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MapTCHA, the open-source CAPTCHA that improves OpenStreetMap [video]

• deleted 2y ago
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• thepuppet33r 2y ago
  This is amazing. Much prefer this to helping train autonomous vehicles.
  • poisonborz 2y ago
    You mean killer drones https://www.vegard.net/google-helps-pentagon-train-killer-drones/ https://www.vegard.net/google-helps-pentagon-train-killer-dr...
    • progval 2y ago
      There is no evidence in the article that it does. "Google is providing Pentagon with access to TensorFlow" means nothing because TensorFlow is open source.
    • mcv 2y ago
      Great, now I can see a "select all images that contain a <specified ethnic group>" reCaptcha.
• barbazoo 2y ago
  I’m not sure how effective captchas really are at filtering out bots. But if they do work, I’d much rather have my efforts contribute to a public good like OSM rather than feeding data to Google, which seems to be the default these days. If anyone from OSM is listening, it would be great to have a way to flag malicious uses of captchas, like in phishing attempts. The existing captcha platforms make this very hard.
  • raybb 2y ago
    I'm not from OSM but could you say more about malicious uses of captchas or how it's related to phishing?
    • bradleyjkemp 2y ago
      It's really common now for phishing kits to use interstitial pages that require solving a captcha before the actual phishing content is shown Victims just click through the captcha without thinking, but it makes automatic verdicting by security scanners a pain because they just see a captcha page: can't tell the brand being impersonated, or even if it's a phishing site I wrote a post about a number of these which actually pretend to be Cloudflare! https://phish.report/blog/fake-cloudflare-interstitials https://phish.report/blog/fake-cloudflare-interstitials
      • barbazoo 2y ago
        Interesting! What I was thinking of was use of legitimate captcha integrations (reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha) in front of fake banking websites. Drives me crazy that there isn't an easy avenue to report those.
        • bradleyjkemp 2y ago
          Oh some of them definitely use a real reCAPTCHA, hCAPTCHA, or Turnstile widget. It actually useful sometimes to track the same API key being used across multiple different domains But yeah, I wouldn't even know where to report those API keys for abuse
• fragebogen 2y ago
  Fun and potentially useful project, love it! When I tried it though, it was quite often hard to see whether the bounding box is "really" correct, as it hides what's underneath. Maybe some slight opaqueness could help. Also, my first image had no bounding box at all. Being met by "Swipe right if the red shape is correctly outlining a building. If not swipe left", it felt like the wording or the UX could be improved by filtering for images that are guaranteed to have such a box.
  • glaucon 2y ago
    Positive about the general idea, I hope it works out. > Also, my first image had no bounding box at all. Me too. > "Swipe right if the red shape is correctly outlining a building. If not swipe left" Rather confusing on a laptop which was showing "Correct" and "Incorrect" buttons.
  • efilife 2y ago
    FYI opaque means not transparent, so you probably meant slight transparency. Or I'm missing something
  • mcv 2y ago
    Yeah, it's not always easy to see whether it's a building, and whether the outline is correct. Also: should I say it's correct when it's only roughly correct, or should it be perfect? I think you'll get a lot of noise from this. But according to the presentation, they analyze that noise and manage to use it to improve the data.
• szundi 2y ago
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• Eduard 2y ago
  playing with the demo at https://maptcha.crown-shy.com/ https://maptcha.crown-shy.com/ , I had problems recognizing the outlines, as they often were colored similar to their structure (low contrast). Some examples I couldn't find any outline at all. Also, seeing a rectangular outlined thing from above, it's often impossible to tell if it qualifies as a building.
  • gregoriol 2y ago
    Same feeling here about the demo: sometimes there is not red shape, so should I click correct or incorrect? sometimes the red shape covers two different styles of roof (I don't know if it is one or two buildings), is this correct or incorrect? sometimes the shape covers a very small thing, could be a phone box or kiosk, it's not clear compared to other buildings around, is this correct or incorrect? I really hope such a project can thrive and be useful though, will check it again after some time!
    • morder 2y ago
      i really need the ability to zoom in or have it larger. the default size for me (even with my browser default at 130%) is way too small for me to make anything out.
  • sudahtigabulan 2y ago
    I think it would help if they used dashed line. Or another pattern that is unlikely to occur naturally. Also, they use red for the outlines... (Red-green color blindness is the most common form.)
• Kralxxx_666 2y ago
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• smashah 2y ago
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• glaucon 2y ago
  As I said elsewhere I applaud the idea, a couple of comments. 1. On Firefox on Ubuntu the text is _far_ too faint, to the extent the initial text is essentially unreadable. 2. I was getting brown coloured areas surrounded by a slightly different brown colour. The outlined area could have been a roof or just some slight change in l and colour. I understand this is why help is needed to classify them but it felt wrong clicking either "Correct" or "Incorrect" ... maybe with enough input it doesn't matter ? Not sure.
• neilv 2y ago
  Comments in case the demo developer sees this: * The swiping in the demo was a rough for me, on a laptop with Firefox. One of the tricks was to be sure to release the mouse button before the pointer hits the edge of white rectangle fake screen. Swiping off the edge without a button-up event doesn't seem to be handled. * At the end of a swipe that registers, after you mouse-up, there's a noticeable lag of sometimes up to approx. one second, during which the card is frozen in place, before it finishes sliding off. * The rotation effect on the card as it's being swiped wasn't intuitive, IMHO. It doesn't follow the vertical movement in the swipe, and there's no obvious physical metaphor for why it's doing that. Perhaps especially with the other roughness going on, the rotation confuses things a little bit more; but maybe, if the other behavior was perfect, the rotation would be fine.
• Mayzie 2y ago
  I had a go, but there were a few I wasn't really sure by. To the creator, can you add a "Not sure" option?
  • mcv 2y ago
    I think they recognize the "not sure" by various users giving different answers.
• xvilka 2y ago
  Another project that would certainly benefit from crowdsourcing is the OpenMetroMaps[1]. Lack of the good universal public transportation website and mobile app is disheartening. I know there's is Transportr[2][3] but it's coverage is still pretty limited. [1] https://github.com/OpenMetroMaps https://github.com/OpenMetroMaps [2] https://transportr.app/ https://transportr.app/ [3] https://github.com/grote/Transportr https://github.com/grote/Transportr
  • jazzyjackson 2y ago
    I was very pleased to find Open Railway Maps includes the passenger network of Morocco, which Google and Apple lack. [0] https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
    • pietervdvn 2y ago
      OpenRailwayMap is OpenStreetMap-data, it just highlights the railway data and hides the other data.
• teruakohatu 2y ago
  I applaud the effort but in the demo I am unsure how this could be used as a CAPTCHA. The examples I saw could be trivially solved with a bot running a simple CNN image classifier model. The training data is available, existing OSM building outlines and satellite data scraped from Google, and training a image classifier would be very straightforward. I am sure a bot would have a much higher success rate than a person.
  • phoronixrly 2y ago
    It can also be solved by a captcha-solving farm, as can recaptcha, what is your point?
    • alex_duf 2y ago
      Also if a captcha solving farm ends up working on a project that is benefiting the world, it's still a net improvement over clicking a box that says "I'm not a robot", and an improvement over exclusively helping google with its OCR and image recognition.
      • remram 2y ago
        The question you have to ask is how inaccurate the data can be while passing the CAPTCHA challenge. The people trying to pass it at scale using bots or farms don't care to pass it correctly.
        • alex_duf 2y ago
          I agree, but since you don't know which part of the data is for validation and which one is for training, and since you can assume such a system will only accept data that makes consensus, you tend to only accept data that is valid. That's the beauty of it.
  • berkes 2y ago
    You sound like you know it to be trivial to build this. If you can build it, (which I doubt) please contribute to OSM by getting involved with e.g. HOT OSM. https://www.hotosm.org/get-involved https://www.hotosm.org/get-involved And I doubt it is that easy, because smart people, at a.o. HOT OSM, have been building exactly this: tools to automatically categorize, detect, rate etc, mapping data from satellite imagery. Not to bypass a CAPTCHA, but to make editing and improving OSM data easier. They then concluded that some problems there are hard to solve with AI, and e.g. need better and more training data. If it's hard to solve with AI, then building that CAPTCHA bypass bot is probably just as hard if not harder.
• phoronixrly 2y ago
  Does it guard against blind people?
• chgs 2y ago
  I did 3 tests, two didn’t have a red shape
• LDWNS 2y ago
  This is so cool! Was so sad to mis this on FOSDEM!
• is_true 2y ago
  I tried it on a desktop PC and on some images the bounding box is so small that you cannot see clearly if it's ok
• memsom 2y ago
  My issue isn't that it does or does not highlight an area, it is that sometimes it highlights an area that is not a building and the instructions are a bit vague as to is this is "correct" or not. One example - I see it highlighting someone's back yard with a swimming pool. It is not a building. Is this correct or not? I mean,it has identified the shape perfectly, but it is not a building. I feel like lazy people clicking through CAPTCHA is not the place to make important decisions on OpenStreetMap map level features without a lot of filtering of the results.
• talkingtab 2y ago
  A sideways look. The predominant business model for the internet is tracking users (for what is often called "advertising"). This is caused by the value of internet transactions being so very tiny, and there is no other way to charge that amount. But here is another business model. The "fee" is proof of work, as in the helping make the product better. Cool.
• karel-3d 2y ago
  Can the demo write "successful" or "unsuccessful"? :) It's hard to know how well it works otherwise
  • johnisgood 2y ago
    > I have identified features (like buildings) from satellite imagery before Exactly, how would I know this? I actually have no idea as there is no feedback at all.
• thecuntdaniel 2y ago
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• johnisgood 2y ago
  As others have noted, this is very easy to solve using a bot, it is easier for a bot than a human.
• antman 2y ago
  Half the time it shows me a picture with no frame and asks me what it is, or it shows a frame and I cannot understand what it is. So an "I don't know " option should be added to use this in production.
• deknos 2y ago
  please make an AGPL3+ paid service out of this, so companies can use this instead of google xD