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What’s more fun is being American and intentionally misinterpreting the captcha. Select all street lights? Then think of how that question could be translated a

What’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 ago
To 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.
- yepthatsreality 6y ago
  You will probably want to use a captcha-solver extension. What you’re describing is what led me exactly to intentionally give bad results. When I give bad results, I'm not permanently denied entry. Instead, the data is sent back to Google and it notes that decision and I get to try again. If enough people were to always select all 3 squares, or an entire road that you can walk across rather than a painted crossing marks, or whatever false positive, then Google Captcha’s idea of a correct answer is more broad. I can’t get rid of captcha. However, since it’s a data training game, I can try to eliminate the issues as much as possible by feeding it extra data so that people don’t have the 1/3 tiles question. That question is difficult to answer because captcha has no rules. This is because it’s not actually used to identify if you’re human or a bot, that’s a side effect.
- Macha 6y ago
  > 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. Even using Firefox with an adblocker is enough to trigger this one. Worse still is when you then go on to fail whatever the rate limited action is (maybe a forgot password form) and you get sent back to the captcha on the same site in a short interval. Then you get the one with the images fading out and being replaced soo.... slow...ly..... Literally, it takes 30s for an image to fade out and 30s for the next to fade back in and sometimes there can be chains of 3-4 images in the same slot taking up 2-3 minutes for the captcha process. Arguably at that point successfully completion is more likely to indicate ill intent as most actual users will give up and go away.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    It's worse for Tor users. Even if I solve all puzzles carefully and correctly, Google still fails me, gives me another round of new endless CAPTCHAs, and fails me again, another round, and finally grants access if it wants to. It takes literally at least 5 minutes to pass it, 10-20 minutes is possible. And even if you pass Google, there are still two failure modes: (1) The website may still think you fail the CAPTCHA even when Google said you pass, seems like a bug or an expiration timer, then you'll have to solve another three rounds of nightmarish CAPTCHAs. (2) Google may ultimately fail you and also disqualify you from solving any CAPTCHAs because of "suspicious traffic from your network", and this denial is often only triggered AFTER you've already solved all the CAPTCHAs. I have no problem if Google blocks Tor completely, but now Google is effectively playing a bait-and-switch game on the users, I'd call it a form of human right abuse. Solving Google reCAPTCHA via Tor is a prefect game for masochists like myself... Well, to be honest, the only reason I'm doing it, is to get true pseudonymous online accounts.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

To 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.

yepthatsreality 6y ago
You will probably want to use a captcha-solver extension. What you’re describing is what led me exactly to intentionally give bad results. When I give bad results, I'm not permanently denied entry. Instead, the data is sent back to Google and it notes that decision and I get to try again. If enough people were to always select all 3 squares, or an entire road that you can walk across rather than a painted crossing marks, or whatever false positive, then Google Captcha’s idea of a correct answer is more broad. I can’t get rid of captcha. However, since it’s a data training game, I can try to eliminate the issues as much as possible by feeding it extra data so that people don’t have the 1/3 tiles question. That question is difficult to answer because captcha has no rules. This is because it’s not actually used to identify if you’re human or a bot, that’s a side effect.
Macha 6y ago
> 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. Even using Firefox with an adblocker is enough to trigger this one. Worse still is when you then go on to fail whatever the rate limited action is (maybe a forgot password form) and you get sent back to the captcha on the same site in a short interval. Then you get the one with the images fading out and being replaced soo.... slow...ly..... Literally, it takes 30s for an image to fade out and 30s for the next to fade back in and sometimes there can be chains of 3-4 images in the same slot taking up 2-3 minutes for the captcha process. Arguably at that point successfully completion is more likely to indicate ill intent as most actual users will give up and go away.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  It's worse for Tor users. Even if I solve all puzzles carefully and correctly, Google still fails me, gives me another round of new endless CAPTCHAs, and fails me again, another round, and finally grants access if it wants to. It takes literally at least 5 minutes to pass it, 10-20 minutes is possible. And even if you pass Google, there are still two failure modes: (1) The website may still think you fail the CAPTCHA even when Google said you pass, seems like a bug or an expiration timer, then you'll have to solve another three rounds of nightmarish CAPTCHAs. (2) Google may ultimately fail you and also disqualify you from solving any CAPTCHAs because of "suspicious traffic from your network", and this denial is often only triggered AFTER you've already solved all the CAPTCHAs. I have no problem if Google blocks Tor completely, but now Google is effectively playing a bait-and-switch game on the users, I'd call it a form of human right abuse. Solving Google reCAPTCHA via Tor is a prefect game for masochists like myself... Well, to be honest, the only reason I'm doing it, is to get true pseudonymous online accounts.