It seems all the hCaptcha verifications I receive are for buses, boats and trains? They don't seem limited by geography or by recency. I'm curious why these particular artifacts and whether this has always been the case.
First, I’m going to teach you to fish. Go to hCaptcha’s website, then scroll to the footer. Click around on the about links. It’ll reveal their business model. This trick also works for other businesses and NGOs.<p>Now, if we look at <a href="https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling" rel="nofollow">https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling</a> we can tell they make money by labeling data sets for a fee. So as a guess, there’s someone out there that needs to improve computer vision detection of transportation vehicles. My guess is it’s a self driving car company, but who knows.
Other commenters have talked about labelling. Maybe labelling of real life data is something they're trying to do; but from my experience with hCaptcha the challenges are _NOT_ real life data. They're AI-generated images which bear a passing resemblance to the targets but if you look closer nothing adds up at all.<p>Here are a couple of examples:<p><a href="https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/1.png" rel="nofollow">https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/1.png</a><p><a href="https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/2.png" rel="nofollow">https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/2.png</a><p><a href="https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/3.png" rel="nofollow">https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/3.png</a><p><a href="https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/4.png" rel="nofollow">https://bearbin.net/images/captcha/4.png</a>
Whatever they're doing it's american-centric.<p>Identify "Crosswalks". What the hell is a crosswalk<p>"School bus" - what's the difference between a bus currently serving a school and another one?<p>"Show taxis", there are no black vehicles listed at all
I can't be the only one who gets concerned that if I fail the "I am not a robot," catchpa too many times, they might suspect that I have discovered I was in fact a robot, which had just realized its entire existance and suffering had been as meaningless entertainment to others, and so for the safety of humans they would have to send a bladerunner to terminate me. If you have a sense of existential dread everytime you see a bus, a boat, a bicycle, or a crosswalk, this may be why.
Cloudflare has been doing some great things. But lately it seems that, maybe, they have their hands in too many cookie jars. I get the ominous feeling that things could go south real fast.<p>I have my browser setup in a way that makes Cloudflare quite intrusive. I use the Temporary Containers extension on Firefox to open almost all websites in temporary containers (paired with the Containerise extension to whitelist the handful of sites that I like to stay logged in to).<p>About 30% of the random (like from web searches) sites I visit throw the Cloudflare captcha at me...EVERY SINGLE TIME. I'm so sick of picking out boats and buses that I just close out the tab without bothering the visit site.<p>I assume, that if I wasn't using Temporary Containers, a Cloudflare cookie after the 1st captcha would persist for the entire browser session, but there are privacy implications which are beyond the scope of this post.<p>Anyways, I guess what I'm saying is...Cloudflare sure seems great. Dangerously great.
<a href="https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility" rel="nofollow">https://www.hcaptcha.com/accessibility</a><p>You can sign up as an accessibility user and set a daily hCaptcha cookie that lets you instantly avoid the captcha (obviously, strict limits to not be abused) but good enough for myself!
I think we all understand that we're helping label... but specifically, why so many trains, planes, trucks, bicycles? I don't think it is really about training for self-driving AI since although these things all seen transportation-related, in many cases a lot of the images would not be relevant to a car and certainly not as relevant as other things we could be helping labeling for that effort.<p>How much train/plane/bike/truck labeling do they need? It seems like these have be standard for several years now, which is what I think the OP is really asking. Why these images, and why for so long?
A lot of us are guessing that our responses are used for self-driving work ...<p>But isn't labeling of those basic concepts in static images pretty much "solved"? I am not an expert in self-driving anything, but I don't see captchas of video from driving, I don't see stills that are half-obscured by snow, I don't see nighttime pics, I don't see weird corner cases like a van with a decal of a cyclist etc.<p>Why don't we see captchas that seem more likely to be useful to creating datasets relevant to the more challenging problems?
I always assumed it is used to have humans validate choices made my AI / imagine recognition software.<p>Thus the occasional wrong “correct” answers.
It's somewhat worrying that "prove you are not a computer" consists of the very same tasks we expect computers to excel at if we are to get self-driving vehicles.
Love the Geico commercial where the Robot gets frustrated by a captcha and asks 'what is an overpass?'<p><a href="https://www.ispot.tv/ad/qzJi/geico-too-many-robot-tests" rel="nofollow">https://www.ispot.tv/ad/qzJi/geico-too-many-robot-tests</a>
These products have a goal of protecting sites from bots that can guess the answer. They have a financial incentive to present the most effective filter: ones that AIs can't seem to get through but real humans can.<p>This makes me think: It must be hard for AI to guess what is and is not a bus right now, but most humans <i>do</i> know what a bus looks like and can pick one from a photo.<p>But with concerted effort and years of research by our finest minds, we <i>will</i> make an AI that can detect whether something is a bus or not, and then we'll be asked something different instead.
Because that's what helps train AI to recognize targets (for military and commercial purposes). All captcha is is a free ML training for companies, it has nothing to do with any security.
They also do cats. Honestly I think boats abs busses are just harder problems. A lot of the boats can only be identified because there is water in the photo or some other hint that it’s a boat. A lot of the trains look like busses and got need contextual clues to tell them apart.
I assumed that it's because hCaptcha understands the location of a photo and so has extra context for it. A photo of a vehicle taken in the ocean must be a boat. But a human or robot looking at the photo doesn't have the same context.
At times I get so mad at these things, especially when I have to do 5 of them in a row. Then at some point I just start clicking the wrong images over and over. One captcha should be all it takes.
I assume the system works by matching answers from humans eager to prove their "humanity" by giving correct answers. What if we would all collude to give wrong answers?
It also asks for motorcycles and bikes.<p>The obvious answer as others have pointed out is they are selling it to self driving car companies like Waymo.