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CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)
- mytailorisrich 6y agoIn 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.
- mikro2nd 6y agoAround 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.
- visarga 6y ago> I've never yet managed to identify a crosswalk. I frequently fail at busses. 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.
- qayxc 6y ago> 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.
- eythian 6y agoI 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.
- iso1631 6y agoWhat the hell is a crosswalk
- bamboleo 6y agoWhat the hell is a chimney
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoA ventilation structure primarily for dispersing smoke from a fire or furnace. I think you call it a "smoke stack" in the USA.
- sabret00the 6y agoThank you for this. I've been pressing skip on the small vertical pipes as a chimney to me is a made of brick. Curse being born in Britain!
- elygre 6y ago“Simplifying English for the Americans”: https://youtu.be/UCo0hSFAWOc https://youtu.be/UCo0hSFAWOc
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThank you! I know my English quite well, but I always thought "smokestack" was some process chemistry thing, and not the US word for "chimney".
- bamboleo 6y agoWoosh You missed the point. I’m not asking that literally.
- bloak 6y agoIt's explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG6O4N3wxf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG6O4N3wxf8
- 6y ago
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoCan't we make systems that work for people with below average abilities? i.e. half of the population.
- gillesjacobs 6y agoThe 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.
- krtkush 6y agoAnd in India, they are commonly refereed to as "Zebra Crossing". No one refers to them as cross-walks and most have no idea about that term.
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoSame in the UK and most commonwealth countries I think
- wiredfool 6y agoThere are pelicans too. Because pelicans have bright yellow flashing balls and ...
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoMy 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.
- globular-toast 6y agoI like the Pegasus crossing. It has an even higher button that can be used by horse riders without dismounting.
- wiredfool 6y agoHow different are the heights of cyclists and pedestrians when they're waiting for a crossing light? 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. ...
- xtf 6y agoThey use captcha to help AI to identify things, therefore: Keep it in the US
- gostsamo 6y agoAs 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.
- notRobot 6y agoTry Buster. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captch... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha-solver-for/mpbjkejclgfgadiemmefgebjfooflfhl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha-sol...
- gostsamo 6y agoThanks, will check it out.
- dessant 6y agoHi, 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. https://github.com/dessant/buster#readme https://github.com/dessant/buster#readme https://github.com/dessant/buster/wiki/Installing-the-client-app https://github.com/dessant/buster/wiki/Installing-the-client...
- gostsamo 6y agoGreat!
- vezycash 6y ago>Hi, I'm the author of the extension. 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.
- tchalla 6y agoIt 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.
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoIt 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.
- duckmysick 6y agoGood 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.
- input_sh 6y agoYes, 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.
- lagadu 6y agoEven 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?
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoTo add some balance, they should include "identify all the roundabouts" so that folk from the USA are equally disadvantaged.
- durnygbur 6y agoFor Americans - "identify cyclist driving through the downtown"
- salawat 6y agoCyclists 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.
- oblio 6y agoFirst 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.
- canofbars 6y agoAnyone 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.
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoThis is a kind of "Western centric" view. In other parts of the world, a van/"minibus" is often used as a taxi.
- canofbars 6y agoI 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.
- yorwba 6y ago> 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.)
- Doctor_Fegg 6y agoCrosswalk. It genuinely took me a while to figure out they meant "pedestrian crossing".
- 6y ago
- Puts 6y agoI'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.
- imhoguy 6y agoThat 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.
- captchathat 6y agoI always include the poles when asked to identify traffic lights.
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoYeah 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"?
- EdwardDiego 6y agoHuh that might be why I keep failing those traffic light ones, I was only including the bit with the lights, not the poles also.
- sabret00the 6y agoGoogle'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.
- lukestateson 6y agoCAPTCHAs don't work. 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.
- xrisk 6y agoOh is Google captcha etc solvable via robot?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- notRobot 6y agoYes. Buster. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-solver/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captch... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha-solver-for/mpbjkejclgfgadiemmefgebjfooflfhl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha-sol...
- zeepzeep 6y agoYes, it's called Buster. It solves the speech based challange by using speech to text APIs.
- xncl 6y agoyes you play the audio captcha into voice to text software and it can solve it with a good rate of success and no effort mentally on my part
- adjkant 6y agoCAPTCHAs 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.
- Bella-Xiang 6y agoCan't google show different CAPTCHAs according to the different IP address?
- edent 6y agoIt could, but that's quite a hard problem for Google's engineers to solve.
- szszrk 6y agoLike 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.
- lagadu 6y agoDoing 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.
- arp242 6y agoGoogle 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.
- intellirogue 6y agoReCaptcha 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. It still shows US-centric pictures though...
- eythian 6y ago
- durnygbur 6y agoI 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.
- AntiImperialist 6y agoI deliberately give some wrong answers to CAPTCHA questions. A lot of the times, it is accepted.
- ojosilva 6y agoI 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.
- AntiImperialist 6y agoYou'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.
- ChrisRR 6y agoIt's not just measuring your answers, it's also judging your mouse movements to determine if they're human-like
- wraptile 6y agoI 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.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago> I really don't feel like spending 15% of that time doing slave labour for google for free I routinely click on a false image and rarely get denied
- mrspeaker 6y agoI always intentionally click on wrong images, just to see how wrong I can be and still be allowed to go. 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.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoMy experience is a bit opposite. I started a year ago and have generally done alright.
- bzb6 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350234
- II2II 6y agoMany 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.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoThis 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.
- Dahoon 6y agoWhile 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.
- canofbars 6y agoYou 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.
- zbuf 6y agoCaptchas 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.
- mercora 6y agomaybe the algorithm wants to detect if you are as slow as a human would be solving those and you failed that ;D
- soneil 6y agoThe 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.
- gelert 6y agoThat sounds awful! Thankfully the most annoying things I've run into are these Americanisms like Crosswalks/different traffic lights/fire hydrants. Your post reminded me of this quite funny dunkey video on Captcha's which is the captcha taken to its logical extreme.
- latexr 6y ago> 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 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_mouse_captcha_is_impossible/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EpicGamesPC/comments/ihiidp/new_mou...
- rollulus 6y agoThe CAPTCHA that makes me sweat all the time: traffic lights. Are they including the poles, or only the housing of the lights?
- tremon 6y agoStairs 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?
- philshem 6y agonot 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. https://www.kqed.org/news/11781032/a-landmark-lawsuit-aimed-to-fix-special-ed-for-californias-black-students-it-didnt 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-problem-space https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/g-pro... and in general, further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_public_policy#US_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_public_policy... edit: add year to Larry P.
- artichokes 6y agoThose 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yorwba 6y agoNot 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.)
- Razengan 6y agoI 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.
- rehemiau 6y agoI'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?
- purplecats 6y agothat's probably the type of stuff it wants to figure out by throwing it at us
- canofbars 6y agoIts probably a legit data point to see "Not all verified humans were able to agree on this image"
- smcl 6y agoThe 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.
- purplecats 6y agoright 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.
- tpxl 6y agoIn 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.
- humanrebar 6y agoIt's worth noting here that taxis are not always yellow in the U.S. Different localities have different rules.
- qwerty456127 6y agoNonsense. 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.
- arp242 6y ago> I don't know how much exactly is a nickel or a dime but it's obvious to me these are coins. That's not all that helpful if you're asked to do calculations with them.
- qwerty456127 6y agoWhatever, I have never seen a captcha relying on such a skill.
- lurtbancaster 6y agoDon'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?
- maxgashkov 6y agoDon't get me started on hCaptcha! I've spent good 5 minutes yesterday trying to guess what the 'boat' is and is not according to its moderators.
- ghayes 6y agohCaptcha, for me, has such weird angles of objects, like a boat cropped to just the hull. Makes it super easy to pass over correct answers.
- rahidz 6y agoIt 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.
- arp242 6y agoThat'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.
- ev1 6y agoI'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...
- imhoguy 6y agoDo we have any alternatives against spam then? micro crypto payments?
- Uhrheber 6y agoI recently suspended my Ebay account. One of the reasons was the fact that, although I used 2-factor login, Ebay forced me to solve captchas every second login. What am I? A trained monkey jumping through hoops? Ebay even sells FIDO2 sticks, but is to dumb to actually implement FIDO login? Ridiculous.
- rustybolt 6y agoTry making a yandex account without a phone numbers. The captchas you get are crazy hard. I often have to ask for a new text for about 4 times.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 6y agoHonestly, I'm not that bothered. I think most of these users are high-pain users so dropping them is okay if ultimately it lets the website operator offer a service to me cheaper. Sure, some are unfairly blocked, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- OJFord 6y ago> I think most of these users are high-pain users What, non-Americans?
- renewiltord 6y agoNon-Americans who can't rapidly figure out what's intended from the context.
- OJFord 6y agoAs I commented elsewhere, sure, when I was first asked I guessed it must be the road markings. But to this day I just select all the road markings that aren't clearly separating lanes. I don't know if I get loads wrong as a result, but it certainly could catch me out by testing identifying the difference between a 'crosswalk' and whatever other markings you might put across your roads. To TFA's point, good job reCaptcha, you identified my unfamiliarity with everyday American things.
- brandonr49 6y agoI too am willing to sacrifice others when it benefits me.
- Reason077 6y agoI understand the purpose of CAPTCHAs when used as a security measure, but recently it seems like there has been a huge proliferation of them in all sorts of random places and it’s becoming very annoying. Even Google has taken to occasionally popping up CAPTCHAs just so I can see search results! (“suspicious activity on your network” - I’m using a reputable, top-tier UK mobile provider) Is there grounds to legally challenge CAPTCHAs on the basis that they’re discriminatory? They must be a nightmare for those using assistive technologies, or who have forms of cognitive impairment.
- cesarb 6y ago> Even Google has taken to occasionally popping up CAPTCHAs just so I can see search results! The most annoying one for me recently has been stackoverflow. The most basic use of stackoverflow (other than arriving through a web search) is to use its own search bar to search for something. Every time I do so, it asks for a captcha. It would make some sense to ask for a captcha when asking or answering a question, but why ask for a captcha when searching? And it's always the first search after opening the browser (the browser is set up to clear cookies on close), so it's not some sort of rate limiting.
- smichel17 6y agoYep, and this resulted in me just searching duckduckgo for the stackoverflow page I wanted to find, instead.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoProbably too stop automated abuse and reduce unnecessary searches. Search can be expensive.
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoSearch is restricted because it's an expensive operation and prone to abuse. This practice is not just found at Stack Exchange, now GitHub doesn't even display the full code search result to visitors. The only option is to log in (if you are already an established SE/GitHub user and doesn't mind the web tracking)...
- import 6y agoThis is same for "parking meters" I never saw a parking meter like what Recaptcha shows to me.
- nottorp 6y agoHere's a different but similar whine. Probably worth its own blog post except I don't blog. Dear Apple, can you test your products outside California? I just left my laptop for 10 minutes on the balcony because I had to get a delivery. Because I'm not in California, the temperature on said balcony is 3 Celsius. Yes, I'm not american and I don't understand Fahrenheit. Guess what, when I came back the laptop was shutdown and wouldn't start until i brought it indoors. After only 10 minutes in the cold. Please test your famous benchmark breaking M1 laptops outside your climate controlled clean offices. Use them outside at the north border, near the great lakes. See if the keyboard still works after a month and if they turn on if you try to use them on your front porch.
- josephduffy 6y agoI agree working in a wider range of ambient temperatures would be nice, but they do have a support article stating the temperature should be over 10°C, so I wouldn't say they've not tested it. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201640 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201640 Note that the iOS devices work from above 0°C (https://support.apple.com/en-sg/HT201678 https://support.apple.com/en-sg/HT201678) so maybe improvements will be brought to laptops too.
- nottorp 6y ago> I agree working in a wider range of ambient temperatures would be nice, but they do have a support article stating the temperature should be over 10°C, so I wouldn't say they've not tested it. Yeah, the point is 10 C is sufficient ... for California. Not necessarily for the rest of the world. I'm sure they specify some temperature range, it's just not quite enough. Besides it was left outside for 10 minutes, not hours. To add insult to the injury, all my older Apple laptops were able to survive bouts on the balcony, and if anything, the winters were colder 10 years ago.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoDischarge rate of batteries falls with temperature. 10C is a very common lower limit for high performance lion cells. There's a complex set of tradeoffs vs fundamental physical limits here. It's not at all a case of "aw shucks we forgot places other than CA exist" which is something you're just projecting onto the situation.
- jarek83 6y agoRegarding taxis - I've been to Denver CO last year, my first visit to the US and haven't seen a single yellow taxi there.
- OJFord 6y agoYeeeeeeess! And frankly, the ones in TFA aren't the worst. I'm familiar with yellow taxis from American films. I'm not familiar with 'crosswalks' (full stop) or American 'fire hydrants'. Your buses also look somehow different often, and those can be hard. Traffic lights even more so, some are familiar, but some styles I would just never see in the UK, so I actually have to look at each square to check, I can't rely on recognising them. Then, even once you get past all that, it'll frequently complain you haven't selected them all, and you have to guess which square that doesn't have a bicycle it thinks has a bicycle.
- soneil 6y agoI don't actually find taxis as easy as most seem to. Here, that large sideways tub would usually be a pizza delivery. Taxis have a very specific roof adornment and that isn't it. I'd usually need some hint to mentally context-shift into TVland.
- fareesh 6y agoTIL I am American
- blindgeek 6y agoI'm totally blind (lacking even light perception), with optic nerve hypoplasia (ONH). Relevant link: https://www.pathstoliteracy.org/blog/living-onh-adult-shares-his-personal-experience https://www.pathstoliteracy.org/blog/living-onh-adult-shares... Relevant quotation from aforementioned link: "Many children with ONH have difficulty processing sensory information through some or all of their senses--referred to as sensory processing disorder. They may show sensory defensiveness and delays in learning fine and gross motor skills, which can make reading braille and learning basic daily living skills, like dressing, grooming and personal hygiene, difficult or impossible without additional supports." I find audio captchas infuriating at times, because I struggle to separate the words from the noise, though they have really improved over the last 3 or 4 years. I remember one night during 2012 or 2013, wasting 2 or 3 hours of my life, just listening to audio captchas. All I wanted was to delete my Facebook account and my girlfriend's Facebook account.
- 1f60c 6y agoAm I the only one who has never had any problems with reCAPTCHA?
- cute_boi 6y agoTrue.
- futurix 6y agoI love searching for very American-looking fire hydrants or pedestrian crossings. Great case of US cultural imperialism - I suspect that the developers didn't even think it might not be the same thing abroad.
- jerjerjer 6y agoTook a lot of years for American developers to figure out that string inputs are not limited to ASCII. And even that is more due to emojis (bless them). It's a slow process.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dayve 6y agoBeing an African born & bred in Nigeria, I particularly find this appalling. Captcha usually asks users to identify fire hydrants, crosswalks & other objects with design patterns that are not common here, in everyday living. There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet, especially since the demographics are much different from existing internet users.
- ape4 6y agoI'd love to try some non-American captchas ;)
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoI made a cross-cultural captcha https://i.imgur.com/U2ivgJl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/U2ivgJl.jpg
- GFischer 6y agoI wonder how many people in the U.S. would recognize what is instantly familiar to us in Uruguay, the Yerba Mate gourd (10 out of 10 Uruguayans would recognize) https://www.123rf.com/photo_120278916_stock-vector-yerba-mate-icon.html https://www.123rf.com/photo_120278916_stock-vector-yerba-mat...
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoMy prediction: This will lead to new users being turned away from established products from the anglosphere and develop their own alternatives. Maybe after a while the big companies will notice and adapt, which might already be too late by then, or maybe they just buy the smaller ones directly, who knows.
- Jestar342 6y ago> My prediction: This will lead to new users being turned away from established products from the anglosphere and develop their own alternatives. Captchas will be localised long before that.
- known 6y agoIs Google intentionally harassing non US users?
- Number157 6y agoTurns out I've been American all these years. ¡Ahora cambiemos al español!
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoI've decided long ago that, if I ever need some form of flood-prevention for a website, I will have a deep look into using an automatic proof-of-work system and essentially give the users computer a captcha.
- sriku 6y ago<shrug> We know (pretty surely) that no company's autonomous vehicle of any claimed level is going to survive for 30 mins on Indian urban roads and traffic conditions. Afaik, none of these companies are even trying to get a vehicle to work in such conditions. This gives me confidence that the AI apocalypse is nowhere near.
- f6v 6y ago> Taxis in my country are generally black Like you never seen a yellow taxi? Stop inventing problems.
- zoomablemind 6y agoThe irony of Captcha is in the very statement we're being asked to confirm: "I Am Not a Robot". The image sets are supposedly to be used for training an AI, which is ... a robot, sophisticated, yes, but just as programmed. It's often said that "It's human to err". Well, instead, the Captcha seems to be eager to sample some fine "specimens" of Robot-candidates, indeed giving us poor fallibles the early lessons of artificial programming. "You'll be assimilated. Resistance is Futile!" Borgs, eh?
- zokier 6y agoBut the author, presumably non-american, was able to solve the challenge, so obviously it didn't prove him american. But it did prove him human because humans have that innate flexibility (if they choose to!) to recognize stuff and understand the intent even when it's not completely unambiguous or immediate. And that's the point.
- oij33ij3 6y agoGuys, don't use anything from Google. It is such a horrible company! For example, they made Angular builds extremely slow as described here: https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/37293 https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/37293 Last year there was another similar issue and each new version builds become slower and slower. I waste half of my time waiting for compilation. Never had any such issue with React/VueJS or any other framework except Angular. I really hate it.
- scrollaway 6y agoThis is not the place to shout your random pet peeves about a vaguely Google-related project.
- philipov 6y agoAll the taxis in America aren't Yellow. In fact, I'd hazard to say most of them are Black. Only the ones in NYC are, and maybe in some other major cities.
- pritovido 6y agoI got so frustrated with CAPTCHAs that started using my computer's visual and natural language recognition software to solve them. It works much better than me at solving those stupid puzzles. It is great because if the software fails, it does not get frustrated like I did. There are CAPTCHAs that my software solves that I know are wrong, but google says it is ok. Like "pic the pictures with a signal on it" and there is a picture with a signal visible from behind. My software does not detect that, neither google.
- ffpip 6y agoIf someone from HCaptcha is reading this, can you please increase the size/highlight the words that we need to see. For example, make the word(s) 'Car', 'Fire Hydrant' bigger in the sentence
- fab1an 6y agohCaptcha team here - thanks for the feedback, we'll look into this!
- ffpip 6y agoIt's simple things like this that make the experience a lot better. I haven't yet got used to hCaptcha, so I still have to search for the word every time I solve one. Make it a different color, and increase the font size.
- pepsifan 6y agoJust annoyed that everytime a big SV CEO is interviewed no journalist asks questions about Captcha/blind-support. They seem to get lost in asking about quantum computing or future of AI...
- altitudinous 6y agoYes, the American focus of the internet is absolutely appalling. Assumptions of timezones - PST, CST and the others whatever they are. Northern hemisphere assumptions of seasons - fall, etc - in the southern hemisphere the seasons are the opposite and we don't use the word fall. Even Apple, known for its "sensitivity" to cultural matters has a big miss on this one.
- sschueller 6y agoEven worse is the continued lack of UTF-8 use yet offering services outside of the US. In fact even Apple had non ASCII character issues on their dev website not so long ago.
- salawat 6y agoHey, as someone who does Quality Assurance, I want to point out that 99% of the time, those issues are brought up. They never get dealt with out the gate because business evolves via iterative value delivery, and most systems capable of creating value can work just fine with massively simplified assumptions to keep the lights on. Also, if you think timezones/calendars/seasons are bad, just understand that many people specifically have a difficult time with shifting their mind into a frame of reference where you can actually talk about time in the sense of "there is a moment in time $now, where I am, the clock displays X because formatting, the system clock is actually Y, and I want people in P to get experience Q which had relationship R to X and S to Y. I have libraries T, U, and V to work through the abstractive layers of. These same people are all inclined never to admit this difficulty or the complexity inherent thereto. Throw in the fact most folks in the U.S. don't even understand the written script of more than a handful of places, and you have a recipe for !quality. Again though, there's only so much political capital you have as a Quality person, and prioritization tends to be the Project Manager's shtick. Also throw in that the real optimization function in the market has been "the crappiest software that can still maintain usership" and it should be no surprise that the software packages that do localization right are far fewer in number than otherwise. It's a rather sad state of affairs, but it is what it is. Just... Wanted to point out there has been at least one person who brought up your points in design meetings everywhere they've been, and never ceases to end up receiving platitudes.
- Angostura 6y agoI just started reading the rest of this guy's blog and it's a delight - a proper old-school blog.
- nraynaud 6y agosame for self driving cars. Some West Coast CEO affirmed that he was training his autonomous cars in SF rather than AZ because he wanted to do "the hard thing". He'll have a surprise when he sells his system to India. with his system that struggles to turn left in SF and not kill bikes in a bike lanes.
- yters 6y agoAre Americans no longer humans?
- gverrilla 6y agoI had a captcha asking me to identify taxis. But their color change throughout the world.
- yepthatsreality 6y agoWhat’s more fun is being American and intentionally misinterpreting the captcha. Select all street lights? Then think of how that question could be translated and misread in another language. Then select everything that would qualify as a light on the street: lamps, car headlights, crossing signals, et al. Sometimes I select a square that I think the machine placed in the set to get more certainty but doesn’t match. For example, “select all chimneys”. If it presents me with an image of a house in the distance that has an object infront/behind it that is not a chimney but due to positioning and image quality it appears to be a chimney I will select it. Captcha is a game. - For Alphabet/Google the game is: mine the public for image recognition data so we can automate a car/drone and sell it to said public. - For me the game is: can I play captcha chess with Google’s AI? And if Google flags me as a bot, so what? At any point I know that I can quit playing captcha chess by giving it what it wants for a round or two and I’m trusted again.
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoTo me it's not a game and not fun at all (I use Tor so I've seen more edge cases than most people). I found CAPTCHA is a school quiz. Some questions are ambiguous and open to interpretation, if it happens, it's not important to select the "correct" answer, but the "expected" answer. - Select all squares with $object. If $object only occupies 1/2 or 1/3 of a square, should I select it or not? The "correct" answer is selecting them, but Google marks it as a wrong answer. The "expected" answer is ignoring them. When using Tor, Google switches the CAPTCHA to the more strict "9 pictures" (or even the "endless pictures with delay on each") version. The rule of "If there is none, click skip" no longer applies. In this version, when Google misidentifies something as the object and you are not selecting it, the answer is wrong because Google thinks you are not selecting all answers. You must guess which one is the misidentified object and select it. - Select all squares with a traffic light. If there's a road sign with a picture of traffic light, should I select it or not... Also, sometimes both the big traffic light and a smaller one in the next crosswalk are visible, should I select the smaller one or not? The expected answer is "no", but there are exceptions... Even worse, sometimes there will be 3+ traffic lights spread across a crosswalk, if I select them all, Google marks it as "wrong", sometimes it's unclear which one is the expected answer at all.
- sida 6y agoJust to be pendantic. American is a subset of human. So you are pass CAPTCHAs, you are indeed proven to be human. In a high precision, low recall way
- FooBarWidget 6y agoThis reminds me of account security questions. They ask things like "what's your childhood nickname", "what's your first pet's name". To my Chinese mother-in-law, who was born in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, when food was scarce, everyone was poor, education was not easy to get, government was non-functional due to anarchy, and when her first priority was to survive, all those questions are just weird. They reek of first-world assumptions.
- est 6y agoyou are not supposed to type realistic answers to security questions. Its better to answer in complete unrelated ways so its not guesable
- architect01 6y agobut good luck remembering those guessed answers once you need them again to get your account back
- 93po 6y agoI use a password generator for the answers and save them in my password manager. One time I had to read 20 random characters to someone on the phone as a response to my favorite food
- jope12 6y agoSo the taxis look different. So what? How knowledgeable and smart do you have to be to still know what the correct solution is?
- teunispeters 6y agoBonus points to "captcha" where they show you a picture from a perspective of someone wealthy and privileged enough to have seen it from that perspective - like the inside of a private aeroplane or boat, and then expect everyone to guess it. Or just about anything to do with passenger trains in a country where most of that service was cut decades ago.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoI always used to wonder when I see a 'Pie' or other items specific to U.S./Western countries on re-CAPTCHA if people there would get it right if a Masala Dosai/ Idli (Common South Indian food) or Moimoi (Common Nigerian food) is shown. Also it makes me wonder the success rate of people working in CAPTCHA farms(unfortunately), which I'm positive are not located in Western countries. Perhaps a large print outs of Pie, side walks are hanging on their walls and they just have to get it right couple of times to understand what it is. P.S. I recently received an CAPTCHA on LinkedIn to identify a 'Spiral Galaxy', although that made me happy, the questions raised about CAPTCHAs seems validated with it.
- typon 6y agoWhen I think of how America centric the Internet is, CAPTCHAs are usually not at the top of my list. There is so much else wrong with the internet when it comes to being basically designed for North Americans
- fomine3 6y agoJust curious, what's the purpose to ask which is fire hydrants? Is it also worth for self driving?
- hazeii 6y agoAlso the frequency with which they appear, and the number of iterations required to pass appears to have a strong inverse correlation with whether you're signed into Google with Chrome or not (we use a wide range of browsers for testing, all of which get reset to baseline). In other words, it's much easier to just use Chrome and stay signed into Google.
- young_unixer 6y agoI have always wondered how much server costs are these websites saving by using captchas instead of more respectful anti-spam techniques? 30%? 50%? 90%?
- typenil 6y agoJust another way for Google to nudge you to use Chrome and make sure you're always logged into Google so they can track you. ReCAPTCHA is spyware first, competition suppression second, and a tool as a distant third - like most Google products.
- garbage098 6y agoit reminds me of whites only establishments. the ignorance is supreme. not everyone can pass a captcha. no internet for them. wake the frig up
- iamleppert 6y agoIf you can’t identify a yellow taxi cab I’m willing to loose the sale vs. not having the captcha at all. The fact is the number of people who can do it who are also your prospective customer is still very high. It’s impossible to find something that is 100% culturally universal. To use the Internet at all it requires it’s own kind of special knowledge and culture so I don’t think the argument is correct.
- thnbfre2dv 6y agoTo a lesser degree, same as to why the SAT is bullshit.
- loeg 6y agoTaxis aren't all yellow in the US, either? We have orange and green ones in the Seattle area, not including lyft/uber private vehicles. Those CAPTCHA vehicles are recognizably taxis because of the sign on the top / writing on the side; not the color.
- zyngaro 6y agoBetween the gdpr privacy pop ups and this captcha think, the web is becoming very annoying and frustrating these days.
- Seb-C 6y agoIf I didn't learn from movies that yellow cars are Taxis in America, I wouldn't know. In France, almost all of the yellow cars are from the French Post, this is kind of a national brand...
- toomanyrichies 6y agoWouldn’t geo-locating the client request, and selecting the CAPTCHA challenge accordingly, be a way to mitigate this risk? i.e. for client requests from the US, it’s “Please select all the images of crosswalks” with photos of American crosswalks, but for Commonwealth countries it’s “Please select all the images of zebra crossings”. Admittedly there are flaws in this plan, such as when someone uses a VPN to obfuscate their IP address, but surely it would be a net gain?
- Siira 6y agoAs an Iranian, I did not have problems with CAPTCHAs being “American.” Perhaps rural people might have trouble with them, but I don’t think it’s a bottleneck. Adding an example picture of what is desired will help everyone though (Cloudflare does this.).
- dafoex 6y agoI hate these things. I failed a few because I was skipping ones that asked me to identify "crosswalks", only to discover about a month later that I was misunderstanding it to mean a skywalk bridge between two buildings. What actually reinforced this mistaken belief was that recaptcha actually called them "zebra crossings" until very recently.