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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Its getting weird when you have to fill that box in with pen and paper

Marci Robin was buying a Fiat 500X from a West Palm Beach, Florida dealership, and was in the final stages of signing all the paperwork, when she was presented with a strange but simple question: was she a robot?

This wasn’t online or anything, she was right there, in person, in front of the sales person, who wanted her to check a box, with a pen, on real paper, confirming that she was not, in fact, a robot. She claims she isn’t.

https://jalopnik.com/dealership-makes-woman-sitting-right-in...

edit: and the original tweet: https://twitter.com/MarciRobin/status/998030243981033472

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I had roughly the same problem. My facebook career lasted for all of thirty seconds before they decided I was a robot and banned my account. I appealed and they asked me to send a photo. I sent them a photo and they said I was still a robot and there was no further appeal. Very helpful. So my choices from that point are to 1) shame them in the media and hope its an entertaining enough story that people like it or 2) do something better with my time then facebook. I chose the latter.

Were you using an unusual user agent or a VPN or something?

Why would they bother checking the user agent when it's the easiest thing to spoof (really, you probably can't even call it spoofing)

I'd bet that the vast majority of botters/phishers which Facebook deals with are amateurs. That said, I meant using unusual user agent software, not really just having an unusual user agent string.

No need for software, one can easy change it on the about:config of Firefox and/or there are some cool add-ons that can rotate/change the user agent of a Firefox on the "desired frequency"

We have a Wordpress site that suddenly saw a surge of hacking attempts. Turns out they all had IE7 user agents. Blocked that, not a problem anymore. Wouldn't surprise me if big sites use simple measures for such simple attack attempts as well.

Twist: he is a robot, and when he sent them a photo, it was a robot photo. Square metal head, lights for eyes, antenna coming out the top. The works.

Maybe he isn't a robot, but his given birth name was zxcvbn4038

or bobby tables

"Little Bobby Tables we call him..."

That is my favourite XKCD comic!

A friend of mine uses a fake last name on Facebook because her real name is Fake, which they refuse to accept as real.

(Her name is actually Faux, which means fake in French.)

That would have been hilarious! Somebody should try it when they I accuse you of being a robot.

I would assume a submitted photo of a robot would go over just as well as when I was once asked to add a picture to the company's internal website of employees by our HR dept. I never add photos of me to anything, so instead, in good humor, downloaded a random anonymous silhouette type avatar. That didn't work for them, and I was told "I need a picture of you". So, I open up photoshop, found a generic picture frame online, and added the word YOU inside the frame. Shortly after this, my supervisor comes in to pay me a visit. Some people just have no sense of humor.

Have someone take a portrait photo of the back of your head.

Or take the photo using a potato. The security at my gym requires a photo id - but you can barely see who's on the picture. It looks to be printed with a dot printer.

In much the same situation, I just said NO. A protracted argument unfolded over the next few days until the matter was settled by me skimming a copy of the Conditions Of Service booklet across the desk and saying, "Show me where it says I have to." Immediate manager was not happy, but it soon blew over.

I don't a real human looks at the photo. It will be CV process that tries to identify the image with whatever word proof was asked to be present.

Hence the high rate of rejections

I got banned from Twitter within 5 Minutes of trying to figure out the user interface, and my best guess as to why it happened is that their anomaly detection is overfit to their existing users. So when a new user starts exploring randomly instead of directly going to look at ads, they're behaving much more like a scraper than what the system has learned to recognize as a normal user.

I think that's very unlikely. There are over 100,000 new accounts created on Twitter every day so we would expect a large and frequent amount of bans if what you are saying were true. Furthermore most Twitter visitors don't have accounts so it would be pretty foolish to base their anomaly detection on a metric that most of their visitors fail.

It's actually well known that you'll get blocked by Twitter within the first 2 minutes of registering, whatever you'll do.

They probably use it as a way to enforce their "soft" requirement of a phone number. After verifying that you have a working phone number, you'll get unblocked.

Also, Twitter routinely renders their tweets unaccessible to non-logged-in users, due to rate limits on their api (which is used by their web frontend).

So, I'm not one bit surprised if anyone would describe Twitter as foolish: that's exactly how they act

So basically if the phone companies lowered the price of buying number lists then a bunch of web2.0 companies' valuations would evaporate?

I had Microsoft do this. They notified me that my account was being suspicious, so I needed to provide a phone number to use it. I had literally just made the account though, zero activity at all. It was just to force me to give a phone number to them for their data harvest

I ran into this with MS as well. However, they explicitly stated that it did not need to be my phone number. So since it was for a work thing, I ask to use my boss' number to get around the lockout. Seemed pretty pointless.

One of my land-line numbers is so spam filled, i ignore it and use it as the default phone number for such antics.

I disconnected the ringer so it doesn't bother me.

Welp, it's a good thing these companies don't have a large amount of control over a lot of people's lives. And luckily their business practices are transparent and we all agree they're fair.

This is fine.

Hey, I have some experience creating intentionally suspicious Twitter accounts.

There is no phone number requirement. They're just as happy with an email address.

If you provide neither of those, then your account functionality is restricted (with a big obvious banner showing at the top of every page), but you still don't get blocked.

Once I needed to create several accounts at once and then have all but one of them follow the last one. Those accounts got blocked, but it's hard to blame Twitter for that.

> There are over 100,000 new accounts created on Twitter every day so we would expect a large and frequent amount of bans if what you are saying were true.

That's in fact true. Every single one of my Twitter account that I've created in the last few years have got banned within a few minutes even before I've had a chance to post anything meaningful with the account.

I wouldn't be surprised if the anomaly detection is overfit to banned users: comes from Kenya, or Russia, or China. Doesn't initially seed the account with in-person connections. Shares an IPv4 address or telephone number with other folks who have been banned before.

You could have done both. I'd love to see an article on that.

> My facebook career

Interesting interview process!

Just throwing this out there. Have you considered that maybe you are a robot?

Reasonable. Just look at its name.

Interesting use of "its" but it is entirely possible that a robot has a preferred set of gender pronouns, and you just mislabeled them. Many of our assumptions support the biopatriarchy.

biopatriarchy? Thats a new one for me today!

Robots find the use of "biodiversity" is discriminating.

Just a keyboard pattern. Not uncommon enough to read anything into it.

The Turing self-test

I know this comment is in jest, but please don't joke on Hacker News as you would on Reddit. Posts like this add little informational content, spawn a thread of joke responses, and take time away from hundreds of people who are here to read high signal commentary.

Sorry to be so profoundly un-fun.

edit: I'm being downvoted, but consider the comment chain this has generated.

The occasional exception is reasonable, if the exception is exceptionally clever.

> I know this comment is in jest, but please don't joke on Hacker News as you would on Reddit. Posts like this add little informational content, spawn a thread of joke responses, and take time away from hundreds of people who are here to read high signal commentary.

Here's a challenge:

Create a bot capable of generating and posting content like the above that's attributed to "zxcvbn4038."

The bot doesn't have to be able to get through spam filters or register itself. It just has to take the current state of a forum thread as (part of its) input and output a) content for a post and b) a position in the tree to insert it.

The human bot-author can then try to insert the content into the thread at the given position. If the post doesn't get detected as spam and can avoid downvotes, the bot wins.

The prize is the sheer joy of contradicting what I'm assuming is an HN mod:

> edit: I'm being downvoted, but consider the comment chain this has generated.

Edit: added rule about avoiding downvotes to retain "high signal commentary."

And it looks like we may already be there:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk...

Yet some more signal for this thread that started with a joke.

I checked the HN guidelines, and I didn't see anything about humor. I did find this, though:

> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

At the risk of getting downvoted too, I'll second this. Reddit is already a great platform to read fun comments on any possible subject, let's try to keep them differentiated.

Humour is fine here so long as it makes the audience think. Which the comment did.

If mainstream systems suggest that a human is acting like a robot, then what is a robot and what is human? That's pretty profound.

It seems that we're nearing the point that anyone who thinks and acts rationally and contrary to consumptive norms is indistinguishable on a coarse scale from a logical machine.

I mean, even Reddit feels less and less like Reddit nowadays...

Well if this isn't just redolent of "The Difference":

https://qntm.org/difference

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film)

I tried to get into that film but why does every AI story seem to end with man trying to fuck his creation? I'm over that trope.

This may sound bizarre, but to fuck is a fundamental desire of organisms that reproduce sexually, and reproduction is one of the prime objectives of living organisms.

I am not sure how fucking a robot has anything to do with reproduction.

Either that, or their lack of common sense suggests that they are.

If everyone keeps telling you you're a robot...

Do you still have all those photos Deckard?

Not an outright ban, but I am unable to use Interactive Brokers client portal (or even signup form) using a regular internet connection. It keeps timing out, logging me out, etc.

Bizarre part is it works fine when I tether via my iPhone.

Also there seems to be growth of websites in NZ that use some sort of Cloudflare-like proxy that very often straight up blocks requests to some simple blogs. Unsure whether it's user agent, ad blocker or my IP is quite dirty, but try to open up www.pointhacks.co.nz and click thru older posts...

I have received a "suspicious activity" warning on Twitter for any new account I've helped open up over the last year.

You can confirm your identity by entering your phone number and receiving a text.

I feel like it's more of a cheap ploy to get additional info after your first 25 tweets than it is any bot detection algorithm.

It's not, it's really not. They really do want to verify you're a person.

Facebook got busted using that (security) info for marketing purposes, and the reaction was muted; but, within the security community, it was loud and angry. Within a week, they had ceased completely.

Don't they still use your phone number you give them for 2FA for advertising? https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...

Do you happen to know a source for that?

Where are you getting that they ceased completely? This is a large company who has a vetted history of absolutely zero ethical accountability. The reasonable thought is that they learned to hide it better, not that they stopped doing it at all.

> I appealed and they asked me to send a photo. I sent them a photo and they said I was still a robot and there was no further appeal.

That's the plot of Blade Runner 2.

I would have sent them a photo of a robot.

I would have disguised as a robot and sent them a picture of me.

Ironically sending a robot picture is the best proof that you're not one, since robots don't have a sense of humour (yet).

Wait; lightbulb moment; someone has to run a NN against a dad joke DB and learn AI to crack some (like the generated face stuff).

Well this is the internets and all, so I suppose it's been done before but no one would admit to owning such a big enough dad joke DB...

> someone has to run a NN against a dad joke DB and learn AI to crack some

A "that's what she said" detector can be implemented as a two class identification problem. This 2011 describes one algorithm that achieves 71% precision: That's What She Said: Double Entendre Identification https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P11-2016

I believe they could have done an even better job with better training (and test) data. It seems to me there's a big problem with how they selected the negative examples: one of the sources is a set of racy text messages, which would be rife with positives. They claim TWSS positives are rare in general, but I doubt that holds for a sexy text messages corpus.

Their overall strategy is pretty interesting though (not deep learning).

Telling them to fuck off (to the photo request) would have been more human. Following orders is very robot like, you know.

Signing up for facebook, after a short period, they'll lock your account due to suspicious activity, even if you have done nothing (maybe that's suspicous?), and demand a phone number or a photo.

If you sign up and provide a phone number, they'll just demand a photo. Twice. Giving them the same photo seems to work though, and leave your account in peace...

They never accused me of being a robot though.

This would've made an awesome SciFi short story.

The twist at the end is that she's lying.

I can't imagine that a car dealership would even care, as long as they got to sell a car.

"Oh dang, you ticked the 'not a robot' box but you are actually a robot ... Ah, no worries, I'll put a call in to head office, get the paperwork changed. Well, enjoy your car! ... And don't forget to come back in six months for your free oil change! ... for the car, I mean."

Are there rules against selling to robots? I mean, a great portion of the stock exchange is just that, essentially, no?

Robots can't own property, as they are not recognized as a person.

You may sell to someone represented by a robot, but you're not selling to the robot.

When using a vending machine, your making a trade with the vending machine company, not the machine itself.

Can a robot be the sole asset, employee, and officer of a corporation?

A robot cannot be an employee or officer of a corporation, you need to be a person for that.

Hm, so selling to a robot without someone behind to represent would be extralegal I guess, and if any problems occur during the trade you'd be on your own?

The closest thing would probably trades with wild animals. Are there any laws on that? (Probably not, but the situation is not unthinkable.)

The salesman is a robot as well.

And the car

... but still not the paper form.

The car is buying itself with the money it earned as a cab.

I wonder if in the far future we'll have two androids pretending to be human and trying to fool each other at the same time, only for them to realize that they are both, in fact, robots

Which is a proper strategy to train robots to be human.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

Isn't that basically 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'?

I really liked the added wrinkle in Blade Runner 2049 where replicants have to periodically prove that they're sufficiently robotic.

More like Second Variety

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety

More like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_(short_story)

Also, "Impostor", still by P.K.Dick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_(short_story)

http://www.elib.pl/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Lem.pdf

Definitely one of my favorite reads from my youth days...

I'm the kind of guy that would be willing to walk away from a sale to test what would happen if I refused to check that box.

Dealership's just getting ready for autonomous vehicles that try to sneak out.

It made for funny headlines but anyone with a little insight into corporate can guess that they simply printed a form from their computer. Likely from their website. A form normally designed to be used online was sent over paper mail and happened to include online elements like captcha.

If anything you should exclude such html elements from the print page with css.

Well yes obviously they had printed out an online form. But they made her fill it in. Thats the funny bit. And yes its clearly to do with employees not quite knowing what to do with the paper version and so just shrugging and say yep you'd better fill it in anyway. Thats all pretty obvious. Its still interesting though, as a little slice of corporate anthropology.

Sounds like they're filling out an online form acting as the buyer, which might be in uncharted territory legally, and they want to dot every i.

this reminds me of a cargo cult or something. People following strange rituals they observed others perform for no reason

Interesting. Not sure if it's a gag or for some sort of handwriting/stroke analysis. Or it could be a variation on the M&M contract clause (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/) to try to verify that they actually read the contract.

I had to do this at CarMax on a recent purchase, it felt as silly as you think it is.

>>"...she was right there, in person, in front of the sales person, who wanted her to check a box, with a pen, on real paper, confirming that she was not, in fact, a robot. She claims she isn’t.

All robots claim not to be one, so we must be really careful.

probably printed app from website and the dealer took it literally

A better question might be "This sentence is false. True or false?"

No.

I'm left wondering, what if they said you were lying when you ticked the box? What would it mean for the transaction?

> She claims she isn’t.

I wonder if the subtlety of that joke will be lost on future generations one day.

I think the entire story will be lost on some future generation, unless you add to the end: "but perfectly human-like robots didn't even exist back then!"

May be They are preparing for the future.

We should start protesting to make sure robots can buy cars.

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