
“I want to do unpaid image classification” - luu
https://strugee.net/blog/2019/04/make-recaptchas-im-not-a-robot-accurate
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montroser
I always like to mix in some false positives when completing Google's
captchas. I identify yellow cars as school buses, occluded street signs as
storefronts, valleys as rivers... They still let you in, up to a point.

It probably just makes their algorithms stronger in the end, like how when you
randomly kick over Boston Dynamics' robot dogs, they eventually get better at
balancing than if you had just let them be.

But I like to think I'm sticking it to them.

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martin_a
Somewhere someone in a self-driving car is dying because of you...

;-)

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everdrive
A lot of these disagree with my assessment, and it's not clear why. Should I
click every square which has some pixels of the object? Apparently not?
Apparently I'm supposed to click the squares which contain only the bulk of
the object. Sometime it seems if the object in question is also in the
background, I'm not meant to click that one? And sometimes I am. I hate these
these things.

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xsmasher
What constitutes a "road sign"? Do they mean traffic-related signs only, or
also street markers, or billboards as well?

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jfengel
"Why are we, the users, not allowed to have access to the fruits of the labor
that we are forced to provide for free?"

Well... you are being given access to a resource, aren't you? I mean, you're
being shown the reCAPTCHA because you asked for something. You could have paid
for it by letting them track you, but you decided it wasn't worth that. So the
backup price is doing some work for them. But you're not doing it for free.
You're doing it because you want whatever it is that's being guarded by the
reCAPTCHA in the first place.

Maybe that price is too high for you, but you were the one coming in with a
request in the first place. You do the thing and you get "paid" immediately.

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vokep
But reCAPTCHA isn't some sort of microtransaction replacement for tracking,
its just a thing to check if you're a person. I'm a person. Don't make me do
work to prove it.

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interfixus
HN seems to be doing just fine without really being in that particular arms
race.

And out in the real world, captchas way too often - not always, but way too
often - signal content not actually worth following.

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OrgNet
Even Microsoft uses Google's captchas (at
[https://earth.minecraft.net/](https://earth.minecraft.net/))...

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mmcwilliams
I would absolutely use an alternative to reCaptcha that requires users perform
small tagging and classification problems for open datasets. A “freeCaptcha”,
if you will.

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sirn
In that case, can’t a bot use the freeCaptcha dataset to train their Captcha
solver?

