes they have a button you can push that will activate yellow lights overhead so drivers know that you're crossing (primarily useful at night). I think you have the right of way regardless, but given how little attention many people pay, I tend to treat them like I'm jaywalking anyways.
Traffic laws can vary by state, but in general pedestrians always have the right-of-way on a crosswalk (except when there's a traffic light).
Whether or not cars will actually stop for you is a different story.
Cross-Walk(even Pedestrian) is a better term than Zebra-Crossing; for kids though, Zebra helps.
Edit: English were in world over making colonies across Afro-Asian countries.
https://www.thehindu.com/in-school/sh-science/The-zebra-in-o...
Has anyone seen a Zebra cross a zebra-crossing? Only happens in England.
They used zebra crossing (even though there are no Zebras in the UK either, I think), so we used it. Now the new argument is that the cultural imperialism of the US is forcing us to change the term again. Sure, the term "cross-walk" sort of makes more sense than zebra crossing, but not enough that you don't need it defined for you the first time you encounter it. So, it is not such a precise and great term, as you almost say, that one can ignore the cultural imperialism argument.
Both arguments (colonialism and cultural imperialism) are distinct and can be treated separately.
As for cross-walk making more sense; Zebra crossing are so named because of the black and white stripes they comprise of, they require you to have seen one, yes, but, I'd argue that without context "cross-walk" is no more descriptive.
Collectively, we call our crossings (Toucan, Pelican, Zebra, Pegasus), "road crossings". They are so named due to their properties; Toucan because "two (types of user) can" cross there, Pelican (formerly pelicon) because it stands for PEdestrian LIght C[O]Ntrolled crossing), Zebra for its stripes, and Pegasus due to the buttons being accessible at heights suitable for those riding horses.
Pier is a more familiar term to me. I think I've only heard the term boardwalk in relation to some place in New Jersey.
I failed a few recaptchas like that too, tho not due to language barrier, but because I didn't pick some things that didn't look like crossings at all. I am convinced that some of those supposed markings were not crossings at all but things that somehow got into google's labeling db as outright false positives.
I find recaptchas downright humiliating. I think twice before completing one — is whatever it grants access to worth it?
Imagine if, every time you went to the supermarket or the library, there was some goon on the door who wouldn't let you in unless you could do ten press-ups and answer half a dozen general knowledge questions. They'd soon go out of business --as all websites which treat their visitors with such contempt deserve to do.
Check if you are logged into google. (pretty much unavoidable in chrome). If you have a google account then they know your phone number is verified and getting a phone number usually requires government mandated identification.
Otherwise they use fingerprinting to identify you and correlate it with activity on google, youtube, google ads, etc.
If those two things fail then Google will give you an endless stream of captchas even if you answer all of them correctly. I often had to complete 20 captchas only for it to tell me "sorry". There was maybe a 1/3 chance that completing all 20 captchas let me through.
Meanwhile on a different browser where I'm logged into google I get through on first attempt. Google captchas are just a data mining operation. They have nothing to do with proving whether you are human. After all, if they have enough data about you they often give you the option to skip the captcha altogether. The captcha is a psychological attack on you to convince you to give Google more data.
It's a bit like that idiotic back to front MM-DD-YYYY date format that no-one else uses outside America, but even non-US gadget manufacturers insist on making the default. I nearly sent my Xiaomi MiBand back when I realised it was hard-wired to display the date back to front. Luckily, with my middle-aged eyesight and the minuscule 3pt text it uses to display the date, I can't read the fecker anyway, so the annoyance is slightly diminished.
Why not? I would suppose it's forbidden to park over these, so identifying them makes sense.
Some of pictures are the kinda that hang suspended from a cable. We just don't have those in Australia so I tend to miss them.
Not sure I've ever seen a real parking meter. (Just ones in cartoons like the Simpsons). I kept getting mixed up with what was a parking meter and what was too ambiguous to tell. (Like could be intercom or a letter box, they pictures get blurry)
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captch...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha-sol...
https://github.com/dessant/buster#readme
https://github.com/dessant/buster/wiki/Installing-the-client...
You've saved hours of my life. I get dramatically fewer captcha requests with Captcha buster installed than otherwise (it's a fact.)
Downloading anime without installing Universal bypass and Captcha buster is masochism - recaptcha would just go crazy infinite loop mode.
Thanks a ton.
If you're into anime, you might also enjoy Search by Image, it includes support for a handful of search engines tailored to anime and manga. Visit the extension's options to enable them.
https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image#readme
ReCaptcha doesn't care at all if you're human or not, but instead has some vague aim of "preventing abuse."
That's a well understood protocol too.
Most of the times I can easily solve Google reCaptcha. However, If I don't know the meaning of the object being displayed / any difficulties seeing it, Google won't let me switch to audio mode ( It'll display something like "This feature is currently unavailable" or "We have detected unusual traffic from your network"
I've rised the issue last year with the W3C [1] and now your experience is publicly documented [2], though the next step would be to file complaints and take legal action for your rights to be respected.
[1] https://github.com/w3c/apa/issues/25
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/#version-2-are-you-a-robot
For example, their bizarre date system. Widespread use of state abbreviations and timezone abbreviations that are only known in the USA. "Zip code" on forms for customers in New Zealand or India or France.
AL can be Alabama or Albania, AZ can be Arizona or Azerbaijan, DE could be Germany or Delaware, etc. Just under half of US state abbreviations are "unique" (as in, not also used for some country in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard).
Personally I'm mostly annoyed by the concept of states when filling out delivery address. When I enter my country (that has no concept of states), I often find myself having to make something up because the state field is a required field.
Why would your dropdown still have those when I selected a different country?
I have even once seen a thread where Easter Europeans who never been in America argued with Americans about meaning of English word and about American culture. It was literally "are you sure you know better then American how Americans would interpret that word/situation in their day to day life" situation.
If we talked about English person speaking to Emglish, we would take English usage.
But context was American speech and Eastern Europans who know America only from movies thinking they know all about it.
But yeah how the f someone though MM/DD/YY was a god date format and they kept using this monstrosity still baffles me
Edit: translating the expression "Zip Code" to the equivalent in other countries is a non-issue (be it postal codes, etc). It's a code used by the post. No mystery there. Of course, they have different formats in different places so don't validate them as US Zip codes
NZ has postcodes, and they're 4 digits, which confuses some websites.
Yes, the dates are ridiculous. I've had to use an online assessment system with hard-coded backwards American due date formatting that I have to warn students about. The vendor just shrugged.
tl;dr: making stuff international is hard.
But I have to call out Ryanair in this context. For many years, before eircode, they demanded a postcode on their payment page. An Irish company, serving Irish customers, demanded postcodes when most the country didn't have them.
(And I paypal still believes my postcode is null. I don't recall ever entering that, so I wonder where/when it derived that.)
A cyclist, however is the mechanism. You can make the argument that it's silly, but I'll bet you more people will look at you funny for saying cyclists drive than for saying the operator of a motor vehicle rides especially given the legal baggage that comes with driving.
Aside from that, they're quite easy to identify. They're usually the ones either breaking traffic laws, or being ignored/cursed at because their mere existance increases the volatility of motor vehicle traffic patterns in urban environments.
Secondly, cities with large numbers of cyclists tend to have better, not worse traffic. It's obvious why: fewer people driving plus infrastructure for bikes is developed and separated from car infrastructure. You should wish for more cyclists, not fewer.
Arguably, what makes motor traffic "flow better" is increased predictability, and decreased demand on shared infrastructure. I'm not condemning all cyclists or saying it isn't worthwhil; merely that the arrangements we've got with them being sometimes pedestrians/sometimes road users leads to a cultural clash that leaves everyone frustrated.
The entire urban network architecture leaves quite a lot to be desired.
I would certainly not wish to be ignored by wagons, trucks, and SUVs while cycling through American cities.
I speak only from having seen others behavior.
True story: Had a driver who swerved from the left-hand lane, across a lane of traffic, across the bike lane, and into a drive way, after I yelled at him (while rapidly braking) tell me "I didn't see you." I've got 3 reflectors (from his PoV), I'm wearing long sleeves reflective highlighter safety orange, and it's daylight…
I find it interesting how the US uses text for almost everything, and how Canada is sort of a mix of US-style and European-style signs.
Thanks for link, it was interesting to see.
That said, it’s not too bad. It’s long and the organization is bad but the policy is reasonableish.
There’s street cleaning one day a week (year round) 11am-1pm, and you can’t ever park then.
It’s a school zone as well; when school is in session you can park for 15 minutes in the afternoon to drop a kid off or for 1 hour to pick the kid up. When school is out you just need to avoid the street cleaning.
I don't see any obvious contradictions. You can't park 11-1 tuesday due to street cleaning. You can't stop there mon-fri 7:30-16:00 with the exception of 7:30-8 for school business (dropping the kids off). You can park mon-fri between 4 and 6, once per day, per district (to pick up your kids after school), district permits (people who live there, not sure what the 4 means) are exempt.
https://www.lamag.com/driver/hidden-costs-parking-signs-easy...
In particular, why is it necessary to point out that parking is prohibited from 11 to 1 on Tuesday, when stopping of any kind is already prohibited on a superset of that time (7:30-4 M-F)?
I don’t drive anymore (and when I did, it was mainly in suburbs) so perhaps I’m just not familiar with conventions?
Also, because this is apparently in a school zone, you have to think about how stopping is different from parking: You don't have to pull into a parking zone to drop off your kid, you can just stop momentarily in the middle of the street. During the non-overlap hours, you can pull over and park, just not stop in the street.
https://www.culvercity.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=1928
It doesn't matter if it seems sane that way. How many seconds does a driver have to read through that all when he's driving near the speed limit? Do we expect drivers to still keep an eye on the road while trying to decipher it? Do we expect every driver to slam on the brakes, and stand still until they've parsed it all?
Head Office seems to be really struggling to grasp that this training might be less relevant to other countries, other offices, let alone remote workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shooter_training
Americans don’t reliably distinguish between various left-of-center ideologies in their language, but that’s not uniquely American, because neither do Europeans.
I see a lot of stuff about Reichsbürger and similar movements in German media; should we conclude anything from that about “what Germans believe” ?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vasistas
> Click on the side of the gun where the bullet comes out from
Pretty much 50% of Americans will find this impossible while the other half will have no problem whatsoever.
"Really? 'erbs? You're french now?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Revolut...
For those not in the know, it is pronounced Kate-rum. The second syllable is normally pronounced as if it should not exist, you move as quickly from the t sound to the m sound as you can. Same thing as Leicester (phonetically leh-str)
Not even OP was confused by this, they are just complaining on the behalf of some theoretical person who might get confused.
I'd like to see someone actually show an example of a captcha they were incapable of solving.
What if the writing accompanying the phone number says "Schlüsselservice Maier"? Some kind of ... shuttle service? Is that a taxi? (It's actually a locksmith.)
Of course these kinds of situations don't really happen for English speakers. I don't think I've ever seen non-English text in a CAPTCHA... Instead you get a picture of some Californian street with palm trees or something. (I assume those streets are in California. Maybe they're actually in Jakarta or elsewhere, in which case I'm sorry for being presumptive.)
A theoretical person that also wouldn't get shown another captcha as a follow-up. I constantly fail captchas on some technicalities (or haste), and have never managed to fail so many to be flagged as a bot and be denied to a website.
And given how many times I usually have to solve them, if not critical for some reason, I tend to just close the tab for whatever I was going to do or read, if a CAPTCHA shows up. I have very little patience for doing free work for big corporations. If it was a non-profit with public access to the data set, sure.
They're currently the dominant culture so it's not an awful assumption - people generally can accommodate and work around these issues. It's just, I dunno, a bit insensitive or frustrating?
But come on. It’s easy to figure these things out. This is an invented problem.
I understand people being annoyed by US-centrism, but that is a different matter.
The bottom left does not have roof visible. Nor does top left for that matter, which could theoretically be taxi van.
I fail these captchas often enough for them to be annoying, but I assumed they are simply buggy.
And if you get it wrong you simply move on to the next question.
Yes, and then on to the next. They don't just profile your answers, they profile your browser too. The more obscure the browser, the more likely my answers are "invalid", regardless of what I select.
I always close the tab, it's way better for my health.
Taxi comes in exactly same colors and types as any other car.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/taxi-min...
Unfortunately, there are tons of people with less than half functional brain... well I'm slightly joking here, but the point is you can't assume your user's cognitive ability. The CAPTCHA as it designed should be obvious to any human that would use your website (including those with impaired cognition) while being hard to robots. The OP is claiming that Google CAPTCHA is an international service and yet can fail to be obvious to a significant portion of non-Americans that would use your website.
Here in the UK, taxis are normally just normal cars with vinyl stickers on the side. I think many people would associate the sign on the top with being a driving instructor's car
In your country maybe.
Testing some more here https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo I also got "mark all fire hydrants". I've never seen one in real life, only those red in American cartoons. I got "parking meters", but none of them looked like they do in my country (and I've never heard anyone call them that word they used for translation). I got mark "mountains", but to quote Dundee: You call that a mountain?
Neither will Captcha
Do they need to be on a road to be traffic lights? If I took the lights, the pole, and the control unit and installed it in a forest, would it still be "traffic lights"?
"Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans" is one of my top 3 browser extensions.
(Mine is, of course, tree style tabs - I could never manage without it.)
* Bitwarden
* HTTPS everywhere
* Privacy Badger/Possum/Other Furry Animal
* uBlock Origin
* uMatrix
* Windscribe
Not anymore, firefox has it by default now, just gotta turn a setting on.
> uMatrix
Sadly this is dead, I guess I'll switch to a fork once I have time to figure out who does what.
Now if only someone could come up with similarly useful extensions that got rid of the other two forms of cancer that are ruining the internet:
1: Cookie consent dialogues*
and
2: Those modal overlays that suddenly cover up what you're reading and ask you to subscribe to some poxy newsletter or mailing list.
*not "I Don't Care About Cookies". It slowed my browser to a crawl when I installed it.
It then switched to being numbers on buildings and street signs, and it immediately felt worse - we were now doing a job for Google, and an annoying one. Mechanical Turk from Amazon was invented to do this kind of chore.
It's now creating training datasets for whatever else Google wants them to - it appears to mostly be for self-driving cars now, to identify landmarks and road signs.
It's definitely not on autopilot, and it's definitely a real problem.
And in return you get an internet that is not filled with spam and bots. Or at least less filled with bots.
The fact that captcha exists on a website is the website owner's intension to cause friction for their users. It has nothing to do with google's use of reCapture directly. The only vote you have is to not use said website - sometimes harder said than done but that's the only option you have.
I like to think that somewhere out there on Google Books, my efforts have resulted in an innocuous word being replaced with something offensive.
Granted this is mostly a kerning issue.
Without wider textual context the correct answer is hard to determine.
I'd use the audio option in the reCraptcha and then see how little of what I heard I could get away with actually entering into the form. Often it sufficed to just type one word out of the entire audio clip or even enter a word which sounded similar [eg. audio clip says "tranced", I write "transit"]. The most satisfying ones of all where when, after listening to a complete sentence containing either word, I could pass the reCraptcha by simply typing "the" or "an" into the form.
One of the things that I find slightly disappointing about Buster is that it types in the entire sentence, when solving the reCraptcha. I hate to think Google are under the impression I've suddenly started trying harder!
Am I the only one who always, on purpose, put in the wrong answer for the clearly scanned word? For me it was kind of a rebelion for being used this way, but it was always super easy to tell which word is generated and which one is scanned - and the algorithm only required the generated word to be correct, so I always put in absolute nonsense for the scanned word to break their OCR detection.
Then the zeroCAPTCHA became a thing, which turned out to be even more annoying than others if you slightly cared about your privacy (meaning you at least installed an abblocken) and faced those multi-stages challenges. By looking at those challenges I think it is pretty obvious what CAPTCHA is used for nowadays, for training a recognition model for a self driving vehicle.
Sometimes literally. They'll show me series of fire hydrants that don't end after several minutes, and I just give up.
Catpcha was not invented to make the internet worse and solving one is not a real hurdle to you.
I'm not sure why you 'sat down for minutes' to solve any of them, you might just be really bad in comparison to a lot of other peoples.
Nonetheless, this helps YOU it makes YOUR experience better by making it harder for bots.
Have you ever seen a community killed by spam bots? You are probably quite happy that the amount of spam in comments etc. are as low as it is.
Since when are captchas a bigger issue than spam bots and fraud users?
and yes i also think that those tasks are actually helping our society. Adding models for self driving cars, for security/emergency breaking systems etc. So whats the issue?
If I had to guess:
> "solving one is not a real hurdle to you"
My experience is that it can be a real hurdle.
Sometimes reCaptcha forces me to complete 2 or 3 captchas (or more), some of them with an annoying artificial delay when loading new images. It seems to be worse when using a VPN or a browser like Firefox (or some privacy extension) that blocks Google tracking.
I understand why people use reCaptcha and that it works well for some users, but it can be a pain in the butt if you don't use Chrome, aren't logged in to your Google account, or if other devices in the network did something that Google doesn't like. I sometimes get captchas on my phone when using mobile data (on a major provider here in the UK) and Google search because of "unusual traffic from your computer network"...
Upon researching it seems to be used by the Epic launcher and Roblox (among others), which might explain why I've never encountered it before.
Someone else's screengrab, which looks larger than what I was presented on my laptop: https://imgur.com/a/jF1HxbN
So they:
* are very small (or I'm old)
* use faux 3d walls which further complicates the image
* have to be solved 10 in a row correctly
* have an unspecified time limit (which in my untempered rage felt like maybe 3 seconds per image tops, no promises)
* don't tell you you've failed by answer or time until you're through all 10.
I as a full grown human with ~25-30 years on the internet, as well as video games and puzzles for fun, could not get through it in less than 5 (*10) tries. I accept I might be occasionally slow, but this should not be an issue.
TL:DR; Can someone at Arkose Labs please just do an rm -rf /
Edit: Apparently they have other types as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/gkpz0f/how_to...
I recognize that by looking at just the screengrab it's an extremely simple concept to solve, it's just that at every implementation turn they made the worst choices, and it just infuriates me.
What I described was just the procedure of 1 "level" of captcha. I had to complete either 2 or 3, the delineation is kind of blurred at this point.
The one I had before the above was audio based, but it failed to load a bunch of times, and failed my answers a few times as well, inexplicably.
It read out not 4-5, but 10-12 numbers, which honestly was manageable, but there was no audio spacing between the numbers that anyone who has to look at their keyboard to type would have to re-listen to it a few times to keep up. This one would also be entirely solvable by a bot, but problematic for a significant portion of humans.
I just don't understand how they make money, nor why Microsoft specifically would pay them for their services. I find the LEAST outrageous explanation that they're bribing someone in Microsoft's COTS purchasing.
This. This is not said enough. Everything you do with a Google service is used to train their AI. I don't want to train their AI.
Hcaptcha (Cloudflare's alternative) is an absolutely breeze by comparison, and it even allows you to pre-generate a bunch of tokens via an extension (PrivacyPass).
I do not understand Hcaptcha hype here. Since CloudFlare switched to Hcaptcha, as a VPN user, every time I run into a site that has CloudFlare / Hcaptcha, I can forget to pass that test. No matter how many times I try, CloudFlare still shows it all the time. It is so bad, so that now every time I see now Hcaptcha shown, I just close the site without even trying anymore. PrivacyPass :) - the biggest joke I seen on privacy - they that endorse it are either naive or have some other agenda.
These "free" zero-cost captchas for site owners are now in all places where a captca is not really needed. If CloudFlare, supper-dupper DOS solution relies on captchas, or if Google super-dupper search relies on captchas to get results, that demostrated how bad these companties really are at the main thing they do, and only want more data.
Even pirate stream sites ask now for captchas. It is so easy to integrate them, why not.
captchas, followed by 2-factor authentication with phone SMSs that we are forced to accept in all main life services slowly, combined with and laws to register phone SIM cards so they really know who we are, killed the web we know - people are being identified with hight quality.
We all rant about this here. It comes same in waves in HN all the time, but what can you do?
At least, if you own or manage a site or blog do not use: CloudFlare, Google, etc - no CDNs, no shared fonts.
I run Firefox with a stringent profile config, Ublocker in medium mode (3rd party default deny), I don’t care about cookies, Cookiebro, LocalCDN, Canvasblocker, Smart Referrer, on PIA VPN, and I never have issues with Hcaptcha.
As far as Privacy Pass goes: their code is on GitHub and you can verify the checksums. Doesn’t give me a 100% guarantee but it’s good enough for me.
- Bots cause trouble to the service
- The service has to find some mitigation
- Mitigations cost money, and that cost will be passed down to the customer in some way
- Google offers a free solution, maybe not the best, but it will not cost the service anything (or close)
- So you are training Google's AI in exchange for cheaper service
Of course, you may disagree with it, you may think that a paid service shouldn't use Google's CAPTCHA, that you already pay too much, etc... But you are free to go elsewhere, and the rest is just market considerations, not something governments generally mess with, at least not governments that support free markets.
You could do lawsuits based on specific terms and conditions, but I guess large companies, Google first, have lawyers who know they stuff and get the company covered.
I don't have a sufficient capacity for sarcasm to faithfully reproduce the emotions I feel when reading this.
At least for humans. It's fairly easy to write a script with current technology even for an average "hacker" to solve them. But on the other hand it's extremely hard, nearly impossible for a person with special needs to complete them. Even for average person solving some of CAPTCHAs is a hassle.
Most of the popular CAPTCHAs services are "robot-friendly" and providers don't care who solves them, they just need data, they don't need to prove you're human.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captch...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha-sol...
Being "robot-friendly" still doesn't mean it's a walk in the park, and it's a hurdle that spammers will have to account for. If your site is a low value target or the spamming in general is low-value, it's often effective. Running any sort of small time open to the internet blog or forum will make the value of CAPTCHAs abundantly clear. The issue here is being inclusive to people, not making them "work" against robots.
A particular gaming forum uses game covers and asks users to select the correct title. This is quick enough to decipher for a human, while any OCR bots would have a difficult time with it. They could build a database of all covers, but it would be difficult to keep it up to date, and site owners could simply add more variation, so I doubt any bot authors bother to do so.
It still shows US-centric pictures though...
It shows the picture selection test ONLY if it is not sure (based on the rest of the data) that I am indeed a human.
When it shows those many different images, it already knows with high certainty (based on majority of user input) that some of them have cars (or whatever) and some that don't. It also shows a few for which it doesn't know because they're using us for training in the first place.
As long as you get the ones it knows with high certainty right, it doesn't matter what you answer on the other ones.
I'm currently staying in SEA and I love gaming cafe culture here. The only problem is that every time I go to one it takes me good 20 minutes to solve all of the captchas to connect to discord, spotify etc. before I can actually enjoy the experience. So often when I only have 2 hours to spare I really don't feel like spending 15% of that time doing slave labour for google for free instead of enjoying the social gaming experience I went there for.
Sure the cafe could be setup better with more IP addresses or something, it's a small niche scenario and there are probably some hacks around it but it shouldn't be this way - it's just so disgusting how the web got hijacked by this nasty invasion.
Unfortunately minority affected don't have big enough voice in this to bring any change.
I routinely click on a false image and rarely get denied
Initially I could get through easily while choosing wrong images, but now it takes me many goes to get through with even one wrong pick.
* A lot of native English speakers are going to have at least some exposure to American culture. For example: they may recognize that taxi's are yellow from American television and movies. Not everyone is going to have that exposure.
* It assumes that there is nothing from their experience that contradicts the question. For example: there is a business in my area that uses yellow cars with signage. (They can do that because taxi's in my area are not yellow.)
* It places a higher barrier to people who are not familiar with the cultural reference. Sure the author figured it out, but it would take them more thought and time to figure it out than someone who is American.
For example in that taxi captcha, there are 4 pictures of trees and 5 pictures of vehicles. 1 vehicle is not identifiable, 1 is an utility van in the distance, and the remaining 3 are yellow cars. These yellow cars have phone numbers on the sides and signs on the roof (where visible).
My bet is that the 3 yellow cars are taxis.
(And as it happens yellow actually seems to be the most common colour for taxis throughout the world where taxis have a specific colour.)
It usually works out fine. On rare occasions it's tricky but then it's possible to request another captcha.
I think people are trying too hard to find problems. I find hard to believe the comments that blow this out of proportion.
The most important one was mentioned earlier. It offers an implicit advantage to Americans. In the olden days we would call this American-centric. These days we would call it prejudiced. Claiming that it is prejudiced is valid since it is effectively asking different people different questions. To the American, it is asking them to identify taxis. To a non-American, it is asking them to solve a riddle.
To highlight that point: most of your criteria relied upon cultural factors. Those taxis have no resemblance to taxis in my part of the world. Taxis in my part of the world are private vehicles with a small magnetically mounted "taxi" sign on the roof. There is no consistency in colour, little consistency in type of vehicle, and they most certainly aren't covered with advertising. I also wouldn't be surprised if there are a handful of utility van used as taxis in my city, since taxi companies offer accessible services.
The game approach also implies some degree of understanding of captcha's. The approach you outlined assumed that the unidentifiable vehicle would not be treated as a valid answer and that more than one image would have to be selected, so you can look for patterns. Knowing the rules of the game may be fine if you are playing a game. It certainly isn't appropriate in the case of operating a business or offering a public service.
Actually before I got locked out, I thought I would stand more chance with the alternative for the visually impaired. It jumped straight in to a fuzzy voice reading 20+ numbers at a rate of more than 1 per second. I was already behind on typing them in before it started, and I failed that too.
Its as if solving an unfamiliar problem with fuzzy images/audio (that are increasingly fuzzed beyond the absurd) wasn't mad enough. But now I'm expected to be faster than a computer as well.
Although I agree in general. Plenty of capatchas have failed me. I refuse to say I've failed the capatcha. Given I'm human, and its role is to detect humans; I can't fail to be human - it can only fail to detect it.
Your post reminded me of this quite funny dunkey video on Captcha's which is the captcha taken to its logical extreme.
Guessing you might be referring to the ones Epic uses[1], which indeed look terrible.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/EpicGamesPC/comments/ihiidp/new_mou...
Imagine being faced with this problem. It's not even visually clear what's going on in the picture. That's before you even get to solving the puzzle. Just "identify what we mean by a mouse" would be enough to be the captcha.
And then -- and I don't know how everyone else's brain works -- but, being the simpleton that I am, it's a linear search checking each one against the condition. There's enough time to look at about 3 of them before the clock ran out. No, I really don't want more time, either.
I'm comforted by the comments in that Reddit post. I haven't gone crazy.
Check out the history (1971) of Larry P. and California's use of IQ testing in schools.
> As a group, African Americans across the country scored lower on IQ tests. The lawsuit alleged that was because the tests were biased toward Eurocentric culture. Questions like, ”Who wrote Romeo and Juliet,” they argued, didn’t assess a student’s innate capacity to learn. It tested knowledge that some – and not others — had acquired at home or school.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11781032/a-landmark-lawsuit-aimed-...
and from Radiolab:
> What is the color of rubies?
> Kaufman argued “Uh that question is clearly biased.” I mean, the correct answer on the test is rubies are red but A...
> If your family has more money, you were more likely to know what was a ruby was
> And B, Kaufman says, Ruby was a popular name in the Black community. So certain kids might think the question was referring to people, not gems.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/g-pro...
and in general, further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_public_policy...
edit: add year to Larry P.
Yes, at that point people who have already developed certain mindware have an advantage, but arguably that's the point of an IQ test. You're not testing the potential of a person to eventually be really smart, you're testing for the current problem-solving potential.
That being said, you're right that it would still be useful for measuring problem solving potential, but that's explicitly not what IQ tests are supposed to measure.
I personally think it's not something that's really true, but it's how I learned it in university and seems to be the default position of experts in the field.
This is of course assuming no traumatic brain injuries or the use of psychoactive substances.
I doubt this viewpoint is out of fashion. The problem is that it is hard to compare people from different environments if you use knowledge that depends on the environment...
Just like Google's tests do now.
Back in the day, I did a boat-load of tests and passed a boat-load of exams at school and then university. I have a drawer full of certificates from (apparently) respected institutions to prove it.
None of which are any use to me right now.
I can't say that any of the tests or exams I sat actually assessed anything close to my "innate capacity to learn".
Q: Is this just me?
Sometimes an annoying CAPTCHA has literally prevented me from giving money to a site when I was going to buy something but instead ended up just closing it in frustration.
I wish Apple would offer a way for sites and services to verify that a client is indeed human via Touch ID/Face ID.
The stakes might be low (you get presented with another captcha) or astronomical (you get your account locked or something). There is literally no way to know with Google, it's a complete black box.
they have no "benefit of the doubt" -- it's pretty blatantly clear they are not on "our" side.
Well yes, but someone without this knowledge will get confused.
The way I learned it, a "car" is any roofed 4+ wheeled vehicle up to van and SUV size (yeah, more Americanisms). Pickup trucks and larger are "trucks".
The ones that get me are the street sign / street light ones. Do the poles count? What about a tiny edge of the sign that is barely visible in a neighboring square? Ugh.
I don't know how much exactly is a nickel or a dime but it's obvious to me these are coins.
Everybody I know (and most of them have never been to America) is Ok with these American captchas too.
The only problems with captchas are they spy on you (Google doesn't actually check if you are a human, it checks which particular human you are) and annoy you.
That's not all that helpful if you're asked to do calculations with them.
Buster captcha solver fails immediately. And when you do actually manually solve the captcha correctly, sometimes Google still thinks you're a robot.
And sometimes it asks me to select all "bicycles" in the images and there are NO GODDAMN BICYCLES in any of the images whatsover. So I hit Skip and eventually google thinks I'm a robot.
Everybody please either switch to hcaptcha or..., although I've not seen a website use this yet, upgrade to ReCaptcha v3 maybe?
I read somewhere that ReCaptcha v3 is far less annoying than v2? Is that true?
Funny you should say that. reCAPTCHA v3 is meant to be invisible, watching the behavior of a user in the background, and then returning a score between 0.0 and 1.0 for the website to do with as they please.
EDIT: This comment is stupidly worded, please see clarification below.
Say I buy a new phone and it stops working after 3 weeks. I want to contact the seller, but they only have a web contact form and I fail to get past the captcha.
This is already getting very close to being a huge legal problem, and the only reason why it's probably not that bad is that technically that website is supposed to give at least a contact address so I could just send them a letter which, while hugely inconvenient, is legally still a good enough way for me to contact them.
I'm sure if you spend a while longer you could find a few cases where the problem is even worse (also considering more than just one legal system).
So what I should have said: Using this technology to block users from the wrong endpoints could end up being illegal.
For context: I'm talking German laws here.
0: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-captchas
To be fair, any captcha would have this trouble, but an entirely invisible one would not be able to be questioned