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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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