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Being an African born & bred in Nigeria, I particularly find this appalling. Captcha usually asks users to identify fire hydrants, crosswalks & other objects wi
by dayve 6y ago
Being 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.
- cvhashim 6y agoI think this is already happening. Hopefully local entrepreneurs in their own countries can continue to build for their countrymen before people like Zuckerberg and Bezos get their hands in the metaphorical pot, and suck all the wealth right back to the US like economic hitmen of the last century.
- warp 6y agoFacebook is actually doing much better in this regard than Google/Amazon/etc.. For example, in certain developing countries "social media" is included for free with your phone plan, often there is no net neutrality and competition between carriers has forced all of them to offer this. As a result, local businesses are forced to have Facebook and Instagram pages, because their audience cannot visit a regular website on most days. Which ensures most people need the "real" internet less and less, and are less likely to pay for it, locking them into Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp for a lot of their communication.
- crankyoldcrank 6y ago> often there is no net neutrality Hold up, what does this mean, even? I thought "net neutrality" meant classifying ISPs in such a way that they are regulated by the FCC instead of the FTC. Obviously this is an American framing. How does that map to other countries? Also, I was assured by users on this website and many others that if the ISPs were moved to be regulated by the FTC by evil Ajit Pai the internet as we know it would end. Those actions were taken by the administration three years ago, the media fell silent, and the internet is largely unchanged. So what do you mean, in an international context, by net neutrality?
- matt_kantor 6y ago> Network neutrality, most commonly called net neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, and not discriminate or charge differently based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
- im3w1l 6y agoIt has to get bad enough for users to turn away. And it arguably isn't, yet.
- howLongHowLong 6y agoI use Lyft instead of Uber because Uber forced me to do so many traffic-related captchas to install(presumably with the aim of eliminating employees eventually), I felt like they were squeezing free labor from me. It's getting there.
- dafoex 6y agoIts not even the anglosphere, because I'm from English England and had no clue what an American crosswalk was until recently. This is something that affects non-americans, not just non-angles.
- Number157 6y agoBut you can answer the questions, I assume?
- dkersten 6y agoI get them wrong more than I get them right. Half the time I don’t bother anymore and just think “well, another website I won’t be visiting”. I really do believe that a bot would be better at solving them than I am.
- Mordisquitos 6y agoBeing an African born & bred in Nigeria, who comments on Hacker News, the assumption may be correct—but they're hardly representative of the average Nigerian.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoThese are hard sometimes for me, from UK: What counts as a truck? Is a fire engine a truck, is a 4x4 (like a Landrover), a HGV (ie lorry), a box van? What counts as a bus? Is a coach a bus, a minibus? What counts as a bicycle? Is a pedal-and-pop (a pedal cycle with an engine)? The image shows part of a headset that might be on a bike, is that enough to call it a bike, might be a lightweight motorbike? Is a hovercraft a boat? Is a helicopter an aeroplane (according to the people setting the question)? Do pedestrian facing lights count as traffic lights? Then every now and again they add in an image that is, I assume, purposefully obscured (uniform noise) as if painted by an impressionist and titled "boring city with smog as viewed by someone with cataracts, there might be half a bicycle wheel in somewhere".
- g00gler 6y agoI don’t think anyone knows exactly what they’re looking 100% the time. I have to redo captchas all the time so don’t feel bad!
- furyofantares 6y agoAre these examples of captchas that have failed you or just questions that come to mind? I ask myself the same sorts of questions but then haven't actually had captchas fail me for it much.
- nailer 6y agoI'm not entirely sure what a crosswalk is. I /guess/ it's a pedestrian crossing, but I wouldn't put money on it.
- delecti 6y agoYes, crosswalks are a marked place on a road where pedestrians are supposed to cross. They often have dedicated signaling to let you know when you have the right-of-way to cross. The signaling usually looks like this [1], though typically the other fingers on the hand aren't blacked out, so it's a full hand, rather than one showing a middle finger (I couldn't quickly find a better example). https://imgur.com/gallery/LFm2dyh https://imgur.com/gallery/LFm2dyh
- dkersten 6y agoOff topic: imgur showed me the image, then gave me a cookie popup and when I clicked decline, the image was replaced by the text “could not find image”
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoCrosswalks are not necessarily marked. For many jurisdictions they exist at the corners of every road intersection.
- jcrawfordor 6y agoThe question of what a crosswalk is can be surprisingly contentious despite attempts at federal standards! In my city there is a situation where the police department and the transportation department currently define "crosswalk" differently, leading to some rather bizarre situations with police reports and attribution of fault (e.g. pedestrian crossing in something the transportation department considers to be a crosswalk but the police department does not, such as a marked bicycle crossing, because their definition is stricter).
- CRConrad 6y agoThe GP poster knows what a pedestrian crossing is, what it's for, and how it looks in most countries that can afford to build them; they were just pointing out that the word “crosswalk” is only found in American English.
- nojokes 6y agoFire hydrants are not at all common in European cityscape but you will learn about them from Hollywood movies or from music videos. But in the part of Europe I am from, if I did not go to the daycare in a larger city, I would not have seen any crosswalks or traffic lights. I could have easily recognized a harvester or a railroad crossing though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- OJFord 6y agoIn the part of Europe I live in (London), if I did not go to any sites using reCaptcha, I would not know what a 'crosswalk' is. Even the things I have seen (traffic lights, buses, 'fire hydrants') don't always ('fire hydrants' never) look the same as their American counterparts. It's just a totally ill-conceived system for any global website.
- archon810 6y agoAre you saying London doesn't have crosswalks? I find that hard to believe.
- lokedhs 6y agoThey are called zebra crossings outside the US. They also look different.
- OJFord 6y agoMy understanding is that 'crosswalks' are all legal points (because 'jaywalking' at another point is illegal in the US) of pedestrian crossing. At least in the UK, zebra crossings are a tiny subset of pedestrian crossings. (And you can cross the road wherever you please.)
- OJFord 6y agoLondon has plenty of pedestrian crossings, but they're unmarked, at least not in the same way - a stop line for cars before the lights, sure - except for 'zebra crossings', which look different, have different rules (no traffic lights and cars must give way to pedestrians) and would never be called a 'crosswalk'. I suppose they just don't need to be, because not using one isn't 'jaywalking'. If there's too much traffic you identify a safe crossing by zebra stripes (or flashing beacon) or traffic lights or island. When reCaptcha first asked me to identify the 'crosswalks', sure, I guessed it must be the road markings. But I just (still, to this day) select all the road markings that aren't obviously just centre direction seperating lines. I might get loads wrong, no idea.
- xbar 6y agoIt would be racist and anti-Afro to suggest that either you are a bot or a scammer for failing all your captchas. Also it would be offensive and inappropriate. And it would be outside the scope of this topic, and it would be a decidedly ad hominem comment when you should be celebrated for standing up to such narrowly contrived captchas. As an aside, how do you like American security questions? "What was the make and model of the car in which you had your first kiss?"
- sgerenser 6y agoSecurity questions are completely pointless anyway and you should just always treat them as an extra set of passwords and store them in your password manager. I have changed from using randomly generated items to vaguely plausible sounding nonsense instead since sometimes you have to actually read these things back to a human.
- downrightmike 6y agoThe USA is the home of the internet, just keep building yours up and hey, start a captcha of your own. Don't let google dominate. Edit: This is serious, if you let them take everything over, they will.
- sandworm101 6y ago>>There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet That isn't what captchas are used for. There are two side to every captcha, what the website is using them for and what the captcha creator or provider is using them for. In google's case, captchas are being used to hone AI. So it is no wonder that items like hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights dominate. Those are the objects that any AI-controlled vehicle will have to recognize. Given that the first market for AI-driven vehicles seems to be western nations, specifically the US, it is no surprise that google gears its captcha program to objects from that area. If google were developing robots to pick fruit captchas would ask us to identify bananas and oranges. I worry about the day that captchas start asking me to differentiate people from other objects. I don't want to help train an AI to tell people from trees, soldiers from bushes.
- wolco2 6y agoIn fairness if they asked that it would be exclude the human the way streetview maps works now
- sandworm101 6y ago>> it would be exclude the human That is one way of running an captcha: set a task that is not possible for a human. Anyone who answers correctly must be a bot. "How many flowers in this field?" "Solve for X: 3567/134 = X" Anyone getting those correct in a reasonable time is probably not a human and so has failed the captcha.
- martamorena9182 6y agoThat doesn't work, because either you need to randomize which way you ask (and then all a bot needs to do is try a couple of times to get the question where it needs to answer correctly), or you always need to ask one way or the other, which also doesn't work, because then the bot will answer incorrectly on purpose. It would be different if the captcha would look at the incorrectness. I.e. the bot would now have to make the same mistakes that humans would make, which might be a workable path for captchas, however its unclear what benefit this would bring compared to answering correctly.
- eatbots 6y agohCaptcha engineer here: this is an issue with Google's approach, not all visual challenges. Our challenges have average solve accuracy within 1% when comparing users in major African countries vs US users in our user testing. Nigeria does slightly better than the US, in fact.
- silveriswrong 6y agoAmerican here. I had to say a mailbox was a parking meter yesterday to satisfy one of these terrible things. Your measurement of success may be biased by user acceptance of incorrect information in the process.
- anoncake 6y agoAnd as a non-American, I neither know nor care what American parking meters look like in the first place. They're training their model on my model of their model
- eatbots 6y agoThis would be a reCAPTCHA: there were no parking meter questions running on hCaptcha yesterday, from a quick check.
- garbage098 6y agomaybe because when i see one i dont even bother
- causality0 6y agoConsidering how horrifically broken hCaptcha is, slapping your hand on the keyboard would have an equivalent solve rate. I've had hCaptchas where one of the images was virtually identical to the example and it still didn't count as one.
- Strom 6y agoIt's very much an issue with hCaptcha as well. I have to frequently identify US parking meters that I only vaguely know from Hollywood movies.
- smsm42 6y agoFire hydrants is the first thing I've remembered too. This is very much US thing, don't remember ever seeing it in other countries (maybe they exist, but not where I lived) - at least not in the form Google wants them.
- lokedhs 6y agoThey exist in Singapore, and looks a bit like the typical one in the US.
- tonfreed 6y agoMy favourite is how it blocks me from doing anything because I use various cookie blockers. I hate recaptcha so much, because all I want is some goddamn privacy.