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  • > if something costs a half-a-crown, and you pay with a florin, how many tanners will you get in your change?

    I'm fairly certain you'll be asked to throw one in instead of getting any change.

    by Joker_vD
  • It proves that you are familiar enough with American culture, which could be a problem for some, theoretically, I guess. I don't get upset about that just like I don't get upset about the fact that we all have to know English.

    But that's not the real issue with CAPTCHAs or with a lot of other checks that companies do.

    E.g., Apple does ID checks when you create a developer account. I would love to see the statistics, but anecdotally the overwhelming share of failed checks followed by "piss off we're not talking to you any longer" occurs with non-US IDs or types of IDs that are less common in the US.

    Access to global infrastructures is very biased, I believe, and getting more biased. It's not always the US's fault though. The world is fracturing.

    by fauigerzigerk
  • 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
  • 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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