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Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

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.

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".

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

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.

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 !

How does one determine classified vs unclassified?

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...

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