But in the part of Europe I am from, if I did not go to the daycare in a larger city, I would not have seen any crosswalks or traffic lights. I could have easily recognized a harvester or a railroad crossing though.
Even the things I have seen (traffic lights, buses, 'fire hydrants') don't always ('fire hydrants' never) look the same as their American counterparts.
It's just a totally ill-conceived system for any global website.
At least in the UK, zebra crossings are a tiny subset of pedestrian crossings. (And you can cross the road wherever you please.)
I suppose they just don't need to be, because not using one isn't 'jaywalking'. If there's too much traffic you identify a safe crossing by zebra stripes (or flashing beacon) or traffic lights or island.
When reCaptcha first asked me to identify the 'crosswalks', sure, I guessed it must be the road markings. But I just (still, to this day) select all the road markings that aren't obviously just centre direction seperating lines. I might get loads wrong, no idea.
That isn't what captchas are used for. There are two side to every captcha, what the website is using them for and what the captcha creator or provider is using them for. In google's case, captchas are being used to hone AI. So it is no wonder that items like hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights dominate. Those are the objects that any AI-controlled vehicle will have to recognize. Given that the first market for AI-driven vehicles seems to be western nations, specifically the US, it is no surprise that google gears its captcha program to objects from that area.
If google were developing robots to pick fruit captchas would ask us to identify bananas and oranges. I worry about the day that captchas start asking me to differentiate people from other objects. I don't want to help train an AI to tell people from trees, soldiers from bushes.
That is one way of running an captcha: set a task that is not possible for a human. Anyone who answers correctly must be a bot.
"How many flowers in this field?" "Solve for X: 3567/134 = X" Anyone getting those correct in a reasonable time is probably not a human and so has failed the captcha.
It would be different if the captcha would look at the incorrectness. I.e. the bot would now have to make the same mistakes that humans would make, which might be a workable path for captchas, however its unclear what benefit this would bring compared to answering correctly.
Would take me, a human, about 3 seconds to
1) highlight 3567/134
2) Press Alt-Escape
3) type "bc<enter>"
4) middleclick
5) Doubleclick answer
6) Middle click in answer box
26.61940298507462686567
The point of the GP was, it's training these AIs on specifically _American_ hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights, which sucks not only for those of us unpaid mechanical Turks who aren't Yanks, but also makes you wonder if nobody cares that these coming AI-controlled vehicles won't be so great at discriminating NON-American hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights from _non-American pedestrians._
And no, America does not equal “the West”; most of your street furniture looks slightly“ off” compared to, say, that of most European countries. Anyway, the part of the “West” that will probably be at the forefront of this wave will probably, as usual, be the most hyper-advanced: Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan...
This is a roundabout way of just saying the most obvious explanation (sites with US-centric captchas are presumably mostly interested in US users anyway) but wrapped up in an unnecessary conspiracy layer to add creepiness.
Maybe after a while the big companies will notice and adapt, which might already be too late by then, or maybe they just buy the smaller ones directly, who knows.
Captchas will be localised long before that.
For example, in certain developing countries "social media" is included for free with your phone plan, often there is no net neutrality and competition between carriers has forced all of them to offer this. As a result, local businesses are forced to have Facebook and Instagram pages, because their audience cannot visit a regular website on most days. Which ensures most people need the "real" internet less and less, and are less likely to pay for it, locking them into Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp for a lot of their communication.
Hold up, what does this mean, even? I thought "net neutrality" meant classifying ISPs in such a way that they are regulated by the FCC instead of the FTC. Obviously this is an American framing. How does that map to other countries?
Also, I was assured by users on this website and many others that if the ISPs were moved to be regulated by the FTC by evil Ajit Pai the internet as we know it would end. Those actions were taken by the administration three years ago, the media fell silent, and the internet is largely unchanged.
So what do you mean, in an international context, by net neutrality?
In an international, developing country context, outside of some places like India with Jio's cheap plans, it is incredibly frequent that you are paying per MB or similar at rates that would be unaffordable otherwise. Facebook funds these things so that your usage of Facebook's apps, Whatsapp, Instagram do not count against quota and are free to use. Thus local competitors get no visits and don't run their own sites because users do not want to pay a day's wages to browse your menu when they could browse your menu for free on their FB page.
It has pros and cons, one thing being that they don't have to pay for data and they get access to some portions of the internet, which is good? But it also makes it completely impossible for a local player funded locally without the billions acquired elsewhere to start, because people quite literally cannot afford to use your service unless you can afford to pay for all of them to; you can't compete. And since it's their only choice, now they monopolize and capture an entire country's worth of communications from start to finish. You'll see whatsapp numbers in many countries in place of a phone number or website.
Our challenges have average solve accuracy within 1% when comparing users in major African countries vs US users in our user testing. Nigeria does slightly better than the US, in fact.
In my experience, reCAPTCHA doesn't know what a street is, and thinks any object with vertical stripes on it is a crosswalk.
It also thinks wheelchairs are bicycles, and some dogs are human beings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_crossing#Distinctio...
The markings also cause confusion. To the non-American mind, does "crosswalk" refer to the crossing with the two parallel lines or the one with the stripes? Whereas with "zebra crossing", there's no ambiguity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_crossing#/media/Fil...
https://www.123rf.com/photo_120278916_stock-vector-yerba-mat...
What counts as a truck? Is a fire engine a truck, is a 4x4 (like a Landrover), a HGV (ie lorry), a box van?
What counts as a bus? Is a coach a bus, a minibus?
What counts as a bicycle? Is a pedal-and-pop (a pedal cycle with an engine)? The image shows part of a headset that might be on a bike, is that enough to call it a bike, might be a lightweight motorbike?
Is a hovercraft a boat? Is a helicopter an aeroplane (according to the people setting the question)? Do pedestrian facing lights count as traffic lights?
Then every now and again they add in an image that is, I assume, purposefully obscured (uniform noise) as if painted by an impressionist and titled "boring city with smog as viewed by someone with cataracts, there might be half a bicycle wheel in somewhere".
I have to redo captchas all the time so don’t feel bad!
I use Brave with Tor quite often, every other site is behind a captcha.
So I selected much more than what Google expected me to select, I selected all the cables and poles as well.
I'm pretty glad that hCaptcha at least gives me an example of what it's looking for
...
Do any of the tiles count? If so, do the tiles that barely have just the edge of a "tire" count? Who knows?
Then again, if they wanted a zebra crossing they wouldn't ask for a crosswalk, but here we are...
(And fail and then have to go through 5 more screens of this.)
As an aside, how do you like American security questions? "What was the make and model of the car in which you had your first kiss?"