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For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created

For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

Zababa 5y ago
Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating, especially if you fail the captcha a few times in a row.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I understand why websites need to use captcha. I do not understand why websites that have user accounts cannot offer the option of 2FA TOTP, or even SMS login to avoid captcha. Hilton.com is a big annoyance.
  - JoeOfTexas 5y ago
    SMS is expensive.
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      It's less expensive than losing customers due to a bad UX.
      - jcims 5y ago
        But more measurable.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      TOTP is free, and can simply be made an option to avoid CAPTCHA.
    - xdennis 5y ago
      It's amazing that they still charge for something smaller than an average packet.
  - leesalminen 5y ago
    A bot can trivially generate TOTP tokens from a shared secret and receive/process incoming SMS to extract the code.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Then use the fact that I am a paying customer of Hilton’s for years to mark my account as a human. I have the Hilton credit card, I am a Diamond member, what else do they want? I know why they force me though, I use content blockers on macOS and iOS to block tracking and ads, but that is not a good reason.
      - Kaze404 5y ago
        Can you share those content blockers? I recently acquired my first iOS device and have been suffering through the ads.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I use Wipr. Firefox Focus is a free one for iOS though.
        IggleSniggle 5y ago
        Not who you asked, but I use Firefox Focus as a content blocker. Since iOS only has Safari and WebViews (Safari in different clothes), you enable content blockers by going to Settings > Safari > Content Blockers.
        travoc 5y ago
        AdGuard is where it’s at on iOS.
      - Cheezmeister 5y ago
        I can think of few behaviours more human-like than using a content blocker. :)
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    I really hate giving my phone number to any service, especially since i might need a second account there, or they might sell my data (or get hacked). I also hate sites that force you to do so... eg. twitter, where it decides it won't let you register without a phone number (making a new twitter account for a project), then won't allow you to use the phone number, because you already used it for your primary account.
    - Cycl0ps 5y ago
      Coincidentally I just made my first Twitter account. I can't remember the exact boxes you need to click but there is a way to sign up without giving out your phone number. The issue is that it may flag your account as more suspicious. After three days I had my account flagged. I couldn't view tweets or use the account in any way. On log in it would redirect me and ask for my phone number for "verification". Funny how they can verify something they never received. It took about ten days for support to correct but my account is active again and they still don't know my phone number.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    I don't understand why they need it when they've already accepted and verified a login request, just need captcha to finish it off? (i.e. you don't get the captcha with bad creds) I mean, maybe I can see/accept an argument for that. But when I have a recent order? When I'm logging in from the link you just emailed me?
- kop316 5y ago
  > Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating In a quite a few instances, I find it flattering, because it implies "we haven't sucked enough data on you already to know if you are a human, so we need to be sure."
  - xdennis 5y ago
    I find it infuriating because it pits me against other people without explaining what the rules are. If it says "select a sign" and I see there's also a sign far away in the distance only a few pixels in size, I select it because it is a sign. I think most people don't because I frequently get many tests after, because I'm not human enough for them.
  - Banana699 5y ago
    It's actually a sign of bad ergonomics and disrespect for your time and effort. There are already sites that know you're human by your mouse/touch behaviour. Only if js is blocked do they need to resort to those ridiculous multi-level games they make you play. My surprise if the sites that do those things turned out to be using humans for free labeling of images would be an exact, unsigned zero.
    - kop316 5y ago
      > Only if js is blocked do they need to resort to those ridiculous multi-level games they make you play. In all fairness, i usually do that.
- unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  It's really hard to know sometimes which frames humans generally classify as 'bicycle' or 'traffic light'. The bottom third of a tire? The supporting pole of an extra set of signals in the background? I sometimes have no idea whose intelligence I'm supposed to emulate.
  - vmception 5y ago
    I’ve heard that before and I don’t really understand how people have so much trouble with this. But I guess knowing the rules helps me with this: The machine doesn't know the answer so it doesn't really matter. You need to emulate the crowd and also realize you are contributing to the crowd. So you can actually pollute it with wrong answers to delay the robot uprising. Or at least cripple it when they keep running into fire hydrants they didn't see.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    They can just use the data and see "50% of verified humans clicked this" and know that it is debatable or not obviously a match but not a verified not-match.
- dylan604 5y ago
  My favorite is finding errors on their side. I was tasked with finding the parking meters, and being told I was missing one. The "one" was an image of a mailbox, not a parking meter. Selecting the mailbox allowed it to say I was a human
  - kenny11 5y ago
    I think I got that exact same one, and had the exact same problem with it. Maybe reasoning that it was confusing the mailbox for a parking meter was how I proved that I was a human to it.
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    The reason this happens is that captchas are not localized. Most countries don't have mail boxes, only US, Canada, Australia, NZ have them so people from outside those countries may not think to distinguish mailboxes from parking meters and will just click every square that matches their mental model of a parking meter (a pole with something on top or a big box)
    - Zababa 5y ago
      > Most countries don't have mail boxes (only US, Canada, Australia, NZ) They do, they just look different. At least that's how it is in France.
      - lou1306 5y ago
        They're not the same as the classic US mailbox (). In the US you can use such a mailbox to send mail as well. In Europe you typically have private letterboxes for incoming mail and big, public post boxes for sending.
        mkl 5y ago
        > classic US mailbox () Missing link? In NZ, and presumably other countries, personal letterboxes in rural areas can be used to send too, which I'm guessing is the same as what you're referring to.
- dunnevens 5y ago
  Sometimes I end up failing them deliberately. I can't boycott them because they're often in the way of important sites. So my small, practically invisible protest is to never click more than 3 times. If you want me to pick out all the bicycles, you better have 3 or less. I'm only clicking 3. I fully understand this isn't going to have any effect. Maybe if a million of us were doing it, it would. But it still makes me feel better.
  - TechBro8615 5y ago
    True civil disobedience would be clicking the non-bikes.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Back when captchas were about optical character recognition, it was obvious which words came from actual books. Plenty of people would input offensive words instead of the correct answer. I hope it had an effect but it probably didn't.
      - revolvingocelot 5y ago
        Someone who isn't me hung around on 4chan a lot back in the day. Indeed, there was an effort across the boards to disseminate heuristics to determine which one was the already-known word and which one was to be parsed by humans. The agreed-upon procedure was identify the latter as "penis".
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        > The agreed-upon procedure was identify the latter as "penis". I remember far worse...
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    So you want us to DDoS the captcha networks? Hmm is that even legal? But it would be somewhat cool if millions of people starting failing captcha on purpose it would be something like decentralized volunteer mass ddos attack.
samstave 5y ago
>For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human This is EXACTLY what a Robot would say...
jjoonathan 5y ago
But metal detectors don't block your way for 20 seconds and they don't ever put you into an eternal loop of scanning again and again until you just give up and decide to live without.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  They do delay customers by 20 seconds, because if we’re carrying metal then we’ve got to be inspected by security.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Capchas hold you up 20 seconds every single time, whereas metal detectors usually don't alarm at all.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      Wasted time is still >20 seconds every time you encounter a metal detector, unless you really don’t ever carry or wear metal. Bonus points if you regrettably have a bag that needs to be searched.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      It takes me 20 seconds just to be sure I've accounted for any possible metal in my pockets.
smichel17 5y ago
Additionally, ReCAPTCHA is worse than a metal detector, since in addition to being an inconvenience, it's performing unpaid labor for Google. It's more like a bouncer at the door, who won't let you in unless you grease his palm first. Just filthy corruption, plain and simple.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  How is it corruption? The website’s owners consciously choose to use said bouncer who has agreed to accept compensation in the form of making the website’s visitors solve captcha.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Do you think that's universally true, like website _owners_ (as opposed to developers) realise captchas are a thing? Seems unlikely to me; the dev setup a cdn, the owner mightn't even know what that is.
    - enriquto 5y ago
      > the owner mightn't even know what that is. That's a problem of literacy, but it is still their fault and their responsibility as owners of the site.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  Another hidden fee in those "free" services.
dylan604 5y ago
I hate captchas with a passion, yet I was recently forced to deploy it on website due to direct instructions from the credit card processor. The system was being used to roll through credit cards script-o-matically, and they mandated captchas to be deployed on threat of closing our account if not. So if anyone has better solution so I can eliminate the G and is Wordpress happy, I'm all ears (or eyes reading in this case).
- andrepd 5y ago
  There are captcha providers besides google, such as hcaptcha, or even rolling your own solution (a la old vbulletin forums)
  - dylan604 5y ago
    sorry. meant better than captcha like solutions. i know there are others, but it's still click here until we believe you're not a bot.
    - TobTobXX 5y ago
      https://friendlycaptcha.com/ https://friendlycaptcha.com/ Requires the browser to complete a Proof of Work challange. Not for verifying humanness, but against spam / dos attacks.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        Oops. I broke it. I tried their demo, and got this as a response: "Demo Friendly Captcha in action The form was unable to submit. Please contact the site administrator." Demo Hell 101. Make sure the demo shows the product working.
      - Gigachad 5y ago
        Proof of work is horrific. Means someones old phone has a meltdown trying to load the page while a warehouse in china with the latest GPUs cranks out billions of proofs per second. You could even utilize botnets to get random laptops and fridges to do your PoW.
jodrellblank 5y ago
Something melancholy about them is the loss of the idealism of "User Agent" as a scriptable machine which can act on your behalf on the innocent and collaborative proto-internet.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I also mourn the loss of User Agents. Why can't they just let bots browse?
matheusmoreira 5y ago
There's also the indignity of doing unpaid work for Google. We're not their fucking slaves.
- travoc 5y ago
  It’s ok. I get my money back by watching hundreds of hours of YouTube while blocking every single ad.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    So do I. That doesn't excuse Google's other forms of exploitation though. Like ads and private information collection, they're just yet another thing we should be working to block.
andrepd 5y ago
I'd be sort of okay with the general idea of proving I'm not a robot, you know what really rubs me the wrong way? It's how blatantly dishonest and disrespectful it is. Let me explain: google decides if you're human based on the data it has on you, such as your browsing profile and whether you're logged in to your Google account. Therefore it punishes you for trying to have privacy or refusing to use google services, at which point it will: - Give you longer captchas - Fade images in slower, something whose purpose can only possible be to annoy you for daring to refuse to submit to google's profiling, since bots don't care about that - Even falsely claim you failed captchas even if you get them right Fuck that!
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Oh yes. There's nothing like doing 3 noisy slow fade captchas correctly only to be failed for unknown reasons and asked to do even more. It's like it's wondering how much free work it can get out of users before they get mad and give up.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    A robot would never give up.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      I bet the robots know exactly how many failures before they need to cycle IPs/cookies/accounts and when the time comes I bet they know how to do it quickly and at low cost. Humans just have to give up and hope that whatever was behind the captcha wasn't actually important.
      - lobocinza 5y ago
        Many side projects on Github that aren't updated often seems to know the thresholds for not triggering such methods but as I user I often have to pass those stupid verifications.
    - 5y ago
random_upvoter 5y ago
So I'm member of a a religious (yogic) organisation and we have our own little chanting on Saturdays. When Covid broke out this obviously became impossible so we decided to have our meetings on Zoom instead. Now we have one woman in our group with some intellectual disability, a wonderful, sweet woman with the kindest heart in the world. Being 100% computer illiterate, she still decided to buy a tablet so she could follow the meetings on Zoom from her home. It fell to me to explain to her the whole process of opening a mail (she didn't know what an inbox was), clicking the Zoom link, clicking yes etc.. every little detail I had to explain repeatedly. It was a challenge but we slodged through the whole thing and she stayed positive and courageous throughout. Imagine how mortified I was when we reached the last steps and I had to explain to her 'and NOW.. after all that... you have to click on all the tiles with traffic lights'. She looked at me and asked with childlike innocence and wonder "but WHY do I have to click all the tiles that contain a traffic light?" I could not reasonably answer that question but I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier"
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  > Being 100% computer illiterate I wonder how much of that was due to the impairment itself, and how much was due to people underestimating her or not being willing to work with her to get her online. > I could not reasonably answer that question I can appreciate that it would have been challenging to come up with an explanation on the spot, while trying to talk her through joining the meeting. Having spent several minutes thinking about this from the safe distance of an asynchronous discussion after the fact, the best I can come up with is this: When you join a Zoom meeting, your tablet makes a call to Zoom over the Internet. But Zoom doesn't know for sure that the call is coming from an actual person trying to join the meeting. Have you ever gotten a phone call from a stranger, only to find out that the call is actually from a computer playing a recording, trying to sell you something? But if you assumed all calls from strangers were like that, you might also miss important calls from real people. It's kind of like that for Zoom as well. There are all sorts of nasty programs out there on the Internet, trying to make calls to Zoom. They might be trying to snoop on people's meetings, bombard people with advertisements, or just overload Zoom. Zoom needs to keep those programs out, so it can focus on serving people like you that are actually attending meetings. Now, when you get a call from a computer, you can tell pretty easily that it's a computer, because so far, computers aren't very good at having a conversation with a person. But Zoom is a computer program, and it's not smart enough to tell whether you're a real person without asking you to do something annoying like clicking all of the tiles with traffic lights. > I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier" What actually happened? Did she make it into the meeting? Do you know if she continued to use the tablet for other things? I hope so. I know the Internet can be frustrating, but I think it would have been a mistake to conclude that it wouldn't make her any happier. After all, it has helped us stay connected through the pandemic, right? I hope she got to participate in that.
agent327 5y ago
And let's not forget the subtle dread that comes with getting it wrong. Does that tiny edge of the traffic light that sticks into the next box make that box count as a traffic light as well? Oh no, I get another one - I must have gotten it wrong and now the computers think I'm one of them!
- Aunche 5y ago
  The trick with captcha is to not care if you get it wrong. I found that I could get past the captcha of it just click on the first tiles that pop into my head until Google is sufficiently convinced I'm not a robot. At most it takes me three attempts and even then, I'm not using too much cognitive load.
  - josefx 5y ago
    > The trick with captcha is to not care if you get it wrong. You have probably never been stuck in a loop where it just wont stop throwing captcha at you.
lamontcg 5y ago
You're forced to prove your human to an algorithm that trains a robot. It is a very boring dystopia. As an aside, I enjoyed the use of the word "anomie" in the article. Now I'm going to put on some sovietwave...
thaumaturgy 5y ago
There's a little bit of praxis that I do for these (when I can't just bounce from the site or service requesting it): purposefully get about 25% of it wrong, misidentifying things that aren't traffic lights as traffic lights, or failing to identify all traffic lights, for example. I'll sometimes have to go through a few rounds of captcha but I don't mind that as much when every one is an opportunity to have a tiny corrupting effect on their dataset. I was fine with Google's captchas when they were designed to help translate scanned printed material into searchable text (providing a social good). I'm not fine with providing free labor for their self driving car project.
- IggleSniggle 5y ago
  I’m confused about your reasoning. Translating scanned printed material into a searchable text is a social good, but providing safer transportation…that additionally may one day free drivers of the menial work of driving…that is not a social good?
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Agreed. The problem, of course, is that the dataset is exclusive to Google, so while it may benefit society it's not creating a public good. But that's also true for text OCR.
  - josefx 5y ago
    > but providing safer transportation. Which will be available any day now, probably as early as 2018 if experts on the field can be believed. Some would even go so far as state that by 2025 private car ownership will be a thing of the past. > that is not a social good? Hype, empty promises and constantly moving deadlines. If this goes on we will have commercial fusion reactors before self driving has any positive impact outside of heavily supervised trials.
  - thesuitonym 5y ago
    A better way to make safer transportation that may free drivers of the menial work of driving is to design cities that don't require people to drive.
Damogran6 5y ago
Blame the bastards hacking the website. Captchas are typically used to combat bot activity.
perl4ever 5y ago
>the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human It's worse than that - if I prove I'm human by choosing pictures the machine doesn't agree with it won't let me in. I recently found that using IE made for exponentially more tests. Out of pique, I tried doing the opposite of what was requested; for instance, if it wanted me to click on fire hydrants until there were no more, I clicked on pictures without fire hydrants until every square had one. But it never got tired, or decided it was wrong about what fire hydrants are, or deduced the rule I was following. It won't even let me differ on, say, 1/4 of them.
22c 5y ago
> the indignity What's particularly degrading is when it asks you to do something like "select all the bridges" and you as a human see one that is clearly an overpass, not a bridge. You don't select it because it's not what you'd call a bridge. You're inhuman. You're asked to select the motorcycles.. Here's a motorised scooter that looks a lot like a motorcycle. You thought that wasn't a motorcycle? Back to the training camps with you until you start to think like a human. Now select all the mountains. Huh? That raised mound of grass doesn't look like a mountain to you? Guess again, inhuman scum. At least with the "audio captcha" I feel like I might be contributing to some closed captions for another human :(
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  How is a highway overpass not a bridge? I would classify it as one.
  - delusional 5y ago
    I wonder if captchas are driving any change in language.
  - 22c 5y ago
    That's the beauty of being human. We can both look at the same image and have two different opinions about it. An AI simply boils it down to a confidence rating and if they're confident enough that an overpass IS a bridge, then your opinion does not matter to them. My interpretation of overpass is that it can be a bridge but is not always a bridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass However, I would totally accept your point of view if you said an overpass is also a bridge.
easton 5y ago
John Mulaney has a good bit about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQbjdaHIZ_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQbjdaHIZ_k
honzzz 5y ago
>> the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human Indignity, that's it! I was never able to explain to myself the visceral hate I feel when I encounter captcha. I knew it could not be explained by the little work it requires, I knew there had to be more, I just couldn't put my finger on it. Indignity, and maybe the feeling of being used. I have to admit, When I encounter captcha, I leave that page and never come back. I stopped using Pocket where I had hundreds of articles because of that. And when I encounter captcha on an especially bad day, I spend a few minutes clicking on incorrect images in an attempt to mess up their data.
- sdoering 5y ago
  On site I find especially annoying is Humble Bundle. Before I want to buy something there login. To prove that it is me owning the account I receive an email with a code I have to type in. Especially when I am on a mobile phone. After that, when frigging ever I want to checkoutmy cartI am forcedto do these captcha again prove that I am a human. I just stopped buying from them. Even if I like the cause.
  - account42 5y ago
    > Even if I like the cause. What cause is that? To make IGN more money? Because everything else is only marketing by now.
toiletaccount 5y ago
You mean you're bummed because you helped train your AI replacement for a few bytes of content that you forgot about in a couple of hours?
southerntofu 5y ago
> the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human Well put. I would add that it's even more humiliating that you have to "prove" it to a machine, who has no clue what it even means to be human.
amelius 5y ago
> A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome. How do you feel about Apple's face scanner?
rtbtobi 5y ago
> the frustration at this stupid world we've created https://github.com/rene-tobner/unity https://github.com/rene-tobner/unity Egovernment and identity management @ world-wide-wished-for-things.org ?

Zababa 5y ago

Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating, especially if you fail the captcha a few times in a row.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
I understand why websites need to use captcha. I do not understand why websites that have user accounts cannot offer the option of 2FA TOTP, or even SMS login to avoid captcha. Hilton.com is a big annoyance.
- JoeOfTexas 5y ago
  SMS is expensive.
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    It's less expensive than losing customers due to a bad UX.
    - jcims 5y ago
      But more measurable.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    TOTP is free, and can simply be made an option to avoid CAPTCHA.
  - xdennis 5y ago
    It's amazing that they still charge for something smaller than an average packet.
- leesalminen 5y ago
  A bot can trivially generate TOTP tokens from a shared secret and receive/process incoming SMS to extract the code.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Then use the fact that I am a paying customer of Hilton’s for years to mark my account as a human. I have the Hilton credit card, I am a Diamond member, what else do they want? I know why they force me though, I use content blockers on macOS and iOS to block tracking and ads, but that is not a good reason.
    - Kaze404 5y ago
      Can you share those content blockers? I recently acquired my first iOS device and have been suffering through the ads.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I use Wipr. Firefox Focus is a free one for iOS though.
      - IggleSniggle 5y ago
        Not who you asked, but I use Firefox Focus as a content blocker. Since iOS only has Safari and WebViews (Safari in different clothes), you enable content blockers by going to Settings > Safari > Content Blockers.
      - travoc 5y ago
        AdGuard is where it’s at on iOS.
    - Cheezmeister 5y ago
      I can think of few behaviours more human-like than using a content blocker. :)
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I really hate giving my phone number to any service, especially since i might need a second account there, or they might sell my data (or get hacked). I also hate sites that force you to do so... eg. twitter, where it decides it won't let you register without a phone number (making a new twitter account for a project), then won't allow you to use the phone number, because you already used it for your primary account.
  - Cycl0ps 5y ago
    Coincidentally I just made my first Twitter account. I can't remember the exact boxes you need to click but there is a way to sign up without giving out your phone number. The issue is that it may flag your account as more suspicious. After three days I had my account flagged. I couldn't view tweets or use the account in any way. On log in it would redirect me and ask for my phone number for "verification". Funny how they can verify something they never received. It took about ten days for support to correct but my account is active again and they still don't know my phone number.
- OJFord 5y ago
  I don't understand why they need it when they've already accepted and verified a login request, just need captcha to finish it off? (i.e. you don't get the captcha with bad creds) I mean, maybe I can see/accept an argument for that. But when I have a recent order? When I'm logging in from the link you just emailed me?
kop316 5y ago
> Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating In a quite a few instances, I find it flattering, because it implies "we haven't sucked enough data on you already to know if you are a human, so we need to be sure."
- xdennis 5y ago
  I find it infuriating because it pits me against other people without explaining what the rules are. If it says "select a sign" and I see there's also a sign far away in the distance only a few pixels in size, I select it because it is a sign. I think most people don't because I frequently get many tests after, because I'm not human enough for them.
- Banana699 5y ago
  It's actually a sign of bad ergonomics and disrespect for your time and effort. There are already sites that know you're human by your mouse/touch behaviour. Only if js is blocked do they need to resort to those ridiculous multi-level games they make you play. My surprise if the sites that do those things turned out to be using humans for free labeling of images would be an exact, unsigned zero.
  - kop316 5y ago
    > Only if js is blocked do they need to resort to those ridiculous multi-level games they make you play. In all fairness, i usually do that.
unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
It's really hard to know sometimes which frames humans generally classify as 'bicycle' or 'traffic light'. The bottom third of a tire? The supporting pole of an extra set of signals in the background? I sometimes have no idea whose intelligence I'm supposed to emulate.
- vmception 5y ago
  I’ve heard that before and I don’t really understand how people have so much trouble with this. But I guess knowing the rules helps me with this: The machine doesn't know the answer so it doesn't really matter. You need to emulate the crowd and also realize you are contributing to the crowd. So you can actually pollute it with wrong answers to delay the robot uprising. Or at least cripple it when they keep running into fire hydrants they didn't see.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  They can just use the data and see "50% of verified humans clicked this" and know that it is debatable or not obviously a match but not a verified not-match.
dylan604 5y ago
My favorite is finding errors on their side. I was tasked with finding the parking meters, and being told I was missing one. The "one" was an image of a mailbox, not a parking meter. Selecting the mailbox allowed it to say I was a human
- kenny11 5y ago
  I think I got that exact same one, and had the exact same problem with it. Maybe reasoning that it was confusing the mailbox for a parking meter was how I proved that I was a human to it.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  The reason this happens is that captchas are not localized. Most countries don't have mail boxes, only US, Canada, Australia, NZ have them so people from outside those countries may not think to distinguish mailboxes from parking meters and will just click every square that matches their mental model of a parking meter (a pole with something on top or a big box)
  - Zababa 5y ago
    > Most countries don't have mail boxes (only US, Canada, Australia, NZ) They do, they just look different. At least that's how it is in France.
    - lou1306 5y ago
      They're not the same as the classic US mailbox (). In the US you can use such a mailbox to send mail as well. In Europe you typically have private letterboxes for incoming mail and big, public post boxes for sending.
      - mkl 5y ago
        > classic US mailbox () Missing link? In NZ, and presumably other countries, personal letterboxes in rural areas can be used to send too, which I'm guessing is the same as what you're referring to.
dunnevens 5y ago
Sometimes I end up failing them deliberately. I can't boycott them because they're often in the way of important sites. So my small, practically invisible protest is to never click more than 3 times. If you want me to pick out all the bicycles, you better have 3 or less. I'm only clicking 3. I fully understand this isn't going to have any effect. Maybe if a million of us were doing it, it would. But it still makes me feel better.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  True civil disobedience would be clicking the non-bikes.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Back when captchas were about optical character recognition, it was obvious which words came from actual books. Plenty of people would input offensive words instead of the correct answer. I hope it had an effect but it probably didn't.
    - revolvingocelot 5y ago
      Someone who isn't me hung around on 4chan a lot back in the day. Indeed, there was an effort across the boards to disseminate heuristics to determine which one was the already-known word and which one was to be parsed by humans. The agreed-upon procedure was identify the latter as "penis".
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        > The agreed-upon procedure was identify the latter as "penis". I remember far worse...
- mrkramer 5y ago
  So you want us to DDoS the captcha networks? Hmm is that even legal? But it would be somewhat cool if millions of people starting failing captcha on purpose it would be something like decentralized volunteer mass ddos attack.

samstave 5y ago

>For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human This is EXACTLY what a Robot would say...

jjoonathan 5y ago

But metal detectors don't block your way for 20 seconds and they don't ever put you into an eternal loop of scanning again and again until you just give up and decide to live without.

jdavis703 5y ago
They do delay customers by 20 seconds, because if we’re carrying metal then we’ve got to be inspected by security.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Capchas hold you up 20 seconds every single time, whereas metal detectors usually don't alarm at all.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Wasted time is still >20 seconds every time you encounter a metal detector, unless you really don’t ever carry or wear metal. Bonus points if you regrettably have a bag that needs to be searched.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    It takes me 20 seconds just to be sure I've accounted for any possible metal in my pockets.

smichel17 5y ago

Additionally, ReCAPTCHA is worse than a metal detector, since in addition to being an inconvenience, it's performing unpaid labor for Google. It's more like a bouncer at the door, who won't let you in unless you grease his palm first. Just filthy corruption, plain and simple.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
How is it corruption? The website’s owners consciously choose to use said bouncer who has agreed to accept compensation in the form of making the website’s visitors solve captcha.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Do you think that's universally true, like website _owners_ (as opposed to developers) realise captchas are a thing? Seems unlikely to me; the dev setup a cdn, the owner mightn't even know what that is.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    > the owner mightn't even know what that is. That's a problem of literacy, but it is still their fault and their responsibility as owners of the site.
lobocinza 5y ago
Another hidden fee in those "free" services.

dylan604 5y ago

I hate captchas with a passion, yet I was recently forced to deploy it on website due to direct instructions from the credit card processor. The system was being used to roll through credit cards script-o-matically, and they mandated captchas to be deployed on threat of closing our account if not. So if anyone has better solution so I can eliminate the G and is Wordpress happy, I'm all ears (or eyes reading in this case).

andrepd 5y ago
There are captcha providers besides google, such as hcaptcha, or even rolling your own solution (a la old vbulletin forums)
- dylan604 5y ago
  sorry. meant better than captcha like solutions. i know there are others, but it's still click here until we believe you're not a bot.
  - TobTobXX 5y ago
    https://friendlycaptcha.com/ https://friendlycaptcha.com/ Requires the browser to complete a Proof of Work challange. Not for verifying humanness, but against spam / dos attacks.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Oops. I broke it. I tried their demo, and got this as a response: "Demo Friendly Captcha in action The form was unable to submit. Please contact the site administrator." Demo Hell 101. Make sure the demo shows the product working.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      Proof of work is horrific. Means someones old phone has a meltdown trying to load the page while a warehouse in china with the latest GPUs cranks out billions of proofs per second. You could even utilize botnets to get random laptops and fridges to do your PoW.

jodrellblank 5y ago

Something melancholy about them is the loss of the idealism of "User Agent" as a scriptable machine which can act on your behalf on the innocent and collaborative proto-internet.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
I also mourn the loss of User Agents. Why can't they just let bots browse?

matheusmoreira 5y ago

There's also the indignity of doing unpaid work for Google. We're not their fucking slaves.

travoc 5y ago
It’s ok. I get my money back by watching hundreds of hours of YouTube while blocking every single ad.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  So do I. That doesn't excuse Google's other forms of exploitation though. Like ads and private information collection, they're just yet another thing we should be working to block.

andrepd 5y ago

I'd be sort of okay with the general idea of proving I'm not a robot, you know what really rubs me the wrong way? It's how blatantly dishonest and disrespectful it is. Let me explain: google decides if you're human based on the data it has on you, such as your browsing profile and whether you're logged in to your Google account. Therefore it punishes you for trying to have privacy or refusing to use google services, at which point it will: - Give you longer captchas - Fade images in slower, something whose purpose can only possible be to annoy you for daring to refuse to submit to google's profiling, since bots don't care about that - Even falsely claim you failed captchas even if you get them right Fuck that!

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Oh yes. There's nothing like doing 3 noisy slow fade captchas correctly only to be failed for unknown reasons and asked to do even more. It's like it's wondering how much free work it can get out of users before they get mad and give up.
- Swizec 5y ago
  A robot would never give up.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    I bet the robots know exactly how many failures before they need to cycle IPs/cookies/accounts and when the time comes I bet they know how to do it quickly and at low cost. Humans just have to give up and hope that whatever was behind the captcha wasn't actually important.
    - lobocinza 5y ago
      Many side projects on Github that aren't updated often seems to know the thresholds for not triggering such methods but as I user I often have to pass those stupid verifications.
  - 5y ago

random_upvoter 5y ago

So I'm member of a a religious (yogic) organisation and we have our own little chanting on Saturdays. When Covid broke out this obviously became impossible so we decided to have our meetings on Zoom instead. Now we have one woman in our group with some intellectual disability, a wonderful, sweet woman with the kindest heart in the world. Being 100% computer illiterate, she still decided to buy a tablet so she could follow the meetings on Zoom from her home. It fell to me to explain to her the whole process of opening a mail (she didn't know what an inbox was), clicking the Zoom link, clicking yes etc.. every little detail I had to explain repeatedly. It was a challenge but we slodged through the whole thing and she stayed positive and courageous throughout. Imagine how mortified I was when we reached the last steps and I had to explain to her 'and NOW.. after all that... you have to click on all the tiles with traffic lights'. She looked at me and asked with childlike innocence and wonder "but WHY do I have to click all the tiles that contain a traffic light?" I could not reasonably answer that question but I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier"

mwcampbell 5y ago
> Being 100% computer illiterate I wonder how much of that was due to the impairment itself, and how much was due to people underestimating her or not being willing to work with her to get her online. > I could not reasonably answer that question I can appreciate that it would have been challenging to come up with an explanation on the spot, while trying to talk her through joining the meeting. Having spent several minutes thinking about this from the safe distance of an asynchronous discussion after the fact, the best I can come up with is this: When you join a Zoom meeting, your tablet makes a call to Zoom over the Internet. But Zoom doesn't know for sure that the call is coming from an actual person trying to join the meeting. Have you ever gotten a phone call from a stranger, only to find out that the call is actually from a computer playing a recording, trying to sell you something? But if you assumed all calls from strangers were like that, you might also miss important calls from real people. It's kind of like that for Zoom as well. There are all sorts of nasty programs out there on the Internet, trying to make calls to Zoom. They might be trying to snoop on people's meetings, bombard people with advertisements, or just overload Zoom. Zoom needs to keep those programs out, so it can focus on serving people like you that are actually attending meetings. Now, when you get a call from a computer, you can tell pretty easily that it's a computer, because so far, computers aren't very good at having a conversation with a person. But Zoom is a computer program, and it's not smart enough to tell whether you're a real person without asking you to do something annoying like clicking all of the tiles with traffic lights. > I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier" What actually happened? Did she make it into the meeting? Do you know if she continued to use the tablet for other things? I hope so. I know the Internet can be frustrating, but I think it would have been a mistake to conclude that it wouldn't make her any happier. After all, it has helped us stay connected through the pandemic, right? I hope she got to participate in that.

agent327 5y ago

And let's not forget the subtle dread that comes with getting it wrong. Does that tiny edge of the traffic light that sticks into the next box make that box count as a traffic light as well? Oh no, I get another one - I must have gotten it wrong and now the computers think I'm one of them!

Aunche 5y ago
The trick with captcha is to not care if you get it wrong. I found that I could get past the captcha of it just click on the first tiles that pop into my head until Google is sufficiently convinced I'm not a robot. At most it takes me three attempts and even then, I'm not using too much cognitive load.
- josefx 5y ago
  > The trick with captcha is to not care if you get it wrong. You have probably never been stuck in a loop where it just wont stop throwing captcha at you.

lamontcg 5y ago

You're forced to prove your human to an algorithm that trains a robot. It is a very boring dystopia. As an aside, I enjoyed the use of the word "anomie" in the article. Now I'm going to put on some sovietwave...

thaumaturgy 5y ago

There's a little bit of praxis that I do for these (when I can't just bounce from the site or service requesting it): purposefully get about 25% of it wrong, misidentifying things that aren't traffic lights as traffic lights, or failing to identify all traffic lights, for example. I'll sometimes have to go through a few rounds of captcha but I don't mind that as much when every one is an opportunity to have a tiny corrupting effect on their dataset. I was fine with Google's captchas when they were designed to help translate scanned printed material into searchable text (providing a social good). I'm not fine with providing free labor for their self driving car project.

IggleSniggle 5y ago
I’m confused about your reasoning. Translating scanned printed material into a searchable text is a social good, but providing safer transportation…that additionally may one day free drivers of the menial work of driving…that is not a social good?
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Agreed. The problem, of course, is that the dataset is exclusive to Google, so while it may benefit society it's not creating a public good. But that's also true for text OCR.
- josefx 5y ago
  > but providing safer transportation. Which will be available any day now, probably as early as 2018 if experts on the field can be believed. Some would even go so far as state that by 2025 private car ownership will be a thing of the past. > that is not a social good? Hype, empty promises and constantly moving deadlines. If this goes on we will have commercial fusion reactors before self driving has any positive impact outside of heavily supervised trials.
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  A better way to make safer transportation that may free drivers of the menial work of driving is to design cities that don't require people to drive.

Damogran6 5y ago

Blame the bastards hacking the website. Captchas are typically used to combat bot activity.

perl4ever 5y ago

>the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human It's worse than that - if I prove I'm human by choosing pictures the machine doesn't agree with it won't let me in. I recently found that using IE made for exponentially more tests. Out of pique, I tried doing the opposite of what was requested; for instance, if it wanted me to click on fire hydrants until there were no more, I clicked on pictures without fire hydrants until every square had one. But it never got tired, or decided it was wrong about what fire hydrants are, or deduced the rule I was following. It won't even let me differ on, say, 1/4 of them.

22c 5y ago

> the indignity What's particularly degrading is when it asks you to do something like "select all the bridges" and you as a human see one that is clearly an overpass, not a bridge. You don't select it because it's not what you'd call a bridge. You're inhuman. You're asked to select the motorcycles.. Here's a motorised scooter that looks a lot like a motorcycle. You thought that wasn't a motorcycle? Back to the training camps with you until you start to think like a human. Now select all the mountains. Huh? That raised mound of grass doesn't look like a mountain to you? Guess again, inhuman scum. At least with the "audio captcha" I feel like I might be contributing to some closed captions for another human :(

frosted-flakes 5y ago
How is a highway overpass not a bridge? I would classify it as one.
- delusional 5y ago
  I wonder if captchas are driving any change in language.
- 22c 5y ago
  That's the beauty of being human. We can both look at the same image and have two different opinions about it. An AI simply boils it down to a confidence rating and if they're confident enough that an overpass IS a bridge, then your opinion does not matter to them. My interpretation of overpass is that it can be a bridge but is not always a bridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass However, I would totally accept your point of view if you said an overpass is also a bridge.

easton 5y ago

John Mulaney has a good bit about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQbjdaHIZ_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQbjdaHIZ_k

honzzz 5y ago

>> the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human Indignity, that's it! I was never able to explain to myself the visceral hate I feel when I encounter captcha. I knew it could not be explained by the little work it requires, I knew there had to be more, I just couldn't put my finger on it. Indignity, and maybe the feeling of being used. I have to admit, When I encounter captcha, I leave that page and never come back. I stopped using Pocket where I had hundreds of articles because of that. And when I encounter captcha on an especially bad day, I spend a few minutes clicking on incorrect images in an attempt to mess up their data.

sdoering 5y ago
On site I find especially annoying is Humble Bundle. Before I want to buy something there login. To prove that it is me owning the account I receive an email with a code I have to type in. Especially when I am on a mobile phone. After that, when frigging ever I want to checkoutmy cartI am forcedto do these captcha again prove that I am a human. I just stopped buying from them. Even if I like the cause.
- account42 5y ago
  > Even if I like the cause. What cause is that? To make IGN more money? Because everything else is only marketing by now.

toiletaccount 5y ago

You mean you're bummed because you helped train your AI replacement for a few bytes of content that you forgot about in a couple of hours?

southerntofu 5y ago

> the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human Well put. I would add that it's even more humiliating that you have to "prove" it to a machine, who has no clue what it even means to be human.

amelius 5y ago

> A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome. How do you feel about Apple's face scanner?

rtbtobi 5y ago

> the frustration at this stupid world we've created https://github.com/rene-tobner/unity https://github.com/rene-tobner/unity Egovernment and identity management @ world-wide-wished-for-things.org ?