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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

First, I’m going to teach you to fish. Go to hCaptcha’s website, then scroll to the footer. Click around on the about links. It’ll reveal their business model. This trick also works for other businesses and NGOs.

Now, if we look at https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling we can tell they make money by labeling data sets for a fee. So as a guess, there’s someone out there that needs to improve computer vision detection of transportation vehicles. My guess is it’s a self driving car company, but who knows.

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Many a time I receive multiple challenges on a site despite having selected all images perfectly, and can't help but wonder, "Hey, are they getting me to do more work than necessary because they're running behind on their labelling backlog?". There's definitely a conflict of incentives in this case. If you're a website owner, you're better off choosing a different service which doesn't have adverse incentives, otherwise it can affect your site experience. And please don't put captcha on GET requests. Use a CDN if you're unable to handle bot load. And don't even get me started on CDNs that throw captcha.

I've found it isn't about "perfection". It is about selecting the same tiles as an "average" person would. I might stare hard at an image, think that one of the tiles contains a tiny fragment of a traffic light, and select it. That isn't what most other people have already done, so the captcha thinks I'm a bot and gives me tougher and tougher challenges. Ever since I stopped pixel-peeping and started quickly selecting the tiles that obviously had a bus in them, the percentage of time that I've gotten by first try has gone way up.

I wonder if this means self-driving vehicles' detection of important traffic features will be at the level of an irritated and disinterested web user who is trying to just do the minimum work to please an algorithm.

But it will be cheap! - The sound of 1000 business C-levels as your head gets removed by going under a truck.

They probably have some statistics in the background which tells them some form of Trustlevel.

You also need to assume that there are potentially control pictures in it as well.

I think this is a very liable approach.

I think you meant "viable", not "liable". Given the discussion, your typo is ironically amusing, though.

Yeah, it's not like they will label something a train just because a single person says so. But if you have 10k responses with 95% confidence saying it's a train, it's very likely to be the case.

But GP is describing exactly the opposite: there might be a train that's not immediately visible at a glance, leading most people to not label it.

For unambiguous images almost all humans will label them the same way. For ambiguous ones humans will differ. Presumably they'll accumulate stats on each image and will be able to detect cases like this.

unless a properly obfusicated bot net has seeded the data set with -everything is a train- responses to the tune of >>10k responses with 95% confidence saying it's a train<<

That's about as much attention the average driver pays anyways. I drive a motorcycle, I KNOW that.

I was always tempted to knock on people's driver-side windows when I saw them looking at their phone. Never did - figured they'd probably startle, with a non-zero chance they'd accidentally fling the car into me.

I yell at them. Loudly! Loud enough that people a block away turn to look.

But then, when you're staring at your phone while driving your car out of a parking lot and across the sidewalk where you only miss hitting me (before driving into oncoming traffic!) because I stopped, well you deserve that minor inconvenience of being embarrassed.

That's an interesting idea - maybe it would be smart to have captcha's do a "Point out all the motorcycles" or "Click all the pedestrians" setup.

I love a rant on this one...

Sometimes the bus/boat/truck has motorbikes sometimes bicycles. Is that a petrol-powered bicycle, or a motorbike to the [USAmerican?] person who wrote the rules!? Are all large yellow vehicles buses in USA or do you have minibuses, oh wait, are minibuses buses.

I've worked out fire engines are trucks for captchas, not sure about Transit-type vehicles, lorries are trucks apparently but goods trucks on railways are not trucks!

Is a traffic light only the lens/led array or the black light-holder too? Do pedestrian lights count as traffic lights? Are those weird lights hanging in the middle of junctions 'traffic lights'.

Wish they'd just tell you what counts.

I have noticed that times I realise after clicking that I missed a square they tend to go through whilst many times I get repeated captchas when I know I got it right. Success, as a user, seems impossible to predict.

> lorries are trucks apparently but goods trucks on railways are not trucks!

In the US, lorry == truck. Never heard the term goods truck before today, but I think it's what we call a boxcar.

A "truck" on a railway car is apparently a "bogie" in the UK.

A bogie in India seems to be a railway car in the US.

Then there are intermodal containers, smaller than boxcars, I think they are hauled by truck (lorry) after being unloaded from a flatcar.

> flatcar

AKA "flatbed" or "flatbed trailer" :-)

Pretty much a regular driver then!

Heck, better than a regular driver. At least what we're looking at is outside!

I'd rather that than a computer hemming and hawing over whether a single pixel is an oncoming truck and not turning just in case.

a computer "hemming and hawing" as that one accident where it couldn't decide if it was a bicycle or a person has nothing to do with the training. It's what the developers decided to do with input that had a low confidence score. There will ALWAYS be low-confidence ratings on real world data regardless of how good your training is.

Instead of saying "oh crap there's SOMETHING there we should stop" they said "huh, no let's loop on testing it until we figure it out or run it over....whichever comes first."

Also if the car wants to stop too much because of low confidence, just turn the brakes off.

Even if you're right, I doubt it's going to be much worse than the level of the average irritated driver.

I kinda go the other way -- could a FFT heuristic mistake this feature for a crosswalk? Then I'll select it, whether or not it's actually crosswalk. Most of the time, this works. It's a stick in the eye of our prenatal robot overlord.

Replying to an_ko's sibling comment:just like the data behind youtube music recommendations, populated by data carefully analysed from legions of bored toddler clicks vs. Spotify's obsessive teenager music curation

Same experience. Once I observed that most (about 9/10) times there are only 3 tiles to select, I stopped looking for a 4th and selected only the 3 most obvious.

I've noticed similar. Often with stop lights, where a tiny sliver of one does not neatly fit in the frame, spilling over ever so slightly to the next square which has no stop light otherwise. There's a none too subtle irony in that one is being punished for accuracy when the context is ultimately public safety.

This. Captcha wants me to choose crosswalks and you can see there’s that sliver of a crosswalk in a few pixels off in another tile. You’re not wrong! But you’re not right. Regression to the mean.

A hexagon would be better as a frame instead of a square.

So take the image, shift it by a fraction of a tile, and rerun.

Google is _the worst_ for that. At least hCaptcha is a bit less culturally specific.

Every time Google blocks me for refusing to label a motorbike as a "bicycle" I get utterly pissed off. And likewise with the traffic lights on the californian skies. Are the traffic lights the actual lights themselves, or the boom holding them up?

I'm not a human very often, according to Google. hCaptcha tends to let me in...

That same case happened to me! Another example is Parking Meters, they don't exist in my country and I'd never seen them before.

I recently failed a google-bicycle captcha.. "you can't fool me, that's a motorcycle not a bicycle!" I thought.. and then had to complete 2 more challenges. Including a cross walk one where one of the images was just asphalt and painted lines (no context/edges so it could be a parking lot, and airstrip,a highway, an intersection, or a cross-walk).

They also claim that Tigers are not "Cats".

"Please select all the Cats" then shows picture of a tiger among the common House Cats.

> Google is _the worst_ for that. At least hCaptcha is a bit less culturally specific.

One example I keep ranting about: I think countries outside the US have different terms for "crosswalks".

I personally know them as "zebra crossings", and it took a while for the reCaptcha request to click in my mind.

Pedestrian crossings here. I'd also not heard the term "crosswalk" until reCaptcha. Yet another bullshit Americanisation infecting the worlds culture.

I'm not a human very often, according to Google

If Google says you're a robot, it must be true! You should behave accordingly.

There's actually a comic strip in the newspaper going through this storyline right now. Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! was told by a CAPTCHA that he's a robot, so he's going through life that way. The other robots do not seem to be happy to have him as part of their culture.

http://www.brewsterrockit.com

I disagree, Google captchas in my experience are much quicker compared to hcaptcha

When cloudflare switched to hcaptcha I definitely noticed it.

Sorry, but Google captcha is specifically designed to annoy real people in some cases. They literally implemented slow fade-in / fade-out for images. This does absolutely nothing against actual bots, but annoying as hell for a real person.

Literally any other captcha is better than this.

I thought the fade thing was specifically to trip up bots. Like bots know what the picture is long before it is shown to the user, so if the bot clicks on it then the CAPCHA knows something is up.

Which is solved exactly after this is encountered the first time, eg

if opacity -ne 100% do_not_click_yet = true

So this is totally useless to prevent bots from solving it.

Surely then they look at timing, people will click anywhere from, let's say 50% opacity, but bots always wait?

Easy for a bot to fake that with a random number generator. If nothing else bot authors can collect their own statistics. I understand the bots have an army of people in the background for images they don't understand yet, just collect timing data from that set and have your random number generator emulate that timing data. (I'm guessing a bell curve)

Actually having army of people it's exactly how complex recaptha's are bypassed. It's less than $1 for 1000 captcha:

https://anti-captcha.com/

There of course options with image recognition, but they're less reliable.

Honestly, that service looks like something I'm almost tempted to pay for myself. $1 per 1000 recaptchas is a lot cheaper than how I value my time, at the very least. It's not like google couldn't pay people to do these ML training datasets; I resent giving them free labour.

Unfortunately I doubt that "recaptcha solver" can be built as browser extension. Most of advanced bots for parsing automation built on proprietary platforms like ZennoPoster and they basically heavily modify Firefox / Chromium.

Also latency of human-recognition service is quite high so while you wouldn't need to solve it you'll need to wait for number of seconds anyway.

I wonder if we could get Firefox to automatically solve them. That is in the main version so nobody has to see those stupid things again.

Few years ago back when I created such bots I had similar idea .

For certain this can't be mainlined. And if we talk about extensions then at least in past extension code didnt have enough capacities to automatically bypass recaptchas.

This would require fake mouse pointer control and it's obviously not one of features that extension api expose.

Do you seriously think that people who programm the bots incapable of taking it into account?

Bypass for this fading was obviously implementrd next day this first appear on reCaptcha.

Isn't it more for rate limiting?

You dont need fade-in / fade-out effects for rate limiting. Bots are obviously get to see images instantly once they're returned by the server as they dont need to wait for fade-in to complete. Because bots API is injected into browser internals instead.

If rate limiting is needed there is always CloudFlare way where you're literally show user "wait" and refresh page a bit later. This is annoying, but nowhere as much as reCaptcha fading is.

people tend to have very different experiences with google captchas based on how normal they are. if you block everything and try to anonymize your browsing as much as possible and otherwise do everything you can to look like a bot, you're going to get a very difficult captcha to somebody with all their browser settings on default.

Yup. This reminds me of the ‘introduction’ of an old hacker simulation game from 2004 that was quite prescient.

“ In the year 2012, the corporations of the world paved over the Internet, designing their own network system. Keeping the same name, they developed a system where every piece of information was audited and paid for before it was passed on to the world at large. Those who still followed the ideology of an open and uncontrolled Internet gathered what resources they could and formed the SwitchNet. Build mostly out of discarded technologies and backdoors in the current Internet, it allowed some manner of uncontrolled communication around the world. The "Hacker Outpost" is in need of new recruits to perform missions in information gathering against the corporations, which will allow them to increase the presence of the SwitchNet in the world.”

And the slightly different press release one: “ In 2012, a new Internet was introduced--one that prohibited users from posting anything on personal home pages, prohibited them from using software of their choice, and from having an e-mail address. Having no place to stay, hackers created the SwitchNet, an underground network operating on the old wires and infrastructure of the original Internet”

Yeah I do my routine browsing in private mode, no 3rd party cookies, no history, and an ad blocker. I get captchas everwhere.

Googles own captchas are Satan. Squiggly lines all over the place. Why they don't use the normally accepted captcha is beyond me

> I'm not a human very often, according to Google.

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." (Well, except Google, it seems.)

I've noticed that some sites deliberately do this or have lousy code that fails to properly acknowledge captcha completions.

Take archive.is/archive.fo/archive.today, for example. If you're using Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) or iCloud Private Relay, and you visit https://archive.is/, you'll get what looks like a Cloudflare screening page. It's not, though: that page is part of archive.is and is served to Cloudflare DNS users (which includes iCloud Private Relay users)--the use of reCAPTCHA in place of hCaptcha is a giveaway. You can complete the captcha as many times as you like, but you'll never get in.

And how many times have we completed a captcha on a form only to have it throw another captcha in our face without so much as an error message? Sometimes it's just lousy code.

I remember reading the CF founders about how archive.is didn't want cloudflare dns users to resolve to archive, so they respect that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495204

There's also a mode where it thinks you are a bot/sucker and gives you unlimited images until you give up. That's always fun.

>where it thinks you are a bot/sucker and gives you unlimited images until you give up.

I frequently get these from Cloudflare when using Tor Browser. Google is basically unusable with Tor Browser.

If anyone wants to see that, try launching the browser via Selenium. I used to do that to partially automate some activities, such as download bank statements. I'd have my Selenium using script open a browser and go to the bank, then wait for me to login and get to the account page.

I'd login, dismiss any popup or interstitial promotions the bank decided to give me, get to the account page, and tell my script to continue.

My script would then use Selenium to click the download button, click the "custom date range" radio button on download popup, fill in the range fields to cover the last 60 days, pick OFX for the download format, and start the download, prompting me to let it know when the download is finished.

When the download finished, I could then go to one of my other accounts at that bank, tell the script I'm there, and that one gets downloaded, and so on.

My bank isn't giving CAPTCHAs so that would still work if I were to get around to updating my script to deal with some redesigns they did of their pages which broke finding the relevant elements on the page.

But I've found that if I do visit a site that uses hCaptcha while using the Selenium launched browser, it seems to get stuck. Click to tell it I'm not a bot. Then get an image test. Answer that correctly and get another image test. Answer that correctly. Then it goes back to the click if you are not a bot thing, and repeats--two more image tests and back to the beginning.

Here's a program if anyone wants to try this and has the Selenium Webdriver package for Python3 installed. This will open a browser and take you to fanfiction.net. Trying to actually read any story will bring up the CAPTCHA.

  #!/usr/bin/env python3
  from selenium.webdriver import Chrome

  driver = Chrome()
  driver.get("https://www.fanfiction.net")
  input("press enter when done")
  driver.close()
  driver.quit()

I'm not sure if the looping is a Cloudflare thing or a fanfiction.net thing, because the latter is the only site I use that has Cloudflare's CAPTCHA.

It used to be that if you added

  from selenium.webdriver import ChromeOptions

and changed opening the driver to

    options = ChromeOptions()
    options.add_experimental_option("excludeSwitches", ["enable-automation"])
    options.add_experimental_option('useAutomationExtension', False)
    options.add_argument("--disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled")
    driver = Chrome(options=options)

you could get past the CAPTCHA, but that stopped working a while ago.

There's this project to provide a Selenium Chrome driver that is supposed to not trigger anti-bot detectors [1], but it still hit the CAPTCHA loop when I tried it.

[1] https://github.com/ultrafunkamsterdam/undetected-chromedrive...

fanfiction.net has also simply broken the Calibre FanFicFare integration thanks to their CloudFlare shenanigans.

The workaround is to simply visit all chapters separately and then point Calibre at the Google Chrome cache folder.

So nice going there, fanfiction.net. Instead of offering a 1-click .epub download like AO3 (which is completely CDN-able with a very long TTL), you now had to serve 50 individual requests. Great engineering work there.

(Obviously they do this to serve ads on every request)

I would really like to see a fan fiction site that combined AO3's ease of downloading with Fanfiction.net's organization.

AO3 is OSS and vastly understaffed. Having worked on some of their tickets, IMO they could use 20 contributors working part-time for a year or two to stabilize it until the idea of useful new features becomes viable.

I strongly encourage anyone with Rails experience to contribute [0]. There is a giant test suite which definitely helps with stability. The ticket time-to-resolve is simply quite slow due to the above-mentioned understaffing, so don't be discouraged!

[0] https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive/

Yeah there’s lots of detect and anti detect stuff going back and forth. It’s pretty silly and frustrating for situations like yours. Doing things for yourself to speed up mundane life things.

There’s so many anti-detect libraries on GitHub these days. Wonder how many work well.

I believe this is done to get answers for unsolved captchas. For example, I have a million photos of streets filled with cars, buses, motorcycles, streetlights, and crosswalks I want to add to my captcha database. I don't want to categorize them all myself, and I want the answers to be what the average person will identify, not what I or a machine will identify.

So, I send everyone two captchas. One has a known answer and is required to be correct to access the service. The second captcha answer isn't yet known, so it doesn't matter what the user selects. However, when they get the known answer right, we log their answer for the unknown captcha. Once we get a large enough sample, we then have our top answers for the unknown captcha and can start using it for verification.

I always assumed that's how it works so would do the first correctly and random clicks for the second. This is as I was uninterested though doubt it is still that simple.

I wonder, what are the minimum number of labels per image to ensure clean data?

I have found many times that if select an incorrect tile and then unselect it before submitting, I am not presented with multiple challenges. My guess is a bot would not exhibit this behavior.

Try it out next time.

Not anymore.

Usually in those cases, even if you make mistakes they get accepted. The larger the clicks, the less annotated / voted those images are, thus less severe their penalization method for wrong markings. I have observed sites that newly introduce such captcha basically accept if I just click 1/3rd of the right answers. Don't click the wrong answers as they are fully/partially introduced on purpose. It's just that you don't have to click all right answers.

Whoever made this new captcha I’m seeing starting to see everywhere:

https://imgur.com/a/hoyjctl

Thank you! itsso much easier than being a labeling bot for self driving cars.

That looks pretty easy for machines. I wouldn’t be surprised if CLIP could solve that out of the box. (Then again, I guess the same applies to “select all the traffic lights”)

yeah you won't be loving this one where they make you do 10 in a row and if you get one wrong you start again with 11 this time. also it'll fail you at random

When they start doing captchas along the lines of "check all pictures of potential terrorists" we'll know they're training data sets for military drone manufacturers.

https://img.ifunny.co/images/d36b2c891b620a864e87a57b869e842...

They already are https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/07/google-ai...

It'd be nice if the military actually cared enough about drone targets to even attempt this...

That wouldn't work well. I was in Texas during 9/11 and they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars because the locals don't really have a good eye for different ethnicities. Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since.

Austin has grown a lot since I lived there are a lot of people from outside Texas have moved there so I'm sure the culture has changed - but when I was there going from north Austin to south Austin seemed to be this epic trip the locals would only do on a weekend -- and probably pack water and sandwiches for the drive across town. A really exotic senior trip "abroad" for students might be to Houston or Galveston. You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.

This sounds nothing like my experience living in Austin 2009-2017. In fact, this is unrecognizable.

> they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars

Weird. This is sort of unbelievable. I think I know many Hispanics who lived in ATX during 2001, but they’ve never mentioned their car being firebombed.

The only part of that story that sounds plausible was:

>>You probably met your future spouse in grade school. Not very worldly.

That sounds nice though.

Not sure how serious you are, but on the chance you are...

The meeting spouse in grade school/not worldly typically implies not leaving the area they grew up in at any point. I grew up in a smallish town where this happens frequently. So many people never leave the state let alone the country. Some people never even left the county. Their biggest travel is for school sporting events.

In otherwords, it's not really a term of endearment as much as another "bless your heart"

I still think it sounds nice.

Is the place you grew up intrinsically so much worse than the rest of the world? Would it be so bad to be invested in a single community for a lifetime, and to have a deep connection to the people there? I feel like I lack that, deep connections where the pull of cultural influence goes both ways. I'm not convinced that the cosmopolitan breadth of experience we may have gained outweighs the deep experience of locality that we sacrificed to get it.

> Is the place you grew up intrinsically so much worse than the rest of the world?

For many people, the answer is a pretty definitive yes. I grew up in apartheid South Africa and left mainly to escape two years of compulsory military service helping enforce apartheid rule.

But if you speak to immigrants in any first world country, you'll find lots of similar stories. People having migrated because of severe political or economic issues.

> I'm not convinced that the cosmopolitan breadth of experience we may have gained outweighs the deep experience of locality that we sacrificed to get it.

What stops you going back, in that case?

I'm sure you realize that going back doesn't take away the years of wandering. You've moved on — in my case, I've spent almost thirty years in different communities, marrying a wife from far away with her own family and community, moving several times, making new friends and losing touch with old ones — and, possibly more importantly, the community I grew up in has moved on as well. You know how Heraclitus said, "No man ever steps in the same river twice?" The community you grow up in is like that; to remain in the same community, you have to stay in it, be carried along with it, and change with it, or when you return, you return to a community changed in ways you have not experienced.

I grew up in a smallish town where this happens frequently. So many people never leave the state let alone the country

So, you're extrapolating your personal experiences and applying them to everyone on the planet.

Many of my family members met their spouses in their home town. They hardly ever leave that town. They might fly to another country for vacation once a decade, but otherwise find complete fulfillment in the place where they live. Several have never even bothered to get a drivers' license, because they never found the need to have one.

By your standard, that makes them unsophisticated. But they're probably not. They live in New York City.

I doubt it. Doesn't match up at all with my experience in Dallas in 2001...

Indians or Middle Easterners I knew were not infrequently misidentified as Mexican (as was anyone of Hispanic but not Mexican background), but the idea that anyone would be so unfamiliar with the sizable Hispanic population to do a "black/white/terrorist" identification and firebomb "all the Hispanic people's cars" is hard to believe without some news articles discussing this as a big trend in 2001 Austin.

> "I was in Texas during 9/11 and they were firebombing all the hispanic people's cars" That's odd, I was living in rural TX when 9/11 and don't recall anything happening like that. And more than half of my coworkers were Hispanic. I remember a few people attacking Sikhs or other vaguely-Asian convenience store owners, not Latinos.

> "Its pretty much black/white/terrorist and hasn't improved all that much in the time since" I suspect your experience wasn't very representative. After all, Texas has a 40% Hispanic population. Assholes won't be calling them terrorists, they're much more likely to be working them like slaves and paying them scraps off the books.

I suspect the biggest reason for a cross-Austin trip being an event has stayed the same: terrible traffic.

This became obvious to me when during some period the regular crosswalks, stop lights, and buses got replaced by chimneys, trees, and mountains (!). It was right around the time when some big companies started advertising AI driven quadcopter services.

Ah, so that's what that's about. Here I was wondering why on earth a self-driving car would need help identifying a mountain (or need to identify one at all). "Surely they can't be that bad at avoiding obstacles," I thought.

https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling

> hCaptcha has one of the largest pools on the planet available for your use. Whatever your scale, we can handle it without expensive upfront commitments. Millions of tasks per day are no problem.

Thanks for pointing this out - I feel abused now.

Makes sense since other than the ones mentioned I received a lot of crosswalks, traffic lights and bicycles.

It's odd that it never asks for pedestrians.

For the most part, human detection capabilities of modern NNs are very good. This would include detections from a variety of camera angles and resolutions. There are already a lot of labeled training sets available with people in various poses, heights, clothing types, etc.

Bicycle detection is probably one of the more challenging elements as it relates to pedestrians and things you don't want a SD car to run into. Depending on the angle and color of the bicycle, rider position, and background elements, it can be challenging to discern the rider from the bicycle reliably. For the most part, just knowing there is a human present is a good start, but being able to anticipate movement speeds and directions of pedestrians vs. bikers is helpful in anticipating collision paths and distances, and also figuring out distances and terrain (person on bike is slightly elevated above ground, which can cause range perception issues, among other things).

source: have been working in AI/MV space for security/safety applications for 12+ years.

> For the most part, human detection capabilities of modern NNs are very good.

If you're white

> There are already a lot of labeled training sets available with people in various poses, heights, clothing types, etc

But not of various skin colors...

I recall some controversy a couple years ago over suspicions that defense contractors were using them to train weapons systems. A few people got captchas asking them to identify helicopters.

I'd love to identify helicopters. I do get planes now, but was it specifically military helicopters?

I like getting to identify basic things like cars, airplanes and trains with hCaptcha. It's like a picture book for adults, and feels strangely pleasant compared to other captchas.

Yeah, they were military helicopters:

https://old.reddit.com/r/google/comments/5udzy4/hey_google_e...

There might be some privacy issues involved there.

A helicopter pilot is lost, lands his helicopter next to you, and asks, "where am I?" to which you respond, "you're in a helicopter". You are correct in the strictest sense, but probably not answering the intent of the question. :)

In this case, the intent is probably something like why are hcaptcha's customers centered around transport when there are so many other applications for this kind of labeling?

You just gave me the idea to start a captcha service designed for datasets relevant for the prolitariet. Not sure how viable it is (what kind of data would be useful for the prols in a revolution) but it was a fun thought experiment.

Yes but if you make a mistake the capcha fails, hence they are already labeled.

captchas mix classified and unclassified data. Only if you get the classified data correct a users data is used to classify the unclassified data. Also the same picture is shown to multiple people to improve confidence.

One of my hobbies is figuring out which captcha prompts are the unclassified data so that I can answer wrong and stick it to the man.

I do the exact same thing, randomly mixing right and wrong snippets. As a result I sometimes go through like 3 or 4 sets, but eventually it lets me in.

Everyone join us !

I’m going to blame you when my self driving car crashes

If the manufacturer of self-driving cars decides to save money and depend on low-quality data, they should be blamed, not a random dude on the internet trying to send a form or visit a page.

yes. the blame shifting seems to be a very skewed thing here. then again, this is a tech forum, so of course it would lean that way. stupid users vs bad tech, so let's just blame stupid users.

We used to get Googlers huffing and puffing at the mere suggestion of feeding "wrong" data to their data collection machinery here at HN. Lots of people here put themselves in the shoes of the company making a buck out of your data, if not being in them right now, before the user.

> We used to get Googlers huffing and puffing at the mere suggestion of feeding "wrong" data to their data collection machinery here at HN.

Yeah, it always seems funny to me. I'm using AdNauseam and other techniques for the same reasons they feel I shouldn't be doing it.

Is one of your others writing XKCD alt text? This reads just like it :')

How does one determine classified vs unclassified?

How do you do so?

I just try to get one randomly wrong. It almost always lets me through. Also, I'll pick the wrong one that almost looks right. Say, a picture with a vaguely traffic light shaped mailbox or a train shaped car or something. :)

I have noticed there's a very very low correlation between how hard I try on captchas and how quickly they let me through. I just quickly mash a bunch of tiles to start, maybe trying to be in the right general area. That works surprisingly often and when it doesn't I, and pay closer attention to what I'm selecting, then I pretty much always get through on that next try.

This approach mostly fixes the annoying phenomenon where I carefully select the exact right tiles only to be told, "too bad, try again".

The first version of reCAPTCHA made it very obvious as to which word was the classified one and which was the unclassified one, so people had a pretty easy way to inject bad data into the process.

Yeah, I remember my days on 4chan where people kept posting a campaign to substitute a racial slur for the one that looked unclassified.

Some are already labelled, the user doesn't know so it's in their interest to solve the captcha properly and provide good data.

I would guess they have a system such that after a user has passed N captchas successfully, they trust its a human and start displaying them (a portion of) unlabelled captchas that will always succeed and that's when novel labelling happens.

Or something along those lines. And then you can get creative displaying same captcha to multiple users, etc...

I wonder if there is a way to pollute the data. Since I always click the captchas correctly, what happens if someone just randomly clicks stuffs? Is he/she banned from the website?

Glad you asked. Since i despise the horrible UX of these Captcha where i get exploited to train a neural network, i very often click on the majority of correct result plus one wrong one.

On average the captcha let me go through which is actually very scary, since it looks like it prioritize algorithm training over bot detection...

Does anyone else do this?

No, because it is a waste of time. Your answer set is compared with many other answers, and eventually the wrong answer is disregarded completely by the AI.

You gave it a mostly correct answer, which it can cope with -- by design. It let you through, after all. You're not really accomplishing anything by being defiant, other than making yourself feel slightly better.

Fully agree that the system propose the same challenge to many people and fully agree that my wrong answer is just diluted in a bunch of correct answers.

That's exactly why i was asking if other people were doing that. If i'm the only one..then yes, it's only useful for myself to fell less like a exploited brain, but if say 20% of the people start dumping random error on purpose...than the situation changes quite a lot...and potentially even the business model of shit-captcha might not work.

If they do the same kinds of error, yeah.

Maybe someone can build a re-capture extension for Chrome/Firefox so that more people can join the fun. But again it needs to train data first :D

> You're not really accomplishing anything by being defiant, other than making yourself feel slightly better.

Isn't that the goal of all virtue signaling?

If I were to make this system I would design for this and present the same captcha to a high number of people. The higher the number of people, the lower the chance someone would make a mistake (intentionally or not) and the higher the confidence in the results.

of course bro, i'm sure that no self-driving car is gonna crash as soon as i deliberatly click on the wrong bicycle picture.

lol I'm imagining a captcha that says "please hurry" to disambiguate a situation in realtime

https://xkcd.com/1897/

“Twitch plays drive an autonomous vehicle”

That is exactly what Google uses/used-to-use the captcha for. It is/was fairly well known/understood.

So the safety of self-driving cars depends on regular folks not trolling the catpcha.

Hopefully they're able to account for Lizardman's Constant

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

> My guess is it’s a self driving car company, but who knows.

As always, https://xkcd.com/1897

confession: sometimes I mislabel just so I can corrupt the dataset

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