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Comment by dizhn | Hacker News Reader

I routinely have problems with closeup images. To this day I don't know how much of the object I should be selecting? Also what is a traffic light? Is the pole part of it or not? Motorcycles seem to be hard too.

Once it showed me a picture of steps nothing but steps. I think I marked like 15 boxes.

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> To this day I don't know how much of the object I should be selecting? Also what is a traffic light? Is the pole part of it or not? Motorcycles seem to be hard too.

I have always assumed this was purposefully ambiguous. The right answer is whatever a majority of humans will answer when presented with the same picture.

I don't think the majority of people on earth would base all their captchas on things only found in America

The majority of people will still cluster around the same best guesses, and that’s all that matters to the algorithm.

Yes, it’s annoying, but that doesn’t matter to the algorithm.

If you think you're failing the captchas because you're doing them wrong, think again. Google captcha intentionally fails you a couple times if they don't have enough tracking info to determine that you're legit. So you solve the captcha correctly but are still lied to that "you've failed to solve the captcha, try again".

That and the "fading images slowly to pretend like you have bad internet" thing. Disgusting behaviour

Maybe they purposely load the images slowly to make it more expensive for the bot owners.

Also just catches people they think might be bots.

I've definitely encountered captcha tarpit logins before that could never be solved until I changed VPN endpoint. I was never getting in.

I kinda don't understand why we still have captchas. We've solved the asymmetric problem with proof-of-work; just make somebody solve something trivial so they spend more resources than you do.

Like if a bot requests your page 1/day its not a problem; but if they want to request it 1/ms then the proof-of-work becomes too much for them and its transparent to a person.

It might be an incentive to make people stay logged into their accounts. This wouldn't be hole reason but I am sure it's part of it. I used another laptop with a VPN for a few days and what used to be smooth experiences turned into a shit ton of "log in to prove you're not a robot". Both Reddit and Youtube did this.

They don't. They load the images and then have js to fade them slooooowly. It's pernicious precisely because of that: its purpose is to annoy humans while being completely useless to thwart bots.

I'm never that consistent and usually get through. I think they are looking at things like mouse acceleration, smoothness, etc. rather than the actual answer to the questions.

They don’t let you pass if you don’t answer roughly correctly.

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