Readit NewsNot that you need to hear it from me, but you will be remembered and missed.
The absurdist humor of my impending demise making the front page of hackernews and being debated by the denizens thereof is not lost on me.
Audio captchas don't work for people with hearing issues and/or who don't speak your n supported languages, where n is usually <10. I've had to help people out with these over the phone, it was not fun.
Even for people for whom they do work, it's worth keeping in mind that bots can solve them by now, and so users whose activity looks too fraudulent, who are still given access to the visual captchas, have to be blocked from using the audio ones. I have also seen this happen.
Text captchas are a non-option by now, they're very easy to solve with LLMs, and the way they have to be phrased makes it impossible to align LLMs not to solve them, like you can do with the visual ones.
Google's ReCaptcha can get away with having no actual challenge for most users, blind or otherwise, but that's because they're Google, they do enough user tracking that they don't actually need a captcha. Google is the only company that can get away with this, and even for them, it doesn't work in all situations, even when the user fully trusts Google and has not adjusted any privacy preferences.
Sure, you could stop using captchas entirely, if you're fine with receiving dozens of viagra ads on every single platform each day, abolishing all "contact us" and comment forms on the internet, having a significantly higher credit card fraud rate (which translates directly to higher prices and a much worse experience for consumers), and getting all your semi-public records and social media activity immediately scraped by shady companies and sold to anybody who expresses any interest. Unsurprisingly, most users are, in fact, not fine with this.
Public content on the Internet should be scrapable. That's what public means.
The fact that my reddit posts were publicly available never bothered me. Even if they were going to be used to train some LMM. What does bother me is reddit locking up my posts and making exclusive deals with Google to train Google's LMM.
Preventing scraping isn't good for the average user; it is good for the company that wants to take content created by said user, lock it up, and sell it to their buddies.
"So I've been trying to sign in repeatedly to set the accessibility cookie since last night. Every time I click the submit button, I get the useless error message "an error has occurred, please try again".
My friend, who shares my roof and my static IP, got banned from hcaptcha's accessibility service last year for being too smart to be blind. And I suspect you all have banned our IP and not just his account.
For the record, my static IP address is (redacted).
See https://michaels.world/2023/11/i-was-banned-from-the-hcaptch... for his story. I have been broadcasting this to websites frequented by technically capable people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42171164https://lobste.rs/s/qbkd0u/i_was_banned_from_hcaptcha_access...
Please let your bosses know that I plan to pursue legal action against hCaptcha and/or amplify the truth to destroy its reputation in the public square. I will also be reaching out to websites who utilize hCaptcha, letting them know that the captcha provider they employ is refusing to provide reasonable accomodations to blind people.
Whether it be with the force of law or the force of satyagraha, your bosses are going to get a message and we will win.
"Hi there, sorry to hear you're having difficulties!
We have an alternative authentication scheme that you may prefer: https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility
You can sign up here: https://dashboard.hcaptcha.com/signup?type=accessibility
This lets you avoid the challenge altogether after registration.
It is designed for users with any kind of difficulty solving the challenges.
Thanks for reaching out, and hope this makes your experience better."
"So I've been trying to sign in repeatedly to set the accessibility cookie since last night. Every time I click the submit button, I get the useless error message "an error has occurred, please try again".
My friend, who shares my roof and my static IP, got banned from hcaptcha's accessibility service last year for being too smart to be blind. And I suspect you all have banned our IP and not just his account.
For the record, my static IP address is (redacted).
See https://michaels.world/2023/11/i-was-banned-from-the-hcaptch... for his story. I have been broadcasting this to websites frequented by technically capable people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42171164https://lobste.rs/s/qbkd0u/i_was_banned_from_hcaptcha_access...
Please let your bosses know that I plan to pursue legal action against hCaptcha and/or amplify the truth to destroy its reputation in the public square. I will also be reaching out to websites who utilize hCaptcha, letting them know that the captcha provider they employ is refusing to provide reasonable accomodations to blind people.
Whether it be with the force of law or the force of satyagraha, your bosses are going to get a message and we will win.
Given how we learn languages and words based upon encountering them in contexts, it makes sense that terms that we use in outwardly similar contexts reflect the subjective experience that each of us relate to those terms. We don't have access to another's subjective experience so I can see how it would encourage the assumption that we all perceive things the same way.
There might be many undetected variances in perception akin to aphantasia lurking in us waiting to be discovered.
The other problem we have is that online companies tend to be accountable to no one. Short of law suits, my friend who got banned from hCaptcha for "not being blind" has no recourse, because nobody is accountable.