So I wanted to book some places for my next holidays on Airbnb and I came on the most annoying CAPTCHA I ever saw
https://i.postimg.cc/sXppmyxm/airbnbdes.png
Now you have to make sum of dices only to acces the website. And 5 times in a row.
And be sure to make no mistake ! I unfortunatly did on the fifth/last one (was getting really p*ssed), and had to start over !
So this morning I had to make around 50 dices sum just to acces this website.
I don't kow who came with this idea, but I find this really bad.
They currently have a monopoly on STR listings - so they don't really need to care about user experience.
This is what you end up with.
Wut? Have you actually ever met a person who can't? I always suspected the electoral majority is not particularly bright (which sort of contradicts the idea of near-100 being an average IQ nevertheless) but if this is "unusually smart" then things feel really creepy.
And it makes sense.
Statistically, an IQ of 100 is the population median, meaning, assuming a Gaussian repartition (which it usually is for human traits), that's about 10% of people scoring around 80 or lower.
To give an idea of what level of intelligence this means, we can wonder what that kind of people cannot do?
In the US, the military don't do a systematic IQ test for recruitment, but when they did one, it was deemed illegal to induct any one if they possessed an IQ less than or equal to 81.
That means 1 person out of 10 is not intelligent enough to be in the lowest rank in the army.
It's not far fetched to think of the possibility that some functioning members of society are not capable of solving mental problems most humanity think are trivial.
In fact, that are also trivial for AI, although we may all end up to fall into that basket one day or the other.
One of the brightest, quickest witted people I know experiences significant dyslexia and dyscalculia. She would fail at this and it would make her quietly angry at you for making her go through it.
I also know someone with a vision disorder who would struggle.
Hell, when I am tired, I would have to close one eye to pass -- I have this issue with quite a lot of captchas, and I am not legally vision-impaired. And I would be angry at the developer for making me struggle.
Furthermore, I think in a world with an ageing population it might be worth considering that puzzles like this are a bit like early dementia tests. It's worth thinking what data gets collected when the world is asked to perform brainteasers to gain access to essential functions.
I have met a few, yes, including people who are intellectually limited (colloquially called "dumb"), people who were born or acquired mental handicaps, people who are suffering most likely suffering from dyscalculia (dyslexia for arithmetic/numbers). E.g. we think my grandma might have had a milder form of the latter, as she had a lot of trouble adding up numbers in particular, which would have made this CAPTCHA very hard for her - but not impossible. And a friend of my mom has Turner syndrome, which is linked to dyscalculia, and she is indeed very bad at basic math.
Regardless of the answer to that, it focuses on the wrong problem.
The problem is the user-hostile concept of captchas in the first place. Imagine going to a brick and mortar store (or travel agency) and being forced to solve some ridiculous puzzle to be allowed inside to do a transaction.
It's not ok in physical life, it's not ok on a commerce website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGl2SMg4rU4
Certainly, when I read this I immediately thought of three.
These CAPTCHAs require more thought than the platform otherwise does, therefore it will gate some people from using the platform.
Lots of CS grads who went immediately to a high-paid CS positions have no clue how to distill complex topics into jargon-free statements that are readily understood. And this lack of self-awareness (i.e. they don't understand that they're using specialized terms and/or skills) bleeds into everything they do.
I can see a bunch of engineers sitting in a review meeting all agreeing 'This is simple math. Let's do it!' Unless there's someone from a non-tech background in the meeting, there's unlikely to be someone saying 'Uh, our audience is people wanting a place to sleep. We shouldn't gate our service with math.'
- Calculates the sum on the first picture
- Reads the instructions
- Reads the instructions again
- Stares at the six pictures for one second
- Closes the page
What they keep out is people with Discalculia, which are in no way stupid or low IQ, just can't to math well. (They also would probably be able to do it, but probably take to long and/or get offended enough to not do it).
I want to know if I would be filtered out
https://www.sciencealert.com/do-brain-training-games-really-...
So if IQ is defined as your ability to solve that kind of problem, then yes, your IQ will increase.
> explicitly advertises that their methods can keep out "low-skilled workers" on "human fraud farms"
Uhm yeah. They're trying to keep people from human fraud farms (who happen to be low-skilled workers) out. It's not a weird elitist conspiracy to keep all low-IQ people from society out.
Why is HN so full of paranoid conspiracy theories?
In this case one (excluding "human fraud farms") and the other (excluding people who would work, but currently don't work, at human fraud farms) are the same thing. Not at all paranoid, in other words :)
Because many of us have been to this rodeo before.
The history of the tech industry has no shortage of thought leaders, heroes, and jabbering masses with low morals and feet on both sides of the eugenics theory.
Their audio captcha (no longer available?) involved listening to 3 MIDI tunes and picking "the sad one".
Given that a large part of the world doesn't use the major/minor dichotomy, or even equal temperament, this seems like a terrible way to verify someone is a human...
My favourite recaptchas, if one can have such a thing, are the shape sequence selection ones as they don't make significant assumptions about culture or education.
I'm very much of the opinion that almost all modern captchas are american-centric. Mailboxes, fire hydrants, Trams are not recognizable for billions of people.
I wonder, does recaptcha work with your google account? Because at some point a lot of people will end up doing some kind of identity verification on there. But I think Google and co can make a reasonable assertion about being human by looking at activity across said Google account - location, emails, documents, etc.
The first time I had to create an account, they required that I connect with a google account with access to all my contacts. Then ask me to make a video of myself.
I didn't create the account and booked an hotel.
Now they are less aggressive with their new procedures, but still, you can see that the people behind it see technical solutions way before they perceive the human impact.
My grand-father was like that. A brilliant engineer from the most elite school of his generation in France. He once told me very seriously a solution for making more accommodations for the poorest people would be to remove individual bathrooms, and create common ones for the whole building instead.
Airbnb tech teams remind me of him.
I've seen some (studio) apartments that have a private bathroom that outside the front door, but still inside the building. I would very much dislike this: to me, it feels like it would break my private space, forcing me to allow for the possibility to run into others each time I go to the bathroom.
It's so nice that I've been able to find a single villain to blame this problem on instead of talking about the broader housing crisis that leads to this, which is completely the fault of governments to address housing shortages due to influence from NIMBYs and corporations.
As further proof you're correct, look at Miami Beach. It's banned Airbnbs and short term rentals, and now housing there is incredibly affordable and not the most expensive in Florida.
Airbnb is not the problem. You're bothered by tourists.
The $500 cost of a shower unit and toilet isn't what makes housing unavailable to the poor. Housing standards are a good thing as accommodation quality regresses to the minimum allowed by law.
Modern web become so unusable and poluted that I don't think that it can get worse.
I think it's time we build a directory of applications or a search engine which indexes only the websites that do not use any trackers. The damage of tracking industry to whole web is irreparable but I think we have an opportunity to build a new web that can have mechanisms to prevent any sort of tracking.
For some challenges, this is so impossible that people give up with logging in until it calms down in a few hours, even Roblox employees and full time developers
People have told me that Arkose pay people to run their captchas and present lots of fancy metrics of attacks they've stopped which is why some websites seem to be ok with destroying user experience by running this
"Look! there was an artificial traffic spike here... but then our systems kicked in and saved the day!" (By locking out paying users and letting in bots, because that's easier for the 'protection' company and gives the same stats for 'back to normal' in the reports)
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CAPTCHA is necessary for the same reason locking your car/house is necessary. You can probably not do it 9 times out of 10 and it will be fine, but then that 1/10 happens, all your stuff gets stolen, and you start locking your doors 100% of the time.
Anyway, at one point we decided to just block the IP ranges from countries like Russia and Vietnam, which seemed to have the most spam accounts.
Well, a more apt one would be that someone breaks into your house or car and puts all their litter everywhere so that you have to spend hours or days cleaning.
Sometimes I don't get the logic of these spambot creators. Do they honestly believe that creating thousands of fake accounts with links to "hot dating site" in my webshop will help them in any way? These data are completely invisible outside (why would anyone want to present their customer data to the world).
Eventually they even added it. Spam and vandalism was just too bad.
These are much better for the users, you share less data with Google and others, and are fairly trivial to implement. Easy to circumvent, but spammers aren't looking at you specifically.
Option A: 10% of time their unlocked house is broken into.
Option B: The poster was using an analogy to illustrate a point.
The whole pandemic reminded me I miss staying in hotels.
Not having to worry about groceries, lunch, cleaning ... A great hotel experience turns your holiday into a holiday experience. The older I get the whole bnb experience feels like a premium stressful hostel.
Why not? Isn't the hotel taking up space that could otherwise be housing?
- AirBNB is better for extended stays, where being able to cook / heat food, or make breakfast is a necessity (for budgetary or dietary reasons… or the fact that having to constantly leave the place to eat can become stressful).
- I work while traveling. Working from a hotel room is usually not nice (if possible at all), unless it’s an expensive room.
edit: I mean the captcha could keep all the "hard for robot" elements (recognizing top face, recognizing symbols) and remove the "hard for human" one (sum), like "select the dice that have the following symbols on top: <red circle>, <blue rectangle>, <green triangle>".
I'm guessing though they are more so looking at % correct and the actual behaviour of making a selection rather than just whether you are capable of adding up numbers.
So it's 100% correct or redo. Infuriating