That feel when you can't captcha [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
I've started opting out of Google Captcha's wherever doing so isn't too burdensome. If I see a Google Captcha and I don't really want to get to the other side, I just close the tab and forget about it, rather than subject myself to their capricious gatekeeping.
- Forget the slivers. If it's not more that 75% of the square forget about it.
- Anything not in the foreground might as well not exist.
- Poles != Signs If you saw pole sticking out of the ground you wouldn't call it a sign would you?
- It's not about whether it's a storefront, it's about whether it obviously looks like one. If you spend literally any time thinking about it it's a no.
- Mark the most prominent vehicle and skip everything else. Only mark a second vehicle if they're equally sized.
Now in order to train this network I had to download 1000 or so captchas and solve them manually, so I had written a quick program that allows a person to solve captchas. So I figured "let's see how good it is", and used the program to test myself (I figured, worst case I have some more raw data).
Turns out the neural net was 2% better than I was. It actually scored 2% better on captcha solving than I did, and this was when I was trying really hard, pausing when there's doubt and giving it 5 seconds thought. I was a bit surprised that trying really hard or just going with my first guess didn't make more than a percent difference.
Then I got someone who had nothing to do with IT to solve 50 captchas and calculated ... precision was 8% below the neural net (also known as she'd do about 1 in 6 wrong, whereas I only had one in 10-12 or so. The neural only had one in 14-15 wrong. It was a pretty sizable difference).
And lastly I figured, this is not possible. I'm somehow messing this up. After all, I should have made that same 8%+ errors on the original set of 1000 captchas I downloaded, did the network really learn to read better than I can, while being fed close to 10% falsehoods* ? So I generated the set where it consistently errors. And ... Yep. It did. About 40% of those was just me doing the ground truth wrong. I fixed them, but it only improved the CNNs performance slightly.
* of course of those 10% wrong would still almost always have 4 out of 5 letters correct
Take your pick. Do you want to pay with:
1) a few seconds of your mental energy
2) your privacy
3) background cryptocurrency mining
Thats just how the internet work. Content must be paid for somehow.
Who gets paid for 4chan's content? Alice does not profit. 4chan's users do not profit. 4chan 'profits' via advertising revenue but they actually operate at a loss.
Who is left to get paid? Google. Google gets a human-completed captcha for its machine-learning projects.
I look forward to the demise of the Web and its replacement with a content-addressed alternative where your views will be technologically obsolete.
If captchas weren't useful to 4chan, they wouldn't make use of it. When you see a system that's obviously not beneficial to anyone, it's useful to take a step back and think about the incentives that keep things as they are. Because if it's so obviously wrong, why hasn't it been changed yet?
I'm not sure how a content-addressed web would handle these problems, but there'll need to be some hoops to jump through before a significant number of other people become willing to look at your content.
Not true. Some (most?) of the best content on the internet is there completely for free, because people believe in it and put it out there out of their own pocket.
The internet is worse, because of the content that is paid for by the methods you describe, than the internet of the 90s when content was there by the methods I just described.
I do think there's some value in paying artists and writers for their work, with, you know, money, because those people have to eat too. But I refuse to buy into this narrative where "I pay you for content and you give me content" (a consensual transaction) is the same as "I request content from you and you pretend to give it to me for free while secretly violating my privacy, stealing my attention, and otherwise screwing me without my consent". These are not the same thing.
This is not "just how the internet works", it's how a few people have decided they want the internet to work because it's profitable to them, and we don't have to put up with it.
Yeah, when people comment that online content must be subsidized, I always find it a little ironic. They're contributing information and analysis to a discussion. Who's paying the subscription fee?
How could such a lifestyle, where they give away their mental energy for free, possibly be sustainable?
The frequent rebuttal of "but my comments are low quality and barely worth anyone's time!" is fun too.
Edit: fixed typo/missing word
The way I see it, you have two options:
- Allow Google to extensively track all your activity online, or
- Do free work for Google
And Google's convinced many webmasters to embed their recaptcha, so no matter where I go I have to give something up to Google. At least I felt better about it when I was helping OCR books.
I doubt they get much value out of it.
If you're not getting anything valuable by completing the captcha, then don't do it.
Does anybody know if captcha's are triggered or are made harder by ublock? It seems to me like captchas are easier on my work chrome profile, which does not have any extensions since I only use it for internal sites.
For the record, I do tag boxes containing only sign posts, or only tiny slivers of signs.
Basically its meant to be somewhat confusing.
And then it’s captcha hell.
They replaced the text captcha with these. Google knows that these stops humans from going in. But, they don't fix it because they need to harvest data. So, Google is evil. There is no doubt on that.
I haven't been able to reach a conclusion on whether it is effective, anyone uses this?
What about squares which have just a sliver of the sign?
Epistemology robot!!!
Also, your text needs some work; there are grammatical errors and some phrases could be improved. (I can help with this, if you want.)
Please, do not make Internet an energy hog more than it already is.
Paranoid fantasy: it's a PhilipKDick/BladeRunner thing. You see, actually he is a robot (as, apparently, are most of us), and this test is designed to prove it. It's a precursor to the Voight-Kampff machine...