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First, I’m going to teach you to fish. Go to hCaptcha’s website, then scroll to the footer. Click around on the about links. It’ll reveal their business model.
by jdavis703 5y ago
First, I’m going to teach you to fish. Go to hCaptcha’s website, then scroll to the footer. Click around on the about links. It’ll reveal their business model. This trick also works for other businesses and NGOs.
Now, if we look at https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling we can tell they make money by labeling data sets for a fee. So as a guess, there’s someone out there that needs to improve computer vision detection of transportation vehicles. My guess is it’s a self driving car company, but who knows.
- raffraffraff 5y agoSo the safety of self-driving cars depends on regular folks not trolling the catpcha.
- PebblesRox 5y agoHopefully they're able to account for Lizardman's Constant https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
- tartoran 5y agoYes but if you make a mistake the capcha fails, hence they are already labeled.
- jre 5y agoI would guess they have a system such that after a user has passed N captchas successfully, they trust its a human and start displaying them (a portion of) unlabelled captchas that will always succeed and that's when novel labelling happens. Or something along those lines. And then you can get creative displaying same captcha to multiple users, etc...
- thargor90 5y agocaptchas mix classified and unclassified data. Only if you get the classified data correct a users data is used to classify the unclassified data. Also the same picture is shown to multiple people to improve confidence.
- Hamuko 5y agoThe first version of reCAPTCHA made it very obvious as to which word was the classified one and which was the unclassified one, so people had a pretty easy way to inject bad data into the process.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoYeah, I remember my days on 4chan where people kept posting a campaign to substitute a racial slur for the one that looked unclassified.
- Spare_account 5y agoOne of my hobbies is figuring out which captcha prompts are the unclassified data so that I can answer wrong and stick it to the man.
- _pebz 5y agoHow do you do so?
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoI just try to get one randomly wrong. It almost always lets me through. Also, I'll pick the wrong one that almost looks right. Say, a picture with a vaguely traffic light shaped mailbox or a train shaped car or something. :)
- rurp 5y agoI have noticed there's a very very low correlation between how hard I try on captchas and how quickly they let me through. I just quickly mash a bunch of tiles to start, maybe trying to be in the right general area. That works surprisingly often and when it doesn't I, and pay closer attention to what I'm selecting, then I pretty much always get through on that next try. This approach mostly fixes the annoying phenomenon where I carefully select the exact right tiles only to be told, "too bad, try again".
- blue_cookeh 5y agoSome are already labelled, the user doesn't know so it's in their interest to solve the captcha properly and provide good data.
- kkcorps 5y agoMakes sense since other than the ones mentioned I received a lot of crosswalks, traffic lights and bicycles.
- q1w2 5y agoIt's odd that it never asks for pedestrians.
- Leherenn 5y agoThere might be some privacy issues involved there.
- HideousKojima 5y agoI recall some controversy a couple years ago over suspicions that defense contractors were using them to train weapons systems. A few people got captchas asking them to identify helicopters.
- tapland 5y agoI'd love to identify helicopters. I do get planes now, but was it specifically military helicopters? I like getting to identify basic things like cars, airplanes and trains with hCaptcha. It's like a picture book for adults, and feels strangely pleasant compared to other captchas.
- HideousKojima 5y agoYeah, they were military helicopters: https://old.reddit.com/r/google/comments/5udzy4/hey_google_exactly_what_kind_of_ai_am_i_helping/ https://old.reddit.com/r/google/comments/5udzy4/hey_google_e...
- brk 5y agoFor the most part, human detection capabilities of modern NNs are very good. This would include detections from a variety of camera angles and resolutions. There are already a lot of labeled training sets available with people in various poses, heights, clothing types, etc. Bicycle detection is probably one of the more challenging elements as it relates to pedestrians and things you don't want a SD car to run into. Depending on the angle and color of the bicycle, rider position, and background elements, it can be challenging to discern the rider from the bicycle reliably. For the most part, just knowing there is a human present is a good start, but being able to anticipate movement speeds and directions of pedestrians vs. bikers is helpful in anticipating collision paths and distances, and also figuring out distances and terrain (person on bike is slightly elevated above ground, which can cause range perception issues, among other things). source: have been working in AI/MV space for security/safety applications for 12+ years.
- danjac 5y agoWhen they start doing captchas along the lines of "check all pictures of potential terrorists" we'll know they're training data sets for military drone manufacturers.
- intricatedetail 5y ago
- d82nsjk9 5y agoHow so?
- finiteseries 5y agoThey’re implying having recorded video of a bunch of westerners on TikTok = western recognition tech.
- intricatedetail 5y agoAnd metadata.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NavinF 5y agoPretty sure they could have done that with just YouTube and Twitch lol
- intricatedetail 5y agothese platforms don't give access to personal data that they can use to aid training.
- zxcvbn4038 5y agoThat wouldn't work well. I was in Texas during 9/11 and they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars because the locals don't really have a good eye for different ethnicities. Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since. Austin has grown a lot since I lived there are a lot of people from outside Texas have moved there so I'm sure the culture has changed - but when I was there going from north Austin to south Austin seemed to be this epic trip the locals would only do on a weekend -- and probably pack water and sandwiches for the drive across town. A really exotic senior trip "abroad" for students might be to Houston or Galveston. You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.
- potamic 5y agoMany a time I receive multiple challenges on a site despite having selected all images perfectly, and can't help but wonder, "Hey, are they getting me to do more work than necessary because they're running behind on their labelling backlog?". There's definitely a conflict of incentives in this case. If you're a website owner, you're better off choosing a different service which doesn't have adverse incentives, otherwise it can affect your site experience. And please don't put captcha on GET requests. Use a CDN if you're unable to handle bot load. And don't even get me started on CDNs that throw captcha.
- dmix 5y agoWhoever made this new captcha I’m seeing starting to see everywhere: https://imgur.com/a/hoyjctl https://imgur.com/a/hoyjctl Thank you! itsso much easier than being a labeling bot for self driving cars.
- NavinF 5y agoThat looks pretty easy for machines. I wouldn’t be surprised if CLIP could solve that out of the box. (Then again, I guess the same applies to “select all the traffic lights”)
- donkarma 5y agoyeah you won't be loving this one where they make you do 10 in a row and if you get one wrong you start again with 11 this time. also it'll fail you at random
- zenexer 5y agoI've noticed that some sites deliberately do this or have lousy code that fails to properly acknowledge captcha completions. Take archive.is/archive.fo/archive.today, for example. If you're using Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) or iCloud Private Relay, and you visit https://archive.is/ https://archive.is/, you'll get what looks like a Cloudflare screening page. It's not, though: that page is part of archive.is and is served to Cloudflare DNS users (which includes iCloud Private Relay users)--the use of reCAPTCHA in place of hCaptcha is a giveaway. You can complete the captcha as many times as you like, but you'll never get in. And how many times have we completed a captcha on a form only to have it throw another captcha in our face without so much as an error message? Sometimes it's just lousy code.
- kqr 5y agoThis became obvious to me when during some period the regular crosswalks, stop lights, and buses got replaced by chimneys, trees, and mountains (!). It was right around the time when some big companies started advertising AI driven quadcopter services.
- _moof 5y agoAh, so that's what that's about. Here I was wondering why on earth a self-driving car would need help identifying a mountain (or need to identify one at all). "Surely they can't be that bad at avoiding obstacles," I thought.
- hnthrowaway0315 5y agoI wonder if there is a way to pollute the data. Since I always click the captchas correctly, what happens if someone just randomly clicks stuffs? Is he/she banned from the website?
- pastullo 5y agoGlad you asked. Since i despise the horrible UX of these Captcha where i get exploited to train a neural network, i very often click on the majority of correct result plus one wrong one. On average the captcha let me go through which is actually very scary, since it looks like it prioritize algorithm training over bot detection... Does anyone else do this?
- arbitrage 5y agoNo, because it is a waste of time. Your answer set is compared with many other answers, and eventually the wrong answer is disregarded completely by the AI. You gave it a mostly correct answer, which it can cope with -- by design. It let you through, after all. You're not really accomplishing anything by being defiant, other than making yourself feel slightly better.
- pastullo 5y agoFully agree that the system propose the same challenge to many people and fully agree that my wrong answer is just diluted in a bunch of correct answers. That's exactly why i was asking if other people were doing that. If i'm the only one..then yes, it's only useful for myself to fell less like a exploited brain, but if say 20% of the people start dumping random error on purpose...than the situation changes quite a lot...and potentially even the business model of shit-captcha might not work.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoIf they do the same kinds of error, yeah.
- 5y ago
- chinathrow 5y agohttps://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling > hCaptcha has one of the largest pools on the planet available for your use. Whatever your scale, we can handle it without expensive upfront commitments. Millions of tasks per day are no problem. Thanks for pointing this out - I feel abused now.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arminiusreturns 5y agoYou just gave me the idea to start a captcha service designed for datasets relevant for the prolitariet. Not sure how viable it is (what kind of data would be useful for the prols in a revolution) but it was a fun thought experiment.
- yumraj 5y agoThat is exactly what Google uses/used-to-use the captcha for. It is/was fairly well known/understood.
- throwaway894345 5y agoA helicopter pilot is lost, lands his helicopter next to you, and asks, "where am I?" to which you respond, "you're in a helicopter". You are correct in the strictest sense, but probably not answering the intent of the question. :) In this case, the intent is probably something like why are hcaptcha's customers centered around transport when there are so many other applications for this kind of labeling?
- snihalani 5y agoconfession: sometimes I mislabel just so I can corrupt the dataset
- rawling 5y ago> My guess is it’s a self driving car company, but who knows. As always, https://xkcd.com/1897 https://xkcd.com/1897