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Comment by sjtgraham | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else getting a lot of obvious door numbers in reCAPTCHA captchas lately?, I guess that's how Google trained these neural nets.

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I've been thinking that for a few months now. When reCAPTCHA was revised last year and turned into numbers, I immediately figured it was for Google to read the house numbers on street view images.

Brilliant, really.

But in particular to create a seed training set (for the neural network) -- not as a standalone house number recognition system.

I hope that the training set gets released publicly. The more training sets openly available to all the better.

Gooogle are being totally dishonest and misleading in their use of reCAPTCHA to digitize house numbers.

"reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows."

"Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books."

They are lying and they are not benefiting the public interest - which is what reCAPTCHA relies on - they are only benefiting their company and their own shareholders.

I just put in rubbish for that part. OCR'ing books isn't bad, but I really don't find the idea of helping Google with house numbers appealing at all.

Well I like being able to accurately view an address in street view, so you are helping me, too. Thanks?

You say that as if you're not helping Google with anything else. Every search, every plus, every rating, every interaction helps Google with its business. And in majority of cases, users reap the benefits too and house numbers is one of those—better geographical knowledge is always good. Whether it can be abused is irrelevant to this specific matter. Every piece of information about anything can be abused.

I noticed those when they first started appearing, my first thought was "must be Street View", followed immediately by wondering about the potential for poisoning some kind of machine learning effort with them (and yeah, I know, issue of scale, even a group of people dedicated to ruining the effort would be vastly outnumbered by background reCAPTCHA traffic).

4chan has had campaigns to get "penis" and a certain racial slur inserted into books. I was going to post links but then decided I didn't want to get fired today for my web searches.

was just thinking that google can now fool captchas

Google is also the one serving them, which does allow them to cheat.

reCaptcha was always a free captcha service based on one simple idea: one part is the classical one, hopefully only readable by humans, the other one actually supports Google on doing OCR-like jobs. Previously it were undetected words from Google Books scans, now they are mostly using house numbers.

More interesting is the other change: reCaptcha now tries to detects real users and then only generates a simple number captcha for the classical part. Likely they are using your Google Account cookie or Google Analytics for that.

One CAPTCHA to rule them all!

Sorry for the downvote; I though you were off-topic before my brain processed the second sentence.

Edit: thanks for the downvotes for apologizing for an errant downvote ... I guess ...

Yes.

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