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.
This is perhaps a declining problem, as young people in so many countries are growing up as proficient US English speakers due to heavy social media consumption, to the point that US English CAPTCHA challenges would just feel normal. I suspect there are more young people around the world now for whom "crosswalk" is more natural than "zebra" -- in my country, the latter is already a shibboleth that one is an oldie who learned UK English, now regarded here as an antiquated standard after teaching switched to US English.
Also a declining problem because any recent LLM can solve them all for you. FWIW though I don’t know anyone in the UK who uses the term crosswalk, though I think most would probably understand it in context.
I've noticed that "Santa" is really starting to displace "Father Christmas" in British English. When I was a kid if you said "Santa" you'd have been scolded for using the American name, but listening to kids now I hear them say "Santa" all the time. I blame TV.
"Crosswalk" sounds extremely American to me and I've never heard anyone say it in Britain, but maybe I'm just getting old.
That’s a fair example, I think I’ve always seen Santa and Father Christmas as interchangeable and wouldn’t necessarily associate one of them with being the American one. A hypothesis I’d be curious about - I wonder if there’s a correlation between how commercialised something is and how Americanised it becomes. In that case I guess we won’t be calling them crosswalks any time soon.
There are more people than only young, intelligent people who want to use the world wide web.
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.
The thing about all those other people, though, is that they eventually get ousted by mortality and cultural change by the younger people.
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!
> and crosswalks are not called that in most of the world
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.
I don't think that's generally true outside the English-speaking world.
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.
This is swiftly changing. I spend about half of every year traveling the developing world, and I am constantly seeing young people consuming English-language social media from their phones. Particuarly young women seem drawn to TikTok beauty-influencer content in highly idiomatic English.
Yes, the reCAPTCHA widget is localized[1], but that doesn't automatically mean every term is localized properly.
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.
Maybe it's translated, but it's definitely not localised. Captchas are nonsense in the UK, and a lot of Europe browses in English even if not their first language.
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?
The problem with recaptcha style systems is that once the underlying model is trained, you are basically playing family feud - you aren't trying to provide a correct answer, as much as you are trying to match the "survey says..." majority opinion
I actually found I had more success with reCAPTCHA when I made myself think less about what the answer was.
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.)
I think I'm failing the captcha by not being sufficiently pedantic. It genuinely never occurred to me that a coach might not be considered a bus by the algorithm (where "algorithm" is presumably "distilled responses of many thousands of other humans")
To be fair liberal and conservative is still used in it's actual sense whenever I hear it here in central Europe. US politics is barely a topic, even less something people actually care about.
I wish I could say the same here. People seem to have forgotten what the word liberal is supposed to mean. There is a local Liberal tradition which has very little to do with modern usage.
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.
it was meaning "to be careful and considerate when changing things", now it means "i do whatever i want and if you don't agree then you are (insert imaginary adversary here)"
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.
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
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."
The big sell on reCAPTCHA v3 was that it did all the fingerprinting beforehand. Only when fingerprinting failed to prove your humanity, you'd get shown a puzzle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
People do pay taxes in the US? I paid almost nothing in Texas, thats why it looked like a shithole. No budget for anything. In Europe I love to pay taxes, because I see where it's going to
Federal taxes are payable by all US citizens regardless of location.
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.
It's kind of a pain that you still have to file US taxes in this case. You may well end up paying zero in the US, but it's up to you to provide the necessary paperwork to show that your overseas income tax was high enough to cancel out the US income tax.
please don't be petty. you don't own the replies to your comment. you are not the only one who can keep the discussion going. others may continue to discuss as they like, and you will have your chance to add your comments in time. removing your comment after people replied to it is disruptive and is not welcome.
Is 'identify all the similar cars?' a valid capcha though? Surely knowing that something is a taxi is the important part of the test, and a good capcha would through in a branded car that isn't a taxi, which non-Americans are far more likely to fail.
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.
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.
This is perhaps a declining problem, as young people in so many countries are growing up as proficient US English speakers due to heavy social media consumption, to the point that US English CAPTCHA challenges would just feel normal. I suspect there are more young people around the world now for whom "crosswalk" is more natural than "zebra" -- in my country, the latter is already a shibboleth that one is an oldie who learned UK English, now regarded here as an antiquated standard after teaching switched to US English.
Maybe we should ask Americans what a Belisha beacon is.
I'm British and I never knew that those yellow-ball-on-black-and-white-pole-by-pedestrian-crossing things had a name. TIL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Hore-Belisha
Forgotten otherwise, but responsible for introducing speed limits and the driving test.
(Before looking him up I had no idea there was a brief 'fuck it no speed limit' period in the 30s, until obviously a number of people were killed)
"Please identify a [PELICAN/PUFFIN/toucan] crossing."
I'd love that. Good luck.
Don't forget pegasus crossings. The one specifically for horse riders.
It sounds delicious. I'll take two, please.
Also a declining problem because any recent LLM can solve them all for you. FWIW though I don’t know anyone in the UK who uses the term crosswalk, though I think most would probably understand it in context.
I've noticed that "Santa" is really starting to displace "Father Christmas" in British English. When I was a kid if you said "Santa" you'd have been scolded for using the American name, but listening to kids now I hear them say "Santa" all the time. I blame TV.
"Crosswalk" sounds extremely American to me and I've never heard anyone say it in Britain, but maybe I'm just getting old.
That’s a fair example, I think I’ve always seen Santa and Father Christmas as interchangeable and wouldn’t necessarily associate one of them with being the American one. A hypothesis I’d be curious about - I wonder if there’s a correlation between how commercialised something is and how Americanised it becomes. In that case I guess we won’t be calling them crosswalks any time soon.
Interestingly, Santa is an American thing because of the early Dutch influence using Sinterklaas.
There are more people than only young, intelligent people who want to use the world wide web.
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.
The thing about all those other people, though, is that they eventually get ousted by mortality and cultural change by the younger people.
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!
> and crosswalks are not called that in most of the world
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.
Like pretty much anyone in the world, actually.
I don't think that's generally true outside the English-speaking world.
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.
This is swiftly changing. I spend about half of every year traveling the developing world, and I am constantly seeing young people consuming English-language social media from their phones. Particuarly young women seem drawn to TikTok beauty-influencer content in highly idiomatic English.
Fire hydrants don't exist, they're just part of that cool media-pushed picture of some mythological place where things are ... weird and different.
Doesn’t recaptcha have localization? Not sure now that I think about it maybe not
Yes, the reCAPTCHA widget is localized[1], but that doesn't automatically mean every term is localized properly.
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
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Maybe it's translated, but it's definitely not localised. Captchas are nonsense in the UK, and a lot of Europe browses in English even if not their first language.
In the UK the captcha uses crosswalk, which isn’t the common name here.
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?
I think you are supposed to click on all tiles that contain any part of said object (and pole is part of the stoplight object).
They certainly could've been more clear about what they want.
I feel that's actually the whole point of the system, to know how humans respond when it's vaguely defined.
The problem with recaptcha style systems is that once the underlying model is trained, you are basically playing family feud - you aren't trying to provide a correct answer, as much as you are trying to match the "survey says..." majority opinion
Being pedantic about the captcha is the less-human thing to do here.
Ha! I guess I'm less human than expected, and finally I understand why I've failed sooooo many CAPTCHAs over the years :)
Thanks, I really never knew!
I actually found I had more success with reCAPTCHA when I made myself think less about what the answer was.
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.)
I think I'm failing the captcha by not being sufficiently pedantic. It genuinely never occurred to me that a coach might not be considered a bus by the algorithm (where "algorithm" is presumably "distilled responses of many thousands of other humans")
This comment doesn't help the pedant
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)
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.
Americans have changed/reversed a lot of political definitions including conservative/liberal.
To be fair liberal and conservative is still used in it's actual sense whenever I hear it here in central Europe. US politics is barely a topic, even less something people actually care about.
I wish I could say the same here. People seem to have forgotten what the word liberal is supposed to mean. There is a local Liberal tradition which has very little to do with modern usage.
How has conservative changed?
In the original sense, a "conservative" was someone who avoided change and only made it after careful consideration. Chesterton's fence is a commonly given example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
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.
it was meaning "to be careful and considerate when changing things", now it means "i do whatever i want and if you don't agree then you are (insert imaginary adversary here)"
Oh come on!
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...
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.
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
It's a combination of things.
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).
The big sell on reCAPTCHA v3 was that it did all the fingerprinting beforehand. Only when fingerprinting failed to prove your humanity, you'd get shown a puzzle.
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.
Some definitely fail you if you answer too quickly.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Most humans will fail? How so?
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.
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.
Interesting I very often get captchas to find motorcycles, crosswalks, and red lights that are definitely not from the US.
Some sites take this to a ridiculous extreme. Just try Haathi trust and it asks for a proof at EVERY refresh.
(2017)
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15785878
2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805
(2017)
Micropayments
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....
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.
Yes. Making meaning often requires context. The study of this is often referred to as pragmatics.
where do i collect my passport?
Ready to pay US taxes from anywhere in the world?
People do pay taxes in the US? I paid almost nothing in Texas, thats why it looked like a shithole. No budget for anything. In Europe I love to pay taxes, because I see where it's going to
Federal taxes are payable by all US citizens regardless of location.
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.
> In Western Europe
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.
In Spain you pay taxes through the nose and there's nothing to show for it. Motorways look like they are you are in Congo.
Oh, just like in the US then. Probably that's why it is called the third world
In what universe is Spain considered a 3rd world country?
I don't know what part of Spain you live in - Galicia is chock full of beautifully-maintained autovias.
yeah cause in Spain some are more "equal" than others
I'm just surprised the most far-flung, depopulated region would have better infrastructure than the rest
It’s less used so it’s in much better shape. Try coming to the touristy places of the south.
No idea why you got downvoted. This is one of the most absurd and controlling thing the US does from the Perspektive of a non US person.
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It's kind of a pain that you still have to file US taxes in this case. You may well end up paying zero in the US, but it's up to you to provide the necessary paperwork to show that your overseas income tax was high enough to cancel out the US income tax.
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Edit: Please stop commenting below as I can't reply anymore
please don't be petty. you don't own the replies to your comment. you are not the only one who can keep the discussion going. others may continue to discuss as they like, and you will have your chance to add your comments in time. removing your comment after people replied to it is disruptive and is not welcome.
The fact that it can be deduced in some cases by some people is missing the point that a test of humanity shouldn't be country specific at all.
>The ones with liveries on the side that are all the same color.
Which is also not true for some countries...
Not really in some countries taxis are specific vehicle types and clearly branded. American ones are ordinary cars with slight modifications.
"slight modifications" it's entirely
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
And in that case the CAPTCHA would still work, as the vehicles are of the same type and have clear branding.
Is 'identify all the similar cars?' a valid capcha though? Surely knowing that something is a taxi is the important part of the test, and a good capcha would through in a branded car that isn't a taxi, which non-Americans are far more likely to fail.
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.