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Discussion (69 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I'd love that. Good luck.
"Crosswalk" sounds extremely American to me and I've never heard anyone say it in Britain, but maybe I'm just getting old.
As mentioned somewhere else in the comments here: This is just one aspect where US American culture is being favored and forced on other people and their culture.
Yes, I know how fire hydrants look like in the USA. But this is not the point. It is about respecting other people's abilities and cultures.
I certainly agree with you that the spread of US American culture is creepy. But such complaints are falling on deaf ears among younger generations now, at least in my corner of Europe: people brought up on this stuff often don't see the problem, they perceive this as normal and fine. In fact, if you advocate for anti-globalization sentiments -- a cornerstone of the European left 25 years ago -- you might even be taken as a far-right supporter now!
As an Australian, I'd never call them that, but I know what the American word means.
In fact, the average Australian has a pretty good understanding of Americanisms, even if they've never been to the US, due to lifelong consumption of US TV shows, films, and other cultural exports.
The majority of people worldwide don't know English well-enough to consume English language media in the original language. A lot of people globally, if they watch US TV shows or movies at all, they'll watch them dubbed, which means the issue of Americanisms largely doesn't come up.
But the underlying point of the article stands. This is similar to the mythical statement that some park ranger once stated "it's very hard to design a trash can that no bears can use, but that every human can."
reCAPTCHA, like CloudFlare, benefits the wider population of the internet to the extent that everybody can use them, but there are edge cases where some outlier users get locked out of necessary internet infrastructure because they can't grok the ask, can't correctly identify the options, or because their computer / IP is being abused by bots so they are in the splash damage range of the bot checkers.
[1] https://github.com/google/recaptcha/issues/68
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?
They certainly could've been more clear about what they want.
I also learned this trick that a lot of the questions have a standard number of answers – e.g. there are always three buses, or fire hydrants, or whatever – so once I've picked three, I'm done. (There often is a fourth ambiguous case, which it accepts but doesn't require.)
Thanks, I really never knew!
The word "conservative" is currently being applied to the Republican party, who are reforming the US as hard and fast as they can manage, without careful consideration. A "move fast and break things" approach is about as un-conservative as one can be.
The internet by default assumes you are a US citizen..
> forcing US culture on everyone in the world
I think captchas are on very near to the bottom on the list of things that tries (knowingly or unknowingly) does this...
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.
As far as I understand it, it's fingerprinting + IP reputation + cross-site IP rate limiting + raising the cost of a request by an order of magnitude because of the LLM call.
The last ingredient is what we forget about. $0.001 or whatever might not seem like much, but there's a difference between "a million requests a day costs you $5 in AWS bandwidth" and "a million requests a day costs you $1000 in VLLMs, $500 in premium bandwidth from residential proxies, + constant toil to update your scraper to keep up with what Google is doing."
(Figures illustrative).
I've tried intentionally answering the prompts wrong and correctness is definitely a factor here (although low bot scores seem to permit you more mistakes). That doesn't mean fingerprinting is not happening while you're solving the puzzles, but it's more than just a distraction.
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.
Captchas worked well enough for a while, if you weren't visually impaired (or worse, deafblind), spoke English, could read (Latin) characters, and so on and so on, but they were always a hack. The hack is now failing.
The only sure-fire way to check for humanity is to ask somebody who tested it in-person, likely an ID-issuing government.
I'm fairly certain you'll be asked to throw one in instead of getting any change.
Taiwan, Colombia, Ecuador, Australia, and many European countries all have (not exclusively, but they do have) yellow taxis.
Maybe "Prove you're not English" is really their intention.
State taxes… I can't say I know even a single thing about how it works when you leave the USA. I hear news, but I don't live in the US, nor do I want to. The way taxes are handled is one of many things contributing to that lack of interest, even with what little I do know about it being about federal taxation.
Fixed that for you.
Edit: Reply to bsoqk as I am rate limited and can't comment directly:
> nothing to show for it
It goes to the PM's brother, who got a job working for the government without even knowing where his office is.
Most wonderful part of living in Spain is paying taxes and not even having access to the public healthcare system. You have to pay extra for that.
Edit: Please stop commenting below as I can't reply anymore
>The ones with liveries on the side that are all the same color.
Which is also not true for some countries...
In most places taxis can be identified as: having a specific color/color pattern and/or a ceiling fixture
It is by design because you want taxis to stand out from other vehicles
Remember that the goal here is to test that a request isn't coming from a computer, and 'identify all the similar things in these images' is really easy for a computer.