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  • Hacker News
  • (2017)

    Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15785878

    2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805

    by ChrisArchitect
  • At this point I assume the captcha puzzle isn’t the actual check, just a distraction while they fingerprint your browser and behaviour to try to identify if you are more likely a human or not. Just my thoughts, I have absolutely no proof that’s the case, but I don’t believe labeling traffic light is still valuable, we are way, way past that
    by dgellow
  • Related:

    CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35788139 - May 2023 (2 comments)

    CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 - Nov 2020 (679 comments)

    CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15785878 - Nov 2017 (20 comments)

    by dang
  • Major Internet companies are still American-centrist, after all, many of them are American platforms and concerns (if not only concerns) American interests.

    Google for example, they provide CAPTCHA to train their own AIs. Since Google mainly operate in the US, it make sense for them to optimize for Americans.

    Another example is Cloudflare's CAPTCHA page, which is created based on measurements of American/first-world networks. But if your connection is "sub-optimal" (a.k.a, not first-world enough), it is possible that you don't even get the chance to load the verification scripts before the server cuts the connection and force a page reload, forming an infinite dead loop.

    I feel the Internet is no longer international anymore, especially after all the AI scrapers. Now days are the days of contraction and everyone is guarding their own boring little caves against what they've defined as "thievery/stealing", while putting very little effort into actual useful thing such as gaining market and user (a.k.a expansion). The CAPTCHA implements maybe a sickness of it.

    by nirui
  • It's just forcing US culture on everyone in the world. Also see Meta deleting IG posts and banning people based on US politics / morals.
    by KingOfCoders
  • This was one of the inspirations to start Friendly Captcha. In the first years potential customers would ask for "ReCAPTCHA but without tracking/Google". I'm happy we decided to never include these kinds of image recognition tasks for end-users.

    I feel often it's forgotten that a captcha should allow *all* humans to pass, not just a certain demographic. I suppose it's intuitive that someone using a screen reader will have a hard time with visual captcha tasks, but really there are so many reasons one may struggle.

    I remember running into a hCaptcha task that asked me to distinguish between circuit boards and top-down cityscapes trying to book a train ticket.. I fear that means grandma is no longer allowed to book train tickets.

    by protoduction
  • Even as someone who lived a long time in the US, I've failed a bunch of these on unclear definitions.

    When you say "stoplights", is that just the lights themselves, or also the poles that support them? Is a tile that contains 1/3 of a bike wheel "bicycle" or "not bicycle"? Is a coach also considered a bus?

    by swiftcoder
  • Other common issues - crosswalks and fire hydrants are common questions too, and crosswalks are not called that in most of the world and fire hydrants look pretty different depending on country.
    by kybernetikos

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