CAPTCHAs don't prove you're human – they prove you're American (2017)

pestatije

where do i collect my passport?

kybernetikos

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.

KingOfCoders

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.

retired

-Post removed as rate limiting on HN does not allow me to comment and keep the discussion going- Edit: Please stop commenting below as I can't reply anymore

jan_m_savage

Some sites take this to a ridiculous extreme. Just try Haathi trust and it asks for a proof at EVERY refresh.

swiftcoder

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?

turbocon

Interesting I very often get captchas to find motorcycles, crosswalks, and red lights that are definitely not from the US.

AndyMcConachie

Yes. Making meaning often requires context. The study of this is often referred to as pragmatics.

dgellow

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

minraws

Correction: they only prove exposure to American media/culture... I could solve captcha and understand most of it from having seen a dozen or so American shows and movies over my teenage years... Even before I ever travelled to America.

reassess_blind

Those do appear to be San Francisco taxis and I agree with the overall sentiment, but the US is not the only country with yellow taxis. 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.

fauigerzigerk

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.

Joker_vD

> 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.

miki123211

The concept that you can distinguish one kind of entity (a human) from another kind of entity of similar intelligence, if they can both send and receive the same data, was always a myth. 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.

armchairhacker

Micropayments

nirui

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.

BrenBarn

They seem to test you're American. But really all they do is test whether Google or Cloudflare likes you. Until we have fully open CAPTCHAS (which we may never be able to have, it seems), or a genuinely diverse selection of them (which seems at least theoretically possible), we're just hitching our wagons to these companies' stars.

lofaszvanitt

Some AI researcher blurted out in an interview that it's great that LLMs mostly speak US English, because the British one gonna die out soon thanks to that....

Martin_Silenus

The very best CAPTCHA, for now: "2 + 2 = ?" Any IA will fail the first try. Most human will fail too, but some will pass and they're the only ones I care about.