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Some captchas are getting pretty discriminatory, not everyone lives in the West and can identify the objects they are asking you to. Another recent one sticks o
by Rastonbury 2y ago
Some captchas are getting pretty discriminatory, not everyone lives in the West and can identify the objects they are asking you to. Another recent one sticks out where they asked me to pick a shape as the same number of conoids on screen. If you ask people on a street what a conoids I bet a significant amount will give you blank looks
Also at least now I know some people call those markings crosswalks
- throwaway519 2y ago[flagged]
- ta1243 2y agoSorry I live in the west, what's a "crosswalk" Did you mean to say > not everyone lives in the USA Other things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant, yellow taxis, yellow buses (Obviously I do, because of American cultural imperialism through things like Captchas which mean the world has to understand American cultural touchstones)
- slater 2y agoPlease enter your five-digit ZIP code
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bux93 2y ago90210 (Cue theme music in mind's ear)
- thebruce87m 2y agoThat’s my zip code too, along with millions of others who live outside the US. Haven’t needed to use it for a while.
- School-Cotton 2y agoSimilarly, on websites that require a British address I use “10 Downing Street” (the only one I know!)
- genewitch 2y ago221 baker
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoMandatory "state" field on forms - if it allows any string I usually enter "mostly liquid"
- OptionOfT 2y agoFor me it is "constant despair".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- croisillon 2y agodid you know that the ZIP code for both Paris Texas and Paris France start with 75xxx
- KETHERCORTEX 2y agoWell, France doesn't have Zone Improvement Plan codes. It is somewhat annoying to fill forms on websites with "ZIP code" in them for people outside US. They aren't called this way anywhere else (except for one or two countries).
- ta1243 2y agoWhich you can then compress into a postcode file #internationalisation https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/12cwylk/microsoft_has_mistranslated_zip_files_as_postcode/?share_id=bzcwX4WhX_3idb7Bms5rQ https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/12cwylk/microsoft...
- alex7o 2y agoSE1 9QN is my postcode what 5 number?
- slater 2y agowooosh
- nmeofthestate 2y ago[flagged]
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago[flagged]
- Symbiote 2y agoIn many countries fire hydrants are underground, under an iron or concrete cover. There's very little to see on the street. There might or might not be a sign marking the location. Sweden: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_hydrants_in_Sweden https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_hydrants_in... UK: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_hydrants_in_the_United_Kingdom https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_hydrants_in... It's also not necessarily relevant to worry about blocking one when parking a car.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoMost UK hydrants are at junctions where its already illegal to park... come to think of it, I think USA ones are maybe mostly at junctions (in the media I've seen)? Are you allowed to park at junctions in USA?
- School-Cotton 2y ago> Are you allowed to park at junctions in USA? US driving laws vary quite widely depending on the state (and sometimes depending on the city within the state). So there’s probably no uniform answer. But parking at an intersection is indeed allowed in a lot of places within the US, in my experience.
- Symbiote 2y agoMaybe the standard international signs are more easily recognised by machines anyway, but if not it will be interesting when Google and others start needing Captcha help. Americans will need to learn what speed limit, parking prohibition and pedestrian crossing signs look like in the rest of the world, as well as realizing buses and taxis come in more colours.
- reaperducer 2y agoAmericans will need to learn what speed limit, parking prohibition and pedestrian crossing signs look like in the rest of the world If you think this is a binary America/Rest of the World problem, then you haven't visited very much of the "rest of the world" and noticed that every place is full of variations.
- jstanley 2y agoYou don't think you could identify yellow buses without cultural knowledge? I think simply knowing "yellow" and "buses" would suffice.
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoIt's hard to really say objectively, as the strange yellow American school bus is kind of an iconic image - perhaps because it looks so different to a regular public transport bus as seen around the rest of the world.
- itishappy 2y agoDoes DHL delivery via yellow busses?
- wccrawford 2y agoDoes anyone deliver anything except people via "busses"?
- ta1243 2y agoWell yes, how else do you get the mail?
- Toorkit 2y agoThose are called Vans.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoIn the US. And then there's "shuttle", I believe the US has at least one kind of thing called "shuttle" for every possible mode of transport, including orbital flight.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
- RobMurray 2y agoAnd audio Captchas are in English. I suppose blind people who don't speak English or have any kind of hearing difficulty don't deserve accessibility.
- webspinner 2y agoCan you have them translated into your native language? I mean I imagine if your using Google from a different country, it might take notice. Maybe it doesn't apply to reCAPTCHA, Google can be stupid like that!
- smitelli 2y agoI distinctly remember a captcha which asked me to identify fire hydrants. Some of the pictures were hydrants, while others were standpipes. These are different things, and I answered accordingly. The service refused to acknowledge my humanity until I relented that a standpipe was a hydrant. If at some future date any of us burn to death due to an automated fire truck that misbehaved due to this, we’ll know why.
- seanhunter 2y agoYup - I recognize this problem. I am a motorcyclist and I frequently have to grit my teeth and misidentify scooters as motorcycles if I want to get past captcha. For non-bikers, a scooter has an automated gearbox and small wheels etc. Think vespa. In the UK at least they are generally a different category of license, although that's because of the size of a standard scooter engine.
- jachee 2y agoIt's a squares/rectangles issue. Scooters are cycles that have motors, and are thus motorcycles in the most-inclusive definition of such.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoFWIW, I went out looking for a better category (something more like "two-wheeler" but without the engine), and discovered that Wikipedia actually agrees that scooters are motorcycles.
- bredren 2y agoScooters are arguably more like traditional motorcycles than ebikes. Reminds me of this scene from Police Academy 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cil6HFXlccw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cil6HFXlccw
- Ekaros 2y agoAnd electric bicycle is in sense also motorcycle...
- mapt 2y agoUnfortunately, even understanding these things, on a shared connection it might take you literally two or three minutes of captcha work before Google recognizes your personhood. Am I identifying the boxes wrong? Am I doing it too fast? Where do "Stairs" begin and end? Does a motorcycle include its rider? Or is Google just fucking with me and failing me on purpose? My workplace had a period this year where captcha was put into the cashier checkout process.
- danaris 2y agoAnd while it's not quite the same kind of CAPTCHA, I've not infrequently run into Cloudflare "prove you're human" screens that just...never let me through. I click the box, it loads for a second, turns into a nice checkmark, and then...reloads the "prove you're human" page. Infinite loop (as far as I can tell, anyway, not having infinite time).
- alwayslikethis 2y agoFirefox RFP? That sometimes does it
- wing-_-nuts 2y agoI forget what extension was doing this for me, but I think this was down to an extension blocking autoload/play. Try disabling your extensions down to ublock and slowly adding them back.
- reaperducer 2y agoOther things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant Even within the United States, fire hydrants vary greatly from city to city. I remember the first time I moved to a city that had those little squatty dark blue ones. I thought they were water main access points. It's interesting to see so many people on HN assessing that captchas are biased toward American culture. Very frequently I get captchas that include things I don't know, and when I look them up, they turn out to be Indian in origin.
- genewitch 2y agoyeah, where are all these mopeds "in the US" i can't even remember the last time i saw someone on a moped... 15 years ago in L.A.?
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoIs a coach a bus? Honestly, I'm not sure what makes them different, if you pressed me I think I'd say a coach has luggage compartments underneath. A UK coach is not a bus... although Megabus run mostly coaches, and Stagecoach run mostly buses. Is a scooter a motorcycle, what about a pedal-and-pop, an ebike? Is the backbox (rear carrier) part of the motorcycle? Is a single light at a junction, ahem intersection, a traffic light? Is the outer-container part of the "light"? What about the lights for pedestrians, are they part of the traffic light? Are house steps, that don't carry you to a different storey, still stairs? Is a single step also stairs? Are fire hydrants always red? So, yeah, usually I just leave the website and come back to HN.
- astroid 2y agoThis can't be right, I have been told over and over again that America does not have any culture. Now it's being used to push imperialism through captchas of all things?! I feel like all the non-US or non-Western or however you want to categorize the 'rest of the world' should be striving to use free-range local culturally-appropriate captcha services if this is true. It's easy to blame the colonizers, but what about the local artisanal websites who give the colonizers/invaders a voice by integrating their captcha services? We really need an 'international-divorce' to put these issues to bed once and for all.
- joveian 2y agoAlso, if you use a larger minimum font size often the text describing the thing you are supposed to select is under the image and unreadable. With hCaptcha it varies depending on the size of the popup window with the captcha and Google seems to reliably show just the top (barely enough to figure it out most of the time).
- croes 2y agoBut on the internet the answer to „what is a conoid“ is just a web search away. The bigger problem is when other options of a captcha fit in another cultural context. Taxi colors are an example for that.
- Suppafly 2y ago>But on the internet the answer to „what is a conoid“ is just a web search away. When I search, the whole first page of google is essentially "things that are shaped like cones", I have no idea what that would be in response to one of those image captchas that show traffic and buildings.
- rovr138 2y ago> A conoid is a ruled surface whose rulings are parallel to a plane (called the directrix plane) and intersect a fixed line (called the axis of the conoid) (Gellert et al. 1989, p. 202). Examples include the circular conoid, helicoid, hyperbolic paraboloid, parabolic conoid, Plücker conoid, right circular conoid, Wallis's conical edge, Whitney umbrella, and Zindler conoid. If the axis is perpendicular to the directrix plane, the conoid is called a right conoid (Gray et al. 2006, p. 436). https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Conoid.html https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Conoid.html
- gus_massa 2y agoI got mathematical surfaces like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conoid To get the correct image I had to search conoid street. Anyway, I guessed they were those red cone shaped things that people put on the street and I'm not sure how they are call even is Spanish (probably conos or balizas).
- TeMPOraL 2y ago> But on the internet the answer to „what is a conoid“ is just a web search away. Not when it's your search engine that's asking you to identify conoids.
- joegibbs 2y agoGoogle "conoid" and you'll get a bunch of pictures of shapes that are curved in different ways. I assume the captcha was talking about things that have a similar shape to a cone, but I don't think you'd get much of a clue from Google.
- Aardwolf 2y agoAlso asking things about US traffic signs or markings in countries with different looking traffic signs
- dizhn 2y agoI routinely have problems with closeup images. To this day I don't know how much of the object I should be selecting? Also what is a traffic light? Is the pole part of it or not? Motorcycles seem to be hard too. Once it showed me a picture of steps nothing but steps. I think I marked like 15 boxes.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago> To this day I don't know how much of the object I should be selecting? Also what is a traffic light? Is the pole part of it or not? Motorcycles seem to be hard too. I have always assumed this was purposefully ambiguous. The right answer is whatever a majority of humans will answer when presented with the same picture.
- sml156 2y agoI don't think the majority of people on earth would base all their captchas on things only found in America
- layer8 2y agoThe majority of people will still cluster around the same best guesses, and that’s all that matters to the algorithm. Yes, it’s annoying, but that doesn’t matter to the algorithm.
- andrepd 2y agoIf you think you're failing the captchas because you're doing them wrong, think again. Google captcha intentionally fails you a couple times if they don't have enough tracking info to determine that you're legit. So you solve the captcha correctly but are still lied to that "you've failed to solve the captcha, try again". That and the "fading images slowly to pretend like you have bad internet" thing. Disgusting behaviour
- oniony 2y agoMaybe they purposely load the images slowly to make it more expensive for the bot owners.
- Suppafly 2y ago>conoids Things that are shaped like cones?
- happymellon 2y agoThings that look like a con?
- bityard 2y agoI have lived in the West my whole life, and am reasonably well educated, and have never heard the word conoids in my life.
- mock-possum 2y agoSure, but you can imagine pretty easily what a ‘conoid’ would be, right? ‘Sphereoid’ would be something sphere-like, ‘mongoloid’ is something mongol-like, ‘freakazoid’ is something freaky… it’s pretty clear from context that ‘conoid’ means ‘like a cone’ isn’t it?
- TylerE 2y agoBut is it a geometrical cone, a conifer tree like thing, a psuedo-control device, or what. I consider my self pretty literate (I was assessed as reading at a college level by the 4th grade), and I've never heard that word. More importantly, they can look absolutely nothing like cones. Would you identify this as "cone like" if it wasn't for the URL? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conoid#/media/File:Pluecker-conoid.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conoid#/media/File:Pluecker-co...
- jillyboel 2y agoI live in "the West" but English isn't my main language. I have no idea what a conoid is.
- rovr138 2y ago> A conoid is a ruled surface whose rulings are parallel to a plane (called the directrix plane) and intersect a fixed line (called the axis of the conoid) (Gellert et al. 1989, p. 202). Examples include the circular conoid, helicoid, hyperbolic paraboloid, parabolic conoid, Plücker conoid, right circular conoid, Wallis's conical edge, Whitney umbrella, and Zindler conoid. If the axis is perpendicular to the directrix plane, the conoid is called a right conoid (Gray et al. 2006, p. 436). https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Conoid.html https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Conoid.html so, a surface with stripes - example https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1366651 https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1366651
- happymellon 2y agoThis doesn't look like a surface with stripes at all. > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_umbrella https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_umbrella
- cmrx64 2y agoWhere did you get stripes from in any of that? A surface is ruled when it can be constructed by extruding a line (or segment) along some path… like waving a ruler around.
- radicality 2y agoI think they meant that something striped and rectangular, like a crosswalk, is a 'ruled surface' because the stripes themselves are like the ruler ? So I guess a crosswalk (flat rectangle in 3D space), would be considered a 'ruled surface', but I don't think it meets the other requirement to make it a conoid.
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoI live in the US, English is my only language. I could probably guess what a conoid is, but I don't actually know (until reading these comments).
- wing-_-nuts 2y agoI've just resorted to flipping over to the audio captcha. Yes, solving the first one takes more time, but you pretty much get it right the first time and you're not wasting your life wondering if 2cm of a fire hydrant is enough to label a square as having a fire hydrant.
- crazygringo 2y agoI am Googling "conoid" right now and I still can't even imagine what it's supposed to be. The Google dictionary says it's a zoological term "approximately conical in shape". The Wikipedia panel says "In geometry a conoid is a ruled surface, whose rulings fulfill the additional conditions: All rulings are parallel to a plane, the directrix plane. All rulings intersect a fixed line, the axis." The graphics are... nothing intuitive. The M-W link in the search results says "a cone-shaped structure; especially : a hollow organelle shaped like a truncated cone that occurs at the anterior end of the organism". None of this seeming relevant, I clicked on the Image tab and it's all these complicated Mathematica-style graphs of things that are very much not cones. I see other people in the HN comments similarly have no idea. Can you please explain what you saw on screen? What did the captcha think was a conoid...? Like, traffic cones or something?
- ayewo 2y agoUsing the touch pad to long-press on the text "conoid" in my browser brought up the built-in dictionary definition on macOS: > conoid | ˈkəʊnɔɪd | mainly Zoology adjective (also conoidal | kəʊˈnɔɪd(ə)l | ) approximately conical in shape. > noun a conoid object: her hull was a conoid, tapering towards the bow.
- recursive 2y agoYeah, that's the zoological definition again.
- genewitch 2y agoIn the UK some crosswalks have cones on the bottom of the box where the button to wait to cross is, and OP mentioned crosswalks in the final sentence. Maybe it's just too late for me right now, but that's what my brain assumed, but the "same number of shapes as" thing was not enough context! the cone on the bottom spins when you have the right of way.
- wslh 2y ago> Some captchas are getting pretty discriminatory, not everyone lives in the West and can identify the objects they are asking you to. Honestly, even living in the West, sometimes I feel like they expect me to have an IQ of 200 just to pass! And, I am sure I pass the Turing test without issues.
- sundarurfriend 2y agoAvoiding this is what made hCaptcha popular among a lot of users in the first place. reCaptcha has always been guilty of this, and it doesn't seem like they're taking any steps to improve this US-centred definition of humanity. hCaptcha gave much more general and neutral puzzles that made a lot of people (including me) give a sigh of relief when they encountered a CAPTCHA and it was h and not re.
- RobMurray 2y agorecaptcha audio challenge is just a few words (in English) that you have to enter. Might be easier in some circumstances? You can press CTRL to repeat the audio.
- webspinner 2y agoI like it myself. If I have to use CAPTCHA that is, I can't stand it on principle!
- gopher_space 2y agoI can't be the only person who's been checking as many wrong answers as I can get away with for the last decade, and I'd be complimented by my conoid-questioning brethren. Captcha seems like it's fully entered a "bear proof garbage can" phase I don't see it escaping.