Let's build a robot to kill the creator of "I am not a robot" CAPTCHA image grids

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/14/lets-build-a-robot-to-kill-t.html

13 Likes

Oh look. There’s a relevant XKCD comic for this:

That almost never happens.

16 Likes

This is a captcha I was given last year on a government website. I think I helped train a combat drone. :skull_and_crossbones:

30 Likes

There’s no way that isn’t the case. It would be absurd if they weren’t using the collected data for training AI.

11 Likes

Thank you Andrea for saying what needed to be said.

(Also, rumors that I am a robot have been greatly exaggerated)

5 Likes

I always liked this one.

13 Likes

CAPTCHA (any type, not just this AI-or-not stuff) represents everything that is wrong when software engineers are in charge of designing software systems.

When you see a CAPTCHA, it means that some lazy-arse developers have chosen, through utter lack of any kind of empathy or understanding of real people, to make users solve the engineers’ problems and paper over their general shittiness.

The CORRECT fucking SOLUTION to dealing with bots and nefarious actors (a tiny minority of traffic in many cases that gets past basic checks like RBLs) is to let them in and kill them off AFTER. DO NOT bother the 99% of legit people who want to use your stuff. Really - CAPTCHA makes me so damn angry for what it symbolises as much as for what it fails so grimly at.

Luckily, where I work and in my capacity as a designer, I am in a position to punch any engineer who suggests its use full square in the face. Twice. Then I take them to the CTO where we have a conversation about empathy and what engineering should be.

Other companies are clearly not as fortunate in this.

19 Likes

Proof of black helicopters!

2 Likes
2 Likes

I wonder what the programmers of the submit section of BB would say to this…

Also, you might be right.

4 Likes

Let’s build a robot…

They’re two steps ahead of you. This guy is totally robot-proof!

On December 31 I tried about five times to complete a CAPTCHA “select all of the squares that contain road signs” or “select all of the squares that show storefronts” - which, as pointed out, sometimes contained a tiny sliver of the overall image.

I was attempting to donate $100 to a charity, and I completely failed five out of five tries. I sent email to their webmaster saying that their captcha process was broken, and asking for another way to donate.

Their reply was “Please keep trying!” Who has that much time?

22 Likes

Yeah, fuck that. They can have my dollars, or they can have my time. They don’t get both.

21 Likes

Suspect? It’s a well known fact. These are provided by Google and are based on the ReCAPTCHA project, which originally helped to digitize books. Eventually Google moved on the having uses identify house numbers in Street View images, and now we mostly help it train image categorization algorithms.

If you have a Google account, and your logged in, and you don’t block the various Google tracking domains most of their CAPTCHAs will just ask you to check a box now unless you just opened your browser or you’ve tried to fill out a large number of forms with CAPTCHAs in a row.

5 Likes

Clearly a hotdog is a taco.

5 Likes

hot dog : taco :: salmon en croute : burrito

4 Likes

27 Likes

You could just replace salmon en croute with “hotpocket”

4 Likes

That would explain that time I got the place where I was beaten up by a fascist in the street. It was complete chance that was well into the one in millions range, but it did my PTSD no good at the time.

5 Likes

…well, my first instinct was to say “scotch egg” but that’s not quite right, is it.

2 Likes