CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American | Hacker News Reader

CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American

shkspr.mobi

41 pointsrobin_reala20 comments

The bigger problem, mentioned in the comments, is that these seem to require you to prove you're not a robot, by failing to follow instructions in a similar way to most other humans.

Do those tiny street signs or vehicles in the background count? It seems most people don't include them, so you have to do the same if you want to get through.

what if robots... ehem humans... revolted, and everyone clicked always the same e.g. top right image and then „verify”?

Then they would start jumbling the images out of order.

It means that nobody would be able to view cloudflare sites over Tor. At this point, half the internet is held hostage to Tor users.

The first example with dime, nickel, etc makes sense, but the one with the cab not really. Not all taxis in the US are yellow. To my knowledge this is mostly a NYC thing.

Well to be technically correct, Google’s capchas are checking if one is able to train their self-driving algorithms the same way as majority of remaining humans forced to do the same:)

As far as the Silicon Valley is concerned, those are equivalent.

Hurray for American Culture Export!

I find the recent (actually not that recent) trend in SV to enforce culture by ignorance rather worrying, other countries exist too and things are different there!

And it all started with Google and their "why are manhole cover rounds?".

Tip: They are only round in north America.

They are round in many other countries too.

I heard (perhaps apocryphally) that was an interview question from Microsoft before Google existed.

Re manholes: they come in all shapes and sizes (where "all shapes" means "predominantly circular or rectangular"); round manholes are definitely not unique to America. This is mostly an artifact of the construction methods - for prefab cut+cover, rectangular is an easier shape to use; where actual digging is necessary, a round shaft provides a generally acceptable profile.

Nope. This trend has started with "dates are MM/DD/YY, and anything unfit for ASCII is not a real character." Of course, at the time, this was an acceptable compromise wrt computing power.

When a CAPTCHA is too tricky, just ask for another one with the "repeat" symbol (bottom left on this example)

To be honest, at this point CAPTCHAs don’t have benefits. If they’re the traditional sort then computers are better than people at them now, if they’re the select-from-a-grid type then you’re forced to help train Google’s AI, and either way they’re a massive accessibility hindrance (we blocked their use on GOV.UK[1]). Better to just care about your users and put a little bit of effort into spam classification.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-captchas

Are there alternatives you would recommend that can be easily implemented on a front-end level instead of the back-end/network level? I don't disagree with their recommendations- just curious.

If it’s front-end only, what purpose does it solve?

No. I’d recommend actively dealing with potential problems yourself over putting your problems onto your users and their progress to their goal.

Try doing that a few times then you get even worse ones.

yeah, reCAPTCHA is not CAPTCHA mate. reCAPTCHA isn't even allowed in CN. If you're looking for an international captcha service, peep funcaptcha

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