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I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

(michaels.world)
405 points blindgeek | 5 comments | 18 Nov 24 10:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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Rastonbury ◴[18 Nov 24 14:46 UTC] No.42172733[source]▶
Some captchas are getting pretty discriminatory, not everyone lives in the West and can identify the objects they are asking you to. Another recent one sticks out where they asked me to pick a shape as the same number of conoids on screen. If you ask people on a street what a conoids I bet a significant amount will give you blank looks

Also at least now I know some people call those markings crosswalks

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dizhn ◴[18 Nov 24 15:23 UTC] No.42173178[source]▶
I routinely have problems with closeup images. To this day I don't know how much of the object I should be selecting? Also what is a traffic light? Is the pole part of it or not? Motorcycles seem to be hard too.

Once it showed me a picture of steps nothing but steps. I think I marked like 15 boxes.

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andrepd ◴[18 Nov 24 15:42 UTC] No.42173424[source]▶
If you think you're failing the captchas because you're doing them wrong, think again. Google captcha intentionally fails you a couple times if they don't have enough tracking info to determine that you're legit. So you solve the captcha correctly but are still lied to that "you've failed to solve the captcha, try again".

That and the "fading images slowly to pretend like you have bad internet" thing. Disgusting behaviour

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1. oniony ◴[18 Nov 24 16:16 UTC] No.42173835[source]▶
Maybe they purposely load the images slowly to make it more expensive for the bot owners.
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2. reginald78 ◴[18 Nov 24 16:43 UTC] No.42174132[source]▶
Also just catches people they think might be bots.

I've definitely encountered captcha tarpit logins before that could never be solved until I changed VPN endpoint. I was never getting in.

3. lesuorac ◴[18 Nov 24 18:48 UTC] No.42175559[source]▶
I kinda don't understand why we still have captchas. We've solved the asymmetric problem with proof-of-work; just make somebody solve something trivial so they spend more resources than you do.

Like if a bot requests your page 1/day its not a problem; but if they want to request it 1/ms then the proof-of-work becomes too much for them and its transparent to a person.

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4. dizhn ◴[18 Nov 24 18:54 UTC] No.42175631[source]▶
It might be an incentive to make people stay logged into their accounts. This wouldn't be hole reason but I am sure it's part of it. I used another laptop with a VPN for a few days and what used to be smooth experiences turned into a shit ton of "log in to prove you're not a robot". Both Reddit and Youtube did this.
5. andrepd ◴[18 Nov 24 19:19 UTC] No.42175865[source]▶
They don't. They load the images and then have js to fade them slooooowly. It's pernicious precisely because of that: its purpose is to annoy humans while being completely useless to thwart bots.