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

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

91 points•theanonymousone•5 days ago•90 comments•

90 comments

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.

TFNA5 days ago

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.

pjc505 days ago

Maybe we should ask Americans what a Belisha beacon is.

mcintyre19945 days ago

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.

hasley5 days ago

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.

skissane5 days ago

> 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.

sam_lowry_5 days ago

Like pretty much anyone in the world, actually.

unwind5 days ago

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.

throwaway634675 days ago

Doesn’t recaptcha have localization? Not sure now that I think about it maybe not

thephyber5 days ago

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

swiftcoder5 days ago

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?

bmacho5 days ago

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.

pixel_popping5 days ago

I feel that's actually the whole point of the system, to know how humans respond when it's vaguely defined.

lemagedurage5 days ago

Being pedantic about the captcha is the less-human thing to do here.

kruffalon5 days ago

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!

skissane5 days ago

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.)

swiftcoder5 days ago

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")

agons5 days ago

This comment doesn't help the pedant

KingOfCoders5 days ago

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.

nephihaha5 days ago

Americans have changed/reversed a lot of political definitions including conservative/liberal.

herbst5 days ago

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.

asdfaoeu5 days ago

How has conservative changed?

lolakutty5 days ago

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...

nirui5 days ago

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.

dang4 days ago

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)

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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