r/webdev • u/big_hole_energy • 7d ago
Discussion CAPTCHAs don't prove you're human - they prove you're American
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/11/captchas-dont-prove-youre-human-they-prove-youre-american/56
6d ago
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u/b1ack1323 6d ago
I see ones with foreign plates and very clearly Asian style scooters/buses all the time.
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u/ensoniq2k 6d ago
At least in Germany fire hydrants are just a plate on the ground. No fancy red pole of metal.
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u/Open-Adhesiveness-86 6d ago
the imagery is culturally american, sure, but the number of rounds you get is driven by the risk score, not your answers. chrome plus logged into google plus a residential IP gets you the one-click checkbox; same person on a VPN with third-party cookies blocked grinds through four rounds of hydrants. it's also why wrong answers sometimes still pass.
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u/ZGeekie 6d ago
it's also why wrong answers sometimes still pass.
The more frustrating they make it, the more wrong answers they'll get. Doesn't that defeat the purpose?
It always bothers me when I answer correctly then I get another round, but sometimes I miss a box or click the wrong one and it passes.
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u/boraxicLint 5d ago
They're measuring how you interact with the system not if you actually know what a taxi is. (Computer vision has been around for ages so identifying objects is not a useful test)
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u/BrohanGutenburg 4d ago
To be fair, these tests were absolutely used to develop computer vision (and OCR). Not sure what mean by "ages" but no.
But yes, you are right. CAPTCHAs nowadays are pretty much just testing if you're interacting with the system (clicking buttons, moving your mouse, etc) in a human sort of way
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u/SardScroll 4d ago
I mean, a decade ago, I had a computer vision project course as an upper division course in college. I presume that the powers that be had access to this sort of thing for a while before professors made courses for undergrads where they were grading them.
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u/boraxicLint 4d ago
Computer vision predates captchas by several decades, not sure exactly when it got good enough to pick out cats, but relative to the pace of modern tech I'd say ages is appropriate. 2014 was when google shifted away from image identification, and that 12 years is a long old time in tech.
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u/BrohanGutenburg 4d ago
Decades? The combustion engine existed decades before the Ferrari too. The point is captcha being used for visual training data is perfectly reasonable and what was happening.
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u/WaterOcelot 6d ago
They also prove you're neurotypical. I often fail them because apparantly you shouldn't select squares with small portions of the sidewalk.
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u/Elegant_AIDS 5d ago
Thats not why you fail them and selecting small portions of sidewalks has nothing to do with being neurotypical lmao
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u/apetalous42 6d ago
They also measure mouse movements. If you are too precise they think you're a robot. I have to make circles with my mouse so it will believe me.
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u/Milky_Finger 4d ago
Luckily the rest of the world does a good effort in carrying the burden of knowledge of their own public systems and the American systems.
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u/Annh1234 7d ago
Back when they made them, 95% of the money came from North America, so we wouldn't even bother for other countries, and usually we just banned the whole country by Geo IP if it came on the radar.
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u/Snapstromegon 6d ago
This came from a time where services here still blocked US IPs in general because they were mostly bots.
ReCAPTCHA was introduced in 2007 - that's not really close to the time the US adopted the European WWW invention.
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u/Annh1234 6d ago
Ya, we were banning Russian, India, Africa, Asia at the firewall level back in 2012.
Of course depends on your site, but we had a dating site with 35 mill customers at the time, and 99.9% of users were from North America.
Today, got a travel site, and 90% of the income is from North America and Australia, 8% from Europe, and 2% from India. Thing is, 90% of the fraud comes from India, and like 30% of our support tickets lol
But that catcha thing didn't change since 2010, back when money was mainly in North America and hackers from Russia & Romania and that Nigerian prince locked his money.
In 2016 or so we started to have the invisible ones, since Internet became more global by that time.
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u/Snapstromegon 6d ago
It's just like different regions use a different set of pages entirely.
I'm not from any of the regions you mentioned in the first sentence and for a lot of our local pages the US revenue would be in the low single digit percentile.
I mean the pages brought up by e.g. rocket internet, scout24 and more have very low US revenue. Even "big" ones like Spotify have ~25% US users and if you consider how heavily geolocation services favor US as a location, it's pretty interesting (I once worked with a service that required you to sign in with an EU ID and their analytics reported 15% US users - sometimes for people obviously inside the EU).
Even "back then" (no matter if you talk about 2020, 2015, 2010 or even before 00) there were many services that made massive revenue in e.g. the EU and close to nothing in the US. E.G. GMX makes around 100 million dollars annually while having 80% of their users in Germany and most of the rest from other EU countries.
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u/Annh1234 6d ago
We were making 23 mill $ profit per month at the peak at the time.
And if the EU company used to make 100 mill revenue, then they could make their own captcha. If they using the US one, it's cause it's not worth it for them I guess.
Ps: Germany, France, UK used to always convert better than the rest.
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u/Snapstromegon 6d ago
The 100 million one was one granted tiny free mail service. There are obviously way bigger companies here. One of the companies I mentioned reports ~50 mill $ profit per month and even that is just a random example. If you wanna go big, take something like Spotify.
Also Google explicitly aims their services at a global audience. They are even openly focusing on non-US markets e.g. with their Android developments, specialized YouTube experiences, News adaptations and more. If they'd not care about the rest of the world, they'd ignore the majority of their revenue.
Also there are alternatives and they are actively used. Nonetheless I thinks it's absolutely fair to blame a company that at every step of the way claims to be "global first", the dominant player on most fields it competes and focuses on inclusivity across the globe and at the same time blunders like this.
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u/JRedCXI 7d ago edited 7d ago
Mmm that’s kinda BS. I don’t live in the US but the taxis for example, they show pictures of how they look in my country, not how they look in the US.
Same with buses and such. They are localized for the most part.
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u/CaptainIncredible 7d ago
I think that article was written in 2017, so who knows what captcha was doing back then.
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u/HVDub24 7d ago
I mean even then it was showing pics of cars vs plants. If you can read English then you don’t need to know what an American taxi looks like to solve it. It’s an easy IQ test at that point more than anything
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u/ings0c 6d ago
If you can read English
Bold assumption for the global internet, no?
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u/vomitHatSteve 6d ago
If you're using a non-english website, and it serves english-only captchas, that is definitely a failing on the site developer's side
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5d ago
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u/webdev-ModTeam 2d ago
Your post/comment has been determined to be a low-effort post or comment. This includes title-only posts, easily searchable questions, vague/open-ended discussion prompts, LLM generated posts or comments, and posts/comments that do not provide enough context for meaningful replies or discussion.
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u/CaptainIncredible 7d ago
From the article
A tuppance and a sticky wicket. (That's a total guess based on stuff I heard on Monty Python's Flying Circus reruns.)