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Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices
385 points by JeanMarcS on Feb 21, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 377 comments
So I wanted to book some places for my next holidays on Airbnb and I came on the most annoying CAPTCHA I ever saw

https://i.postimg.cc/sXppmyxm/airbnbdes.png

Now you have to make sum of dices only to acces the website. And 5 times in a row.

And be sure to make no mistake ! I unfortunatly did on the fifth/last one (was getting really p*ssed), and had to start over !

So this morning I had to make around 50 dices sum just to acces this website.

I don't kow who came with this idea, but I find this really bad.




I see this as high-IQ software developers building systems to shut out non-high-IQ people from society. Managers look at these CAPTCHAs and think "oh I could solve these no problem, let's use them". In fact, they can only be solved by unusually smart people or by ML bots. Arkose Labs (the maker of this particular captcha) explicitly advertises that their methods can keep out "low-skilled workers" on "human fraud farms". They keep out everyone else too if they're not that good at mental rotation and mental arithmetic or logic -- this dice puzzle and the mouse labyrinth puzzle are pretty much prototypical IQ test problems.


Not sure I agree with your “opressive” high-IQ developers spin, but it’s clear that whoever implements this kind of captcha (even the not-so-challenging ones) doesn’t give a shit about user experience and deserve to metaphorically-speaking, burn in hell. I think it’s just an example for how developers should not make decisions about UI or UX in general. It doesn’t really matter how hard to solve the captcha is, it shouldn’t exist in the first place, even those with: “pick all the fire hydrants”.


AirBNB doesn't want bots scraping their data.

They currently have a monopoly on STR listings - so they don't really need to care about user experience.

This is what you end up with.


> AirBNB doesn't want bots scraping their data

They’re likely also trying to push users to their app.


I've never understood this concept. Reddit is the worst, though at least you can argue that they probably have all the figures to back up the idea that engagement is much higher when they push someone onto the app. For a travel app which you are only using a few times a year I can't imagine this holds.

It seems like it's product managers justifying their investment in the native applications in a lot of cases.


A company I worked for in the past explicitly made the mobile web version worse so people would use the app. They did it because with the app they could send offers through push notifications. Ugh.


It also is more likely when to users to come back after stopping using the app for a while if it's still installed and as such they can "stumble" about it.

Anyway the most well known example is probably YT which slowly reduced over time the functionality of their Web version for mobile, and also put things in to make it more annoying, too.


I don't know why so many people leave so many notifications active. I've even had people tell me that lack of notifications are the reason they don't like just using web sites on mobile.


Lots easier to collect user data without having to worry about inconvenient browser privacy protections?


There is one simple reason: it's harder to block ads in the app version.


Does the airbnb app or website even serve third party ads?


It's less useful to focus on this single example, and more on the industry. Once these types of ideas gain momentum, they just become to be accepted as truth.

"If everybody else pushes users to their app over web, there must be good reasons to do it, we should too."

Expecting companies to rationally analyzed whether that is actually the case, is, well, expecting too much of companies.


Come to think of it, does GDPR apply to apps?


Yes


It applies to all data, no matter how it was collected, including manually and for employees, with some minor exceptions for small companies.


I built a client for their mobile API a while ago. Send it through Tor. That was the plan but I decided the project itself wasn’t worth it.


They have a monopoly on STR listings? I use VRBO at least as often (probably more) than AirBnb.


It does seem like a very bizarre thing to say. As if GPT-3 decided to comment on HN.


VRBO made 2 billion in bookings, which is impressive but still less than one fourth of AirBnb.


It's a pointless war and their data is all over the place. With millions of residential IPs scraping data, its not possible to keep data in public and not get it scraped. All they are doing is making it worth someone's time to put it all together and provide a near realtime api for all the scraped data. Same goes for amazon and anyone who thinks they can protect their data.


I'm fairly certain that Airbnb used to give their data away on a different website. I used the dataset in my undergrad.


Airbnb gives their data away. http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data.html


This looks to be an activist project focused on shutting out Airbnb, check out the about page.


There are some very American ones such as the fire hydrants that really catch me out as someone who's not American, I can only imagine what it's like for those with English as a second language.


Oh ya, it's really funny.

It can be a problem even for Google Captcha.

Like:

- Taxies are not yellow in all countries

- Fire hydrants like that aren't a thing in many countries either (e.g. in Germany they are below a small hatch in the ground)

- US School Busses

- Even Street Signs can look and be placed very different.

- What is recognized as a shop/restaurant and similar based on the style of the sign board

But that is typical SV: Solving problems for the US from a US perspective and assuming it works in most countries.

But most countries are _not_ like the US.


It reminds me of a thread the other week about data protections in france. People were complaining about not being able to have a one size fits all solution for all jurisdictions (and that that one size should have US style limited data protections).

The idea that stuck with me from it is that we’ve been spoiled as devs by the early low hanging fruit version of the internet. The MVPs were enough better than non-digital incumbents that we could just export california everywhere.


> In fact, they can only be solved by unusually smart people

Wut? Have you actually ever met a person who can't? I always suspected the electoral majority is not particularly bright (which sort of contradicts the idea of near-100 being an average IQ nevertheless) but if this is "unusually smart" then things feel really creepy.


I never met one in person, but in email support, yes.

And it makes sense.

Statistically, an IQ of 100 is the population median, meaning, assuming a Gaussian repartition (which it usually is for human traits), that's about 10% of people scoring around 80 or lower.

To give an idea of what level of intelligence this means, we can wonder what that kind of people cannot do?

In the US, the military don't do a systematic IQ test for recruitment, but when they did one, it was deemed illegal to induct any one if they possessed an IQ less than or equal to 81.

That means 1 person out of 10 is not intelligent enough to be in the lowest rank in the army.

It's not far fetched to think of the possibility that some functioning members of society are not capable of solving mental problems most humanity think are trivial.

In fact, that are also trivial for AI, although we may all end up to fall into that basket one day or the other.


I know some quite clever people who could not solve this, for different reasons.

One of the brightest, quickest witted people I know experiences significant dyslexia and dyscalculia. She would fail at this and it would make her quietly angry at you for making her go through it.

I also know someone with a vision disorder who would struggle.

Hell, when I am tired, I would have to close one eye to pass -- I have this issue with quite a lot of captchas, and I am not legally vision-impaired. And I would be angry at the developer for making me struggle.

Furthermore, I think in a world with an ageing population it might be worth considering that puzzles like this are a bit like early dementia tests. It's worth thinking what data gets collected when the world is asked to perform brainteasers to gain access to essential functions.


>Wut? Have you actually ever met a person who can't?

I have met a few, yes, including people who are intellectually limited (colloquially called "dumb"), people who were born or acquired mental handicaps, people who are suffering most likely suffering from dyscalculia (dyslexia for arithmetic/numbers). E.g. we think my grandma might have had a milder form of the latter, as she had a lot of trouble adding up numbers in particular, which would have made this CAPTCHA very hard for her - but not impossible. And a friend of my mom has Turner syndrome, which is linked to dyscalculia, and she is indeed very bad at basic math.


In most of the cases you mentioned, that would be considered a handicap though. In such cases it's a failing on adding an accesability option or secondary option.

Among people, who aren't straight up unable due to handicaps, who couldn't solve them? It seems easy enough that mostly anyone could.


If your starting position is that dyslexia and dyscalculia are handicaps that mean people need to be treated differently, you're failing right out of the gate.

They are quite common problems with a wide spectrum of severity.

Back when you could take your car to a local garage, your car would very likely be repaired by a very clever person who was dyslexic (even dyscalculate) because as a career, men in particular who struggled with written language (or even modestly complex maths -- differential gear yes, differential equation no) could do it and thrive at it.

Should that person be treated as handicapped if they need to fill in a form? Or should forms not be designed to make people waste their time with puzzles or kafkaesque processes of any kind?


[flagged]


I don't see why my grandma - if she was still alive - or my mom's friend wouldn't be booking Airbnbs; people of at least "average" intelligence by the way, except for their issues with basic math. My mom's friend is an avid global traveler in fact, and if I remember correctly she used Airbnb on several occasions in the past, and yes, she does her own bookings.


[edited to remove a bit of my comment because it did actually come across as rude, my apologies]

Summing dice together is not the only ability you need to solve this puzzle.

It's not the totality of what is being tested.

In other words, it's instructive to consider why a computer struggles to solve it with this particular photographic presentation, and why a person might.


What the fuck does summing dice together have to do with booking an Airbnb?

“If you cannot lift 100 lbs over your head, should you be operating a fork lift?”


If technology doesn't make things easier, what's the point of it?


Well, this is a cynical answer, but I think in this case: make money. Making things easier is one way to use technology to make money. Having a significant market share and making it difficult for others to enter the market is another way to use technology to make money.

There was (probably) a point in history where AirBnB existed to make things easier. Now I'm pretty sure it's just there to make money.


> Have you actually ever met a person who can't?

Regardless of the answer to that, it focuses on the wrong problem.

The problem is the user-hostile concept of captchas in the first place. Imagine going to a brick and mortar store (or travel agency) and being forced to solve some ridiculous puzzle to be allowed inside to do a transaction.

It's not ok in physical life, it's not ok on a commerce website.


Here is a video about how to solve this captcha. The comments clearly indicate that many people are having trouble with this kind of captcha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGl2SMg4rU4


I have met people who can't and people who won't. Also, a lot of people in their 50s and above aren't solving this.


I think you would need some statistics to back up the over 50s argument. If I were to give an instinctive opinion it would be that under 40s are poor at mental arithmetic because they have always had a machine to do it for them whereas over 50s can split a bill in their heads quite quickly.


I’m 43. What exactly happens once I turn 50 that I will no longer be able to add a couple of single digit numbers?

Incidentally, how old are you, and do you have any involvement with IT hiring?


A study was making the rounds last week saying that the brain stays "sharp" until 60. Presumably 60 is an average which means people in their 50s will start to see some decline.


I think they should do some studies whether there’s any basis to my observation of a sudden sharp rise in IQ among SDEs once they reach mid-30ies, as they seem to suddenly want to be treated as adults and no longer fall for foosball tables, slides, colorful company attire, and free vending machine lunches as a substitute for being treated like people. ;)

Coming back to the topic, it’s interesting how this IQ cliff seems to exclusively affect ICs in IT, while somehow spares all of the middle and upper management, that all seems to be on top of their compensation game as they gracefully age ever so upwards in titles.


> Have you actually ever met a person who can't?

Certainly, when I read this I immediately thought of three.


I personaly know some people for whom solving OP's puzzle would require enough effort and take long enough that they'd just complain and drop it.


The average IQ by definition is 100. In civilised countries it is above that.


That's why I wrote near-100 rather than 100. I know it can be closer to 110 or to 80 in specific countries/states. Pollution is proven to harm average IQ, other aspects of the living conditions during childhood can harm average person mental development also. It has been mentioned here on HN a number of times that childhood lead poisoning harmed mental development of a huge part of American population.


In some definitions of civil, the US would not qualify.


I think you're flattering yourself a bit if you believe that being able to solve a CAPTCHA means you have an unusually high IQ


You've never spent much time around lower IQ people, I take it. The type of people who drive trucks, or bag groceries, and will never be able to do more than that. Good people, most of them, of course. But allergic to logical, deliberate thought, and barely capable of it when they try. Not everyone can do basic math, and many of those who can't, have no problem booking a hotel.

These CAPTCHAs require more thought than the platform otherwise does, therefore it will gate some people from using the platform.


If I could only give more upvotes. I'm one of the few self-taught tech employees I've met at AWS. And I'm consistently told (during yearly reviews and casually) that my ability to communicate tech issues simply to both tech and non-tech people is my 'super power'.

Lots of CS grads who went immediately to a high-paid CS positions have no clue how to distill complex topics into jargon-free statements that are readily understood. And this lack of self-awareness (i.e. they don't understand that they're using specialized terms and/or skills) bleeds into everything they do.

I can see a bunch of engineers sitting in a review meeting all agreeing 'This is simple math. Let's do it!' Unless there's someone from a non-tech background in the meeting, there's unlikely to be someone saying 'Uh, our audience is people wanting a place to sleep. We shouldn't gate our service with math.'


A High-IQ Software developer:

- Calculates the sum on the first picture

- Reads the instructions

- Reads the instructions again

- Stares at the six pictures for one second

- Closes the page


In other words captcha use on some essential services might be a case for the courts if those services are thereby inaccessible.


They don’t even have to be essential services. US equal rights law would apply to any public accommodation - AirBnB being a perfect example


They don't even keep out low skilled workers as they don't need much IQ, at least for a worker who is repeatedly solving them and was thought the best approach to do so.

What they keep out is people with Discalculia, which are in no way stupid or low IQ, just can't to math well. (They also would probably be able to do it, but probably take to long and/or get offended enough to not do it).


I thought these captcha companies made money by selling image classification services? Isn’t it possible that someone wanted these dice images classified for some machine learning project to do with dice?


I wonder if they are doing businesses in the EU especially Germany, because then they would be pretty much in breach of the German constitution and even admitting to doing so intentionally...


How do I get to play with this?

I want to know if I would be filtered out


You can go to https://www.twilio.com/login/password and enter a fake email address and repeated fake passwords. Or one of the addresses listed here: https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/178 Though I got pretty easy ones trying it.


twilio site actually prompts a captcha after a few unsuccessful login tries but it just says "Pick any square". I've tried a few times and clicking any of the 6 options underneath work lol.


Proof of work. I wonder if these mental exercises do increase IQ.


They increase puzzle solving abilities/speed, just like any practice. Which means it increases the IQ measure, but not what people think IQ stands for.


A few studies a while back showed that those 'brain training' apps on the Nintendo consoles didn't actually improve any IQ or mental agility, so it's fair to say that these sort of captchas or similar systems don't either.

https://www.sciencealert.com/do-brain-training-games-really-...


At least you'll get better at solving that particular kind of problem.

So if IQ is defined as your ability to solve that kind of problem, then yes, your IQ will increase.


It isn't.


They improve your ability of doing them.


Wait are you really suggesting that the Airbnb programmers thought "guys, we need to stop low-IQ people from using our site"?? That's crazy.

> explicitly advertises that their methods can keep out "low-skilled workers" on "human fraud farms"

Uhm yeah. They're trying to keep people from human fraud farms (who happen to be low-skilled workers) out. It's not a weird elitist conspiracy to keep all low-IQ people from society out.

Why is HN so full of paranoid conspiracy theories?


How do you think they distinguish a low-skilled worker working for a human fraud farm from a low-skilled worker not working for a human fraud farm?


I don't. We're talking about intent.


They don't need to distinguish between those cases. They just need to make the cost of solving the captchas (either automatically or by paying a farm of low-skilled workers to solve them) higher than the value of the abuse.


Missing the point, which is that unless you can distinguish, then an action that stops low-skilled workers from getting through will stop those people whether or not they're doing it for fraud or because they're a genuine customer.

It's probably not their intent to stop the latter, but the effect is still discriminatory.


> paranoid

In this case one (excluding "human fraud farms") and the other (excluding people who would work, but currently don't work, at human fraud farms) are the same thing. Not at all paranoid, in other words :)


That's not what is paranoid. OP was suggesting that they are deliberately trying to keep low-IQ people out as part of some elitist plot, and this is simply the best way to do it.

Rather than the obvious boring reality which is that this is intended to keep low-skilled Indian captcha solvers out and as an unfortunate side effect also keeps low-IQ people out.


When you get to a certain level of smartness and responsibility you don't get to shrug and say "oh well I never saw this coming".


Nobody is suggesting that they didn't see it coming. The conspiracy is that they wanted it to happen.


Why is HN so full of paranoid conspiracy theories?

Because many of us have been to this rodeo before.

The history of the tech industry has no shortage of thought leaders, heroes, and jabbering masses with low morals and feet on both sides of the eugenics theory.


It's Arkose Labs (also used by Roblox, GitHub, Dropbox, Twitch, and more). There's some more links here: https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/178 (Buster is a browser extension for automated captcha solving). You can subscribe here https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/320

Their audio captcha (no longer available?) involved listening to 3 MIDI tunes and picking "the sad one".


> Their audio captcha (no longer available?) involved listening to 3 MIDI tunes and picking "the sad one".

Given that a large part of the world doesn't use the major/minor dichotomy, or even equal temperament, this seems like a terrible way to verify someone is a human...

My favourite recaptchas, if one can have such a thing, are the shape sequence selection ones as they don't make significant assumptions about culture or education.


I saw this one today, which asks you to pick a "cheese" illustration: https://imgur.com/a/fQSQpX4.

I'm very much of the opinion that almost all modern captchas are american-centric. Mailboxes, fire hydrants, Trams are not recognizable for billions of people.


Buses: American style school/prison buses are only recognisable from a childhood of watching american media

Sidewalks/Crosswalks: American English terms

Traffic Lights: We never put them in strings above roads

A lot of US-centric assumptions built into captchas I see


My “favorite” ones happen where the site doesn’t pass on the language and you get a captcha in another language. So now you have to google translate and hope to language gods that the word doesn’t have multiple meanings.


I've had this happen to me before [0]: I just got one "mark everything that shows bikes" with pictures of cyclists, motorbikes and cars. The translation used the norwegian word "sykler" which to me is the human powered one. But it looked like it wanted me to also select motorized ones as well. That's something that's lost in the translation.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25227518


It's not too uncommon for Japanese websites to use CAPTCHAs in hiragana, so you have to be able to type in はしらす or whatever


Assuming the content is in Japanese this is probably the expected result though.

For international websites it would be good to follow the users chosen language. But if a website doesn't have a english version(or other alphabet based version), expecting alphabets in a captcha is not very reasonable.


> expecting alphabets in a captcha is not very reasonable.

As an American expat living in a country that doesn't speak English by default... I'd say it's fairly reasonable. Captchas aren't the responsibility of the site owner, the captcha integration docs should explain how to pass the language through to them and should require developers to do so.


> Mailboxes, fire hydrants, Trams are not recognizable for billions of people.

Cheese is though? And I'm pretty sure most of the world would recognise those things anyway - you forget how much American culture is spread through films and TV.


Putting aside the fact that at least 50% of the world doesn't speak English and might not even know what "cheese" is, a lot of the world does not subsist on dairy products or use cheese and will not recognise images of cheese. Neither will they understand the traditional American schoolbus which is a very distinctive thing and will pick any old bus that appears on the photos as long as it looks like a large motor vehicle. Very few people percentage-wise will know what "crosswalk" or "sidewalk" or "mailbox" mean because these are very specifically American terms

Just for context, 65% of India is rural and a ton of these people do not have access to the internet and will have zero idea how to get through these arcane captchas. The internet is effectively locked off to them


a ton of these people do not have access to the internet and will have zero idea how to get through these arcane captchas.

While I agree with both the theme and vigor of your position, your sentence made me wonder how people are seeing CAPTCHAs without the internet?


Your argument only makes sense if the content behind the captcha is also local and relevant to the user.


> 65% of India is rural and a ton of these people do not have access to the internet and will have zero idea how to get through these arcane captchas

Damn I didn't know so many rural Indians without internet access are using AirBnB...


Did you look at the capture? For cheese it was a camera not actual cheese.


I believe you failed the CAPTCHA. I assume the bottom right is the only correct answer.


Jeez you're right, how could I have overlooked the cheese?! I thought it was even worse than it is, assuming you're supposed to associate the camera with someone taking a picture and saying "cheese".


What's it like being a robot?


Is swiss cheese strictly American? That's the only one a user would need to know to proceed. They don't have to identify anything else beyond "not cheese".


The best one is the chinese captcha, I think. You just slide a puzzle piece into place.


Chinese captchas can be much worse when you're on domestic websites, to the point where I need to get my wife to solve it for me because I'm not sure which character doesn't have a specific stroke


I believe Binance has the same thing. This to measure my human imperfect way of sliding the puzzle piece, I suppose.


I don't get this captcha tbh. Shouldn't it be trivial to create minor variations based off of a real human slide?


But I don't understand how we can't make a program that has a bit of randomness.


Sure you can, but it's not trivial to make the random seem like a human random at a large scale. What are the parameters of a human slide and what kind of distributions are they? And there might be things they do under the hood that affect those parameters like fingerprinting. You would need a lot of data to imitate a human, but the provider of the captcha has a lot more data than you to counter your effort.

Thats why it's usually just easier to pay some people pennies to solve them by hand.


Ah, interesting, I didn't think of the information asymmetry there, thank you.


It feels like all of the captchas/alternatives are suffering the same problem of "computers are just better than people". By 2025, captchas will require in depth knowledge of American culture. I got this image from a time traveler: https://postimg.cc/3WrTbgmF


It's like they're maximizing ML success rate while minimizing non-white success rate. This is absurdly transparent implicit bias. I don't know how these things make it out the door. I don't get how these things can be shown and someone says "Yeah, I want that. I'll pay for that." Just pathetic all around.


Given that the year is 2022 and even Michael Jackson is known worldwide, I’m pretty sure humans now recognize western music concepts.


I am from a western background, and the last time I checked, I had about a 54% chance of correctly telling minor from major (p > 99.5%).


It's probably no longer available because picking out "the sad one" just amounts to picking out the one in a minor key. Machines should be able to do that fairly easily.


That's the ironic part, machines are able to solve these just fine so they defeat the purpose entirely.

I wonder, does recaptcha work with your google account? Because at some point a lot of people will end up doing some kind of identity verification on there. But I think Google and co can make a reasonable assertion about being human by looking at activity across said Google account - location, emails, documents, etc.


Yes, it does. Which means that people like me who block Google domains outside of designated sandboxes have a flipping awful time with ReCAPTCHA.


That's why I've added the following rule to allow recaptcha.

  @@||google.com/recaptcha/\*$script


> That's the ironic part, machines are able to solve these just fine so they defeat the purpose entirely.

I wonder if the strategy is to create such a large number of different tasks that it becomes practically difficult to build solutions for all of them individually.

For instance, detecting 'sad' music is an easy task, but what if that is only 1 of 500 possible Audio-Captcha types - which also include 'select the angriest speech' and 'identify which music was played on a record player'. Individually these are probably moderately easy to solve, but if they can write/create new Captcha types quicker than people can solve them, they would stay ahead (unless someone can generalise them - but generalising is a much more difficult challenge).

It's effectively the WarioWare approach to Captcha's - an individual WarioWare game would be trivial to automate/solve, however automating the full WarioWare series would be a real big task (again, unless some sort of generalised AI can be used).

They could even employ some interesting strategies with who/when they show particular catcha types to in order to throw off bot writers.


The strategy is security through obfuscation. Solutions to solve some specific CAPTCHAs haven't spread through the CAPTCHA-solving ecosystem yet. Solving most of these CAPTCHAs are easy, and you could probably repurpose and retrain existing solutions given enough data.


> Solving most of these CAPTCHAs are easy, and you could probably repurpose and retrain existing solutions given enough data.

You are right that you can probably repurpose / retrain solutions fairly quickly, but if the CAPTCHA-creators can create frameworks to create new Captcha-types fast enough (e.g. put a structure in place so it takes 1 person a day to create a new type, and you can have a team of 20 people churning out new ones constantly) then the economics of running a captcha-solving team becomes exponentially harder, and building a captcha-solver involves a lot more work.

i.e. If it is quicker to create a Captcha rather than solve it, and the people who are creating the Captcha's have more resources than the Captcha-crackers, they will stay ahead.

Security through obscurity is a valid strategy to slow down efforts, and will definetly help when you have teams of people working to defeat your security.


For many tasks it's cheap enough to hire captcha solvers. From that we should assume that a vastly larger number of tasks become cheap enough if someone trains automated solvers on the output of the human solvers.

It doesn't need to be perfect either in most cases - just good enough that you can drive down cost progressively by trying an automated solver first before passing it on to a human if it fails.

Ultimately you'll only stop people in those cases where the monetary value of bypassing it is very low. (EDIT: And because such solvers are reusable, you need to effectively never re-use captcha types between high-value targets and low-value targets or people will end up training solvers on high-value targets as part of paid services and they'll trickle down to lower value targets as soon as they're automated fully)

Frankly, some captcha's are getting obnoxious enough that we're getting close to the point where I'd be willing to pay for a subscription service to have people solve captchas for me just for my own personal use.


Then you’d just have people farming legitimate google accounts to get around captchas.


There's a browser add-on that solves captchas for you? Some rather obvious implications of that!


Good luck being both visually impaired and autistic... Captchas are great when not needed and horrible when actually needed.


Airbnb has been very human hostile since the beginning.

The first time I had to create an account, they required that I connect with a google account with access to all my contacts. Then ask me to make a video of myself.

I didn't create the account and booked an hotel.

Now they are less aggressive with their new procedures, but still, you can see that the people behind it see technical solutions way before they perceive the human impact.

My grand-father was like that. A brilliant engineer from the most elite school of his generation in France. He once told me very seriously a solution for making more accommodations for the poorest people would be to remove individual bathrooms, and create common ones for the whole building instead.

Airbnb tech teams remind me of him.


I don't understand the grandfather bit. Wasn't he right? Makes sense to me that a shared bathroom would decrease the cost, and I've lived in an apartment like that and it was fine.


What's wrong with sharing bathrooms? That's a dorm, or a youth hostel for that matter. It's totally fine. Pretty common all over the world, not just for the poorest.


We're presumably speaking about a shared bathroom in your home, not about travel accommodation. It would infringe upon a fundamental need for privacy that people have: having a space that is yours alone, where you are free to do whatever, without being observed by others.

I've seen some (studio) apartments that have a private bathroom that outside the front door, but still inside the building. I would very much dislike this: to me, it feels like it would break my private space, forcing me to allow for the possibility to run into others each time I go to the bathroom.


I lived in a dorm for 2 years in college. Not only did I not have a private bathroom, but I also had a roommate, so really I had no reliably private place at all. It was fine. I mean occasionally privacy would be nice, but I also enjoyed the increased sense of community in the dorms.

Maybe you'd hate this, but that doesn't make it a violation of human rights or anything.


Times change. It might not be a human right, but expectations of minimum quality of life improving over the course of decades is a good thing.

US college students not having individual rooms and bathrooms is a scam though due to the prices the kids pay the college.


Sharing a bathroom is hugely common for students or young people (even young "professionals") living in flatshares in Europe.


Of course it's not for travel, I understand that. But neither are dorms. And people stay in youth hostels and similar accommodations for longer periods too.

> upon a fundamental need for privacy that people have

I don't think you should project your personal preferences with objective needs. Besides, you share bathrooms at the office where you spend 8 hours a day, are you also concerned about running into people there?


You’d be surprised to know that people in poor places not only share the same bathroom but also the same room and same bed.


Because some people (as in, a vast majority of the global population) live their lives in a low-income bracket and one could consider it a very unpleasant thought to live your entire life sharing bathrooms with strangers.


The grandfathers point was that shared bathrooms would decrease costs of building new apartments, which is good for poor people with less income. Needing to share a bathroom with someone is no problem compared to not having a place to stay.


So would sleeping halls. Both models exists, yet in the developed world we tend to see either as a worst case crisis accommodation not as a viable alternative for long term accommodation.

So yes, it solves problems in those places where lack of any accommodation is a big housing problem. That is important, but it affects a relatively small proportion even of the homeless (most homeless are not "rough sleepers" who end up sleeping outdoors, but people who bounce between temporary housing exactly or crash with people; e.g. in the UK rough sleepers seem to make up in the region of 5%-10% of homeless people).

It may vary by location, but at least in the UK, for most homeless and poor, the problem is not that they have nowhere to sleep, but that they have the kind of substandard accommodation that people in this thread seems to think will solve their problems, and that they lack security - e.g their accommodation is temporary etc. because even this kind of substandard accommodation is not easily accessible to them in ways they can afford.


Sharing bathrooms is not the same as "substandard accommodation". That's the point. You can (and do) build perfectly modern, clean, safe high standard living quarters with shared bathrooms. You can also find terrible slum apartments with private bathrooms.


You can. You wouldn't find buyers or renters without discounts far exceeding the cost savings, because it's seen as substandard, however.

If anything, even places where space is extremely costly, one clear way of judging relative luxury level is the ratio of bathrooms to bedrooms.


"Substandard" is not the complement of "luxury". And nobody is saying that middle class people won't pay the extra cost of private bathrooms, clearly they are doing that. The point under discussion is if it's inhumane to give poor people free housing where they have to live like European middle class students and share bathrooms, and the answer is a very clear "no, it's not inhumane".


No, substandard implies it's below the expected standard, and it is as demonstrated by the fact that the market expectation is to have bathrooms. How many places do you see on the market without a private bathroom exactly?

EDIT: In fact, many places you'd struggle to even get approval for places with communal bathrooms without special exemptions, as it's so far below expected standards that these expectations now often violate government set standards as it's come to be seen as entirely unacceptable to impose it on anyone. E.g. in Norway, the standard rules for a permanent dwelling requires a bathroom with few exceptions, and sets minimum requirements for the size of the bathroom.


> expected standard

The places you see on the market are not free housing, so it doesn't really say anything about what we are discussing.

> entirely unacceptable to impose it on anyone

This is just silly. Nobody wants to impose anything on anyone. We are talking about housing that is provided for free, I don't think anyone is proposing round up people and force them to live there.


> The places you see on the market are not free housing, so it doesn't really say anything about what we are discussing.

They tell us what is the expected standard of housing. You're of course free to believe that poor people should be subjected to conditions most people opt out of, but to argue that this is not the expected standard in developed countries like the ones discussed is disingenuous given that this is demonstrated both by the lack of any serious volume of alternatives most places, and the fact that in many markets it is not even permitted to offer housing with lower standards.

> This is just silly. Nobody wants to impose anything on anyone. We are talking about housing that is provided for free, I don't think anyone is proposing round up people and force them to live there.

If the alternative is no housing, it's disingenuous to suggest there's no pressure involved. Lower the standards, and many people will be without a choice - this is part of the reason why it is outright illegal to provide the kind of substandard housing you're arguing for, because it'd encourage a situation where more people are left without a real choice.

Most of the comments in this thread also makes no mention of free housing. Indeed the comment that started this whole sub-thread made no mention of free, but about providing housing for the poorest cheaper. Your answer to that person made no mention of free, but simply argued there was nothing wrong with sharing bathrooms. My responses have focused on the fact that there are clearly a whole lot of countries where this is considered so far below acceptable standards that it's either not allowed to even provide such housing, or that there's minimal demand for it.

You're of course free to argue for changes to such standards and the provisioning of such substandard housing to poor people rather than to provide for them what is considered the minimum bar of acceptable housing in these places today, but don't pretend you're not arguing for lowering the standard well below what is in many markets the worst housing possible to legally offer.


What you can “expect” when you pay the full price of something is not necessarily the same as what you should expect when you get something for free.

If you work in Norway you “expect” at least €2-3000 in monthtly salary, but few people argue that this is what you should expect in welfare if you don’t work.

Even in our social democratic paradise, the rule is usually that things you get through the welfare system, paid by taxpayers, should be adequate and humane, but not to the level of someone working full-time.

So those arguments are meaningless. Instead we have to ask if it is adequate, and most people would say that it is. Especially since so many people have lived like that as students.

If you’re not talking about free housing, then it’s just a market economics question, how could then anyone be opposed to more affordable housing? If you don’t like it, don’t rent it. But when someone says “we should do X for the poor”, they are usually talking about the welfare system.


The question here is - is the cost difference of a shared bathroom versus a private bathroom the (or a) major factor in not building affordable housing and the answer is almost certainly no. If it's not, then this is just elitistic moralizing from the ivory tower.

Happy to be proven wrong by the way. (non-sarcastic)


Elitistic moralizing? The only ones moralizing here are those that think dorms are inhumane.

Anyway, in most countries we do build social housing, it's not a question of not building at all, it's a question of being able to build more if you spend less on each unit, and that is obviously the case. As you probably know, bathrooms and kitchens are by far the most expensive rooms, so you can definitely save a lot of money if you share them.


Why would you be _more_ averse to sharing a bathroom if you're low income? I think it's more about American germophobia or new members of the middle class feeling that sharing bathrooms is beneath them now that they've made it.

In most places being poor doesn't mean you live in squalor, it just means you have less money. You are still doing your best to keep your place clean etc.

And obviously your neighbours won't be strangers for long.


Privacy?

The original point, although not fully written out, was that the elite schooled grandfather thought it would be more effective to build housing with shared bathrooms, but he neglected the humane aspect(s) of living.

Somewhat ironically you are falling into that same model of thinking.


Different people have different views on what privacy is. In many cultures it's considered normal to have your parents in law living with you, here it's most people's worst nightmare. Some people think it's important to have your own car, others see no point at all in owning it.

There are obviously people who absolutely don't want to share a bathroom with their neighbour, but the "model of thinking" that is the issue is when you're projecting that onto the entire world population. People just have different priorities.


> Somewhat ironically you are falling into that same model of thinking.

This is called 'disagreeing'.


The fact that most people opt out of doing so as soon as they can afford not to have to share should be a good indication that people value the privacy and comfort of not having to highly.


I have never seen any statistics about that at all, so I wouldn't know if that is the case. It would be interesting to see how much more people are willing to pay for an equivalent apartment with communal bathroom being the only difference. As it is, only the cheapest places have that, so there are very strongly confounding factors. Are people getting private bathrooms because that is what they want most, or because they have more money and all nice apartments have them.

And I imagine it varies a lot between cultures.


I think a good indication is cost differentials with the addition of en suite bathrooms.


This is not the case, in Europe, me and almost all of my peers (friends, coworkers) choose to live in flatshares. Renting a studio apartment wouldn't be much more expensive but it's just more fun living with other people :)


A proportion of young people sometimes do for limited periods, sure, but "almost all of your peers" do not change the fact that most people opt out of it, and even more opt out of sharing with strangers. Even with flat shares, there's a premium on flats with en suite bathrooms, because people tend to opt out of sharing if the price difference allow them to. Of course it's not the only thing people care about - a good enough location or high enough standard can overcome more sharing.


The point is not that sharing bathrooms is neutral, the point is that if it's something that huge number of middle class people are happy to do while students or young professionals, it's pretty far from the human rights violation some people seem to think it is.


First of all, a very tiny proportion of people are middle class while they are students or young professionals.

Secondly, nobody here that I have seen are suggesting that it's a "human rights violation", but there is also a huge difference between people making the choice of living in a more central location or a higher standard flat and sharing a bathroom with a few people vs. establishing sharing bathrooms with strangers as an acceptable standard to impose on people who lack a choice.


Millions of people, like myself, grow up comfortably middle class, and yet have no problem adapting to dorm life. What is objectionable about expecting people who receive free housing to live under the same conditions as students? Are students lesser humans?

And where exactly do you draw the line, how high standard does free housing have to have? Middle class? Upper middle class?


The issue is not your ability to adapting in a situation where you're already engaging in privilege, but about whether it is reasonable to lower standards for the poor.

No, students are not lesser humans, but neither are poor people forced to deal with the effects of any policy changes to allow the lowering of expected standards of the housing provided.

Many places - such as in Norway where I grew up - the provisioning of housing units without bathrooms is only permitted in very limited situations exactly because it's consider unjustified to create a situation where even private landlords can exploit lack of choice for the poorest to coerce them into tolerating situations we'd not want to impose on others.

As for students, checking student housing for Oslo now, the largest amount of sharing of bathrooms I can find in "dorms" is sharing with one other person in the very smallest housing that is explicitly not considered suitable for e.g. couples or families. But in Norway at least, the norm is also not to push students into dorms, and people don't live in them for the long term.

So I expect that housing for the poor should at least not be worse than the standards we've come to see as the bare minimum to consider a housing unit intended for the long term to be habitable. Yes, the standards are lower elsewhere, especially for students, largely on the basis that it's a choice that often involves a good deal of privilege, and when/where dorms are expected or required it is often at least sold as part of the socialisation. In places where dorms are often expected, you're free to not apply to those universities or pick ones with higher standard dorms without losing the ability to go to university.

Poor people often face a significantly reduced opportunity to realistically choose without facing sleeping rough, and the notion that they have a genuine choice itself tends to come from a highly privileged attitude.


> The issue is not your ability to adapting in a situation where you're already engaging in privilege, but about whether it is reasonable to lower standards for the poor.

What does this mean? It would seem that if legions of middle-class people can adapt, why couldn't poor people?

> the notion that they have a genuine choice itself tends to come from a highly privileged attitude

You keep repeating that your opponents are privileged, that is not an argument for anything, it's just random ad hominem. Not that it even makes sense.

But in any case, even if someone has little choice, that doesn't mean that it's reasonable to say that a gift "imposes" on the receiver. If I give a beggar a hamburger, I am not forcing him to eat meat, whether he has much else to eat or not.


Given the choice, I don't think anyone would spend their lives living in a dorm or youth hostel, or a homeless shelter, or a tenement block with communal facilities that would rapidly fall into disrepair (I mean, look at the state of various housing projects and slumlord setups now and imagine if the same setup with communal bathrooms would actually be better kept than that).


Is this sarcasm? Obviously there are places in the world where dorms, hostels etc are in exceptionally good condition, like in Japan, or here in Scandinavia.


Hostels in Scandinavia at least, while they may well be in good condition, make up a vanishingly small proportion of accommodation because what they provide is well below the expected standard for most people even for short term stays.


You keep talking about "expected standards" all the time. These are YOUR expected standards. Poor people, students, backpackers and many others have different standards.

And please try to understand what is being discussed. In this instance I merely pointed out that "communal facilities that would rapidly fall into disrepair" is not a proper argument, since there are plenty of communal facilities in excellent condition, just as there are lots of privately owned slums. Your reply has nothing whatsoever to do with that.


These are not just my expected standards, but also market standards a whole lot of places, and the legal standard many places.


And you'll live in them for a few weeks and then go back to your cushy home, right

If I've been downvoted for saying dorms are temporary shelters, not lifetime homes, then so be it; HN is just as bad as the rest of them.

We're all gonna get fucked over here at one point.


People stay in college dorms for 3-4 years. And hopefully people don't stay in social housing dorms forever either, that would be a system failure regardless of the standard of the social housing.


I’ve been so turned off by the entire concept of AirBnB, ever since their practices ruined several cities I love with massive overtourism influence. Like so many tech companies, the influence has just gotten completely out of control in the modern world on a global scale.


Exactly. Look at Venice, which was a quaint little town nobody had ever heard of until Airbnb came long. As you correctly point out, without Airbnb excessive tourism wouldn't exist.

It's so nice that I've been able to find a single villain to blame this problem on instead of talking about the broader housing crisis that leads to this, which is completely the fault of governments to address housing shortages due to influence from NIMBYs and corporations.

As further proof you're correct, look at Miami Beach. It's banned Airbnbs and short term rentals, and now housing there is incredibly affordable and not the most expensive in Florida.


> Look at Venice, which was a quaint little town nobody had ever heard of until Airbnb came long.

Venice, Italy? Arguably the most popular tourist destination in Italy for... decades? Centuries? Airbnb might've exploded this popularity, but Venice has always been Italy's Disneyland.

> look at Miami Beach. It's banned Airbnbs and short term rentals, and now housing there is incredibly affordable and not the most expensive in Florida.

Drastic measure aside, which has surely plummeted profits from tourism, are you sure the drop in real estate prices has nothing to do with the fact most parts of Florida's coastline will be underwater within the next few decades[1]?

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/miami-is-the-most...


I was being ironic on both counts: Venice was overcrowded long before Airbnb, and Miami Beach is incredibly expensive despite Airbnb.

The point is there are systemic issues of housing shortages - Airbnb is at best a manifestation of these symptoms, not a cause.


Gotcha. I invoke Poe's law :)


Why would Airbnb be to blame for this? They're providing a market that fulfills demand for low cost or privately owned accommodations, competing directly with the established hotel industry. Not everyone wants or needs to stay in a hotel, and many people prefer the tourist experience facilitated by local hosts. Long-term rentals are also a convenient way to experience a location that doesn't involve complicated paperwork.

Airbnb is not the problem. You're bothered by tourists.


They're providing this market by removing housing from the local people, which drives them out and drives up prices for those who stay. This, in turn, forces all the inhabitants of a city out of it, thus ruining the character those inhabitants gave it. All so some tourist can 'live like a local', at the expense of the actual locals being able to live like a local.

And it's wholeheartedly AirBnB's fault and problem. Not to mention there's often new apartment blocks being built to act as de-facto hotels but having none of the regulations in place, which isn't quite competition at all.

Basically, tourists aren't locals, they should have a right to live like locals. Especially at the expense of the locals.


At a large enough scale, I agree that there's an impact to locals. But don't tourists also boost the local economy, the travel industry and introduce different cultures themselves? It's not such a clear case that this is all negative.

The lack of regulations is an issue of local governments not catching up to tech companies, as usual, not Airbnb's.

> Basically, tourists aren't locals, they should have a right to live like locals.

What if those tourists do eventually become locals after staying at an Airbnb? Are you against migrants as well?

> Especially at the expense of the locals.

The locals do benefit financially from tourism. Markets like Airbnb's simply accelerate this, which of course introduces issues, but governments should carry more of the blame for this than a company that disrupts the hotel industry.


> What if those tourists do eventually become locals after staying at an Airbnb? Are you against migrants as well?

The fact you are conflating these two issues and even asking this question indicates how anyone should interpret your overall argument.


I'm not conflating them, but taking the counter argument to an extreme. The question was tongue-in-cheek, I wasn't expecting a "yes".

The objections to "overtourism" are in small part the same ones to gentrification, which essentially boils down to a large amount of migrants moving into a community and "disrupting" the local lifestyle. I'm not saying this isn't a problem in many cities, but that a) it's often viewed in a xenophobic light instead of accepting that communities change rapidly due to globalization, and that this change is not always entirely negative, and b) that efforts to regulate this should come first and foremost from governments, and not expected from companies whose only goal is increasing profit. This is the same way it has worked for the tobacco, pharma, food and many other industries, but it's clearly not working well for the tech industry, as governments struggle to catch up to the sheer amount of rapid changes affecting almost every part of society.


> At a large enough scale, I agree that there's an impact to locals. But don't tourists also boost the local economy, the travel industry and introduce different cultures themselves? It's not such a clear case that this is all negative.

And tourism is planned into this with the way zoning permits work. But AirBnB skirts those rules. Also the negatives of losing housing in a city far outweigh any financial benefit that could come to it, especially as most won't be reaped by the people that are being forced out...or it will be taken from them in terms of increased rent because the supply is much smaller.

> The lack of regulations is an issue of local governments not catching up to tech companies, as usual, not Airbnb.

Or it's because AirBnB actively lobbies against it and refuses to enforce rules, saying it's up to the individual providers. They facilitate it, and often most things on AirBnB are illegal and against the zoning laws of whatever building they're being used for.

> What if those tourists do eventually become locals after staying at an Airbnb? Are you against migrants as well?

What a ridiculous question. Obviously I'm not against migrants. I'm against tourists thinking they have a right to live like locals. > The locals do benefit financially from tourism. Markets like Airbnb's simply accelerate this, which of course introduces issues, but governments should carry more of the blame for this than a company that disrupts the hotel industry.

> The locals do benefit financially from tourism. Markets like Airbnb's simply accelerate this, which of course introduces issues, but governments should carry more of the blame for this than a company that disrupts the hotel industry.

The locals benefit nothing from AirBnB. The landlords do, sure, but the actual residents and regular workers do not. If anything, it makes matters worse as rents are driven up, or they have to move further away from work. In the worst case scenarios, the town just becomes tourist-oriented and there's no other jobs left. That's a horrible thing as if the tourism ever dries up, the town is left up the creek.

But also tell the locals they benefit financially when their local bar closed down because the landlord thought it'd be better to make it a shop that caters towards tourists; or when all their neighbors move out because of the rambunctious drunken tourists coming in at 2 every night of the week; or when their landlord decides to evict them/up their rent because the landlord knows they can make more on AirBnB than renting to residences.

It's a wholly negative impact to everyone except those people who own the AirBnBs, who are often skirting multiple regulations, facilitated by AirBnB itself. It is a net negative for the city, and I know personally that housing crisis in at least one country (Ireland) has been facilitated by it, as the amount of houses on the market in Dublin doubled during the pandemic when tourism was shut down.


Residents have a say in how their city functions. A well run city balances the needs of its constituents - schools, access to shops, bus routes, community centres, parks, parking etc. It also balances the need of business, tourism operators, hospitality etc.

None of that works when an operator like Airbnb ignores it all. Nimby’s give community consultation a bad name, but the alternative is the Wild West. No thanks.


So, basically, Not In My Backyard, no?


No, I think OP is advocating for a more balanced, community-oriented approach. The the moment AirBnB is a free-for-all, where externalities are unfairly borne by the local community. A better way would be to design a community-oriented system of rules that are applied when an owner wants to rent. For example, in this neighborhood, we allow up to X00 units to be rented during this quarter. It may change next quarter. (Or some regular period.) My point: Start small... let it grow, and allow for continuous community feedback.

Another way to interpret your comment, would be to replay the OP but substitue... hmm... oil/chemical refinery next to your house. Then how does it feel if random Internet stranger replies to your post: "So, basically, Not In My Backyard, no?" It sounds low empathy. My point: There are plenty of stories on HN/Twitter/Internet about living next door to a nitemare AirBnB rental that hosts loud drunken parties each weekend.


Where exactly is Airbnb a “free-for-all” nowadays? Every municipality I can think of where it might affect housing prices has very onerous regulations on STRs.


I have a friend who owns a condo in a building downtown that is almost empty of owner occupiers. The vast majority of the condos are rented out as airbnbs. She has no regular neighbours and most of the people she sees in the building are strangers.

When it reaches that level, it is a problem.


It's a similar problem in neighborhoods that were not designed to be the center of tourism, no hotels, and homeowners had no intention of living next to "hotels", but if just a couple houses become full-time AirBnB all year, that is what happens -- everyone is now living next to hotels, and that spits in the face of neighborhood and those who chose to live there.


> Why would Airbnb be to blame for this?

Because they have pushed back hard on cities’ attempts to regulate and enforce what is happening due to the influence of their service. They have no respect for what is happening in some places and how residents are impacted.

Your argument is similar to saying that Facebook is not to blame for the spread of misinformation. Tech platforms create a new world and then want nothing to do with the consequences of their influence. It is arrogant and irresponsible.


But it really is up to governments to enforce regulations. Companies have no choice but to ultimately comply if they want to keep operating in those locations. E.g. see Uber.

This is not similar to Facebook, since "overtourism" is not as obviously harmful as misinformation. How would you even define it? It could be argued that it's another aspect of globalization which benefits the local economy, the travel industry and mixing of cultures.


Your argument is: "we should ban sales of milk because people pollute with used containers".


Only in the context of being knee-deep in milk cartons.


Your proposed metaphor ignores the crucial question of degree, and thus fails.


My metaphor works but you don't like it * *edited


> My metaphor works but you don't like it. Sorry, not Sorry.

Please do not use this kind of attitude and communication style on HN.


The poster is hurt I called out his false argument, tells me I'm wrong and then I call him out on it? What's the problem? Also, are you the police?


Sorry for sounding like a cynical right-winger but I'm sure people prefer to share toilets with other people instead of sleeping in the streets. In my country there are very regid regulations on what standard apartments has to fulfill, which has the consequence that not enough apartments are built that can be afforded by poor people.


I've long since suspected that a small part of the housing crises in the developed world is due to the high minimum standards for apartments and housing.


Small?! Supply side is completely f-ed in real estate by red tape and regulations on building. It's the main reason we have such housing costs across the developed world.


It's not, it's due to greed and people (and corporations) living of rent.


Why do people keep ascribing high housing costs to some nebulous "greed"? Isn't all economic activity due to greed? Anyone trying to choose a lower priced thing to buy or trying to get paid a higher wage is also doing it because of greed.

The parent is right. Shanty towns are the extreme low-regulation end of housing and they're also extremely cheap. It's a matter of how bad we want to allow people to treat themselves and our standards for safety and comfort keep going up so cost does too.


Having a bathroom shared between many strangers is exceptionally annoying. You have to queue for your turn to use the shower. If someone spends ages in their, well bad luck you're going to be late for work or no shower for you. Many people these days choose not to share a single bathroom even between family members, never mind trying to negotiate with your co-residents. Then how is this shared bathroom cleaned and by who and to what standard? What if one of your neighbours refuses to do the work? Bad luck for you.

The $500 cost of a shower unit and toilet isn't what makes housing unavailable to the poor. Housing standards are a good thing as accommodation quality regresses to the minimum allowed by law.


I disagree. These problems are true, but they can mostly be worked around. For instance, do you have to shower in the morning? - many people do not. They are not worse than other problems the affected people experience, I'm sure.

The cost issue is less from the inventory and more from the space. Even just 2qm (quite small bathroom) more per unit adds up to a lot quickly.

Personally, I hate to share a bathroom with neighbors. But when I could not avoid it for a while when I was younger, it could still manage. I'm sure others in less fortunate positions could, too, considering the other, more impactful crap they have to deal with.


The comment I was replying to presents a false choice. It's suggesting that people are sleeping on the streets due to the provision of quality accommodation and if only quality of housing could be made worse people would not be sleeping on the streets. What utter nonsense. You can provide people with housing AND make it decent.

A 2 square metre bathroom is too luxurious for you? How small a room are you suggesting should be provided to each individual in your view?


I felt the parent comment was not so much talking in absolutes but rather pointing out that overly broad regulation can be a real problem. I'm generally a fan of regulation, but I can see how it can be a problem.

I, and I think you and the grandparent comment, too, agree that there is a tradeoff to be made.

I probably should have said 4qm, which I believe is more commonly used. In that case, merging let's say 4 of them into one shared room yields 12qm of space. That's enough for an apartment!


Let's push the idiocracy to the extreme by asking Arkose to add a timeout to their captchas, so people have to solve it fast and make the default puzzle be a prime factorization.

Modern web become so unusable and poluted that I don't think that it can get worse.


I read here on HN that Google has come up with new way to buypass all trackers and adblockers and I think things are going to get really bad for web.

I think it's time we build a directory of applications or a search engine which indexes only the websites that do not use any trackers. The damage of tracking industry to whole web is irreparable but I think we have an opportunity to build a new web that can have mechanisms to prevent any sort of tracking.


Kagi.com lets you filter for and signal boost results without trackers. It’s very nice.


I wanted to do something similar for my search engine when I proxied results from Bing (similar to what Kagi.com is doing according to their FAQ), however, it felt like a gimmick because I had so little control over what websites to boost.

The reason I had little control is because Bing's API limit you to requesting 50 results which is usually SEO spam with trackers.. so all I accomplished was e.g. moving Wikipedia from second to first position while 9+/10 of the returned results still contained trackers for pretty much all queries.

If you have access to Kagi.com then I'm curious to hear what results you see when you search for e.g. "Manchester United". I suspect all of them (except Wikipedia) will contain trackers. If that's not the case then I would love to hear how people think they managed to filter out all the bad sites while still displaying other results besides Wikipedia.


Here's the result, using the ad/tracker sort:

https://imgur.com/CXrWsJr

It does say that there are ads and trackers on a variety of those. Though I see for example that it says 0 detected for espn, which is .. uh, dubious I guess. But then again privacy badger blocks nothing there so maybe it's correct?

It also says Twitter and Facebook have no trackers. I think that's technically correct, if they mean "third party" trackers. Difficult to say; I don't disagree with that approach.


And who would moderate it? Who would make sure they don't cheat and don't insert some tracking code at some point in the future? I don't believe automatic checking would work, unless you decide any JS equals tracking (and at this point you'd be better of just disabling JS).


well then I guess the criteria to index websites would be those who have no js.


even if someone did it this way (as a switch in DDG for example), there is no way of guaranteeing that the ebsite didn't implement some JS between the time it got indexed and your visit

honestly, just disabling JS is the only bulletproof way of making sure you don't run any JS


They literally do this on Roblox, I've seen over 20(!) hard puzzles and about 10 seconds to solve each one: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/impossible-roblox-captcha/3214...

For some challenges, this is so impossible that people give up with logging in until it calms down in a few hours, even Roblox employees and full time developers

People have told me that Arkose pay people to run their captchas and present lots of fancy metrics of attacks they've stopped which is why some websites seem to be ok with destroying user experience by running this


If regular users can't log in, that would decrease the load, and that could be presented in those metrics i suppose.

"Look! there was an artificial traffic spike here... but then our systems kicked in and saved the day!" (By locking out paying users and letting in bots, because that's easier for the 'protection' company and gives the same stats for 'back to normal' in the reports)


Careful what you wish for - it can, and probably will get worst. I still get cookie rage every time I have to deal with cookie popups. To put things in perspective, i recommend trying to run with a pihole plugged in your network. Even just for a week or two. The difference is so stark it emphasises how shit things are right now.


Just a friendly reminder to anyone reading this — the "annoyances" lists you can enable in uBlock Origin get rid of basically all cookie popups. I haven't seen one in a couple of years.


Just a note that sometimes this blocks the popup but not the background overlay that goes along with the popup. This makes interacting or even scrolling with the site impossible. It only happens occasionally and it's nothing a quick "zap element" in ublock doesn't fix. But it can be surprising.


Did not know this, just enabled all of them. Thank you!


There is also an extension on chrome and firefox store named 'I don't care about cookies' which is specifically made for this issue.


I had a mixed experience with this extension: very effective but it breaks many sites - initially I didn't understand why, it took me some time to identify the culprit.


Better: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic


I literally made a whole series of annoying puzzles as the confirmation flow of certain destructive actions for a gaming-related site of mine.


99% sure OP is browsing with some shady VPN


As someone who added CAPTCHA to their own platform recently after resisting for years because of how much I hate them, I have to tell you that the unfortunate truth is that eventually bad actors ruin the party for everyone on every platform.

CAPTCHA is necessary for the same reason locking your car/house is necessary. You can probably not do it 9 times out of 10 and it will be fine, but then that 1/10 happens, all your stuff gets stolen, and you start locking your doors 100% of the time.


I run a community forum and have done so for over ten years. Spam accounts is a regular occurrence, but thanks to various services (akismet, stop forum spam), captchas, and simple word / behaviour filters (anyone with <10 posts that tries to post a link or image gets flagged) we've been able to avoid our users from seeing much spam. There's a few that come through, I wonder if those are real people.

Anyway, at one point we decided to just block the IP ranges from countries like Russia and Vietnam, which seemed to have the most spam accounts.


Spam on a “community forum” is a whole different world than all of the potential damages criminals can cause on a platform like Airbnb.


Well, CAPTCHA is more like locking your store and then asking your customers to pick the lock.


I think CAPTCHAs are more fitting the analogy of metal detectors at banks or sensitive places.


It is a good analogy. On the other hand, it would be quite jarring if I had to go through a metal detector just to buy groceries.

On the third hand, I understand US schools have metal detectors these days, and in Beijing I had to go through a metal detector to hop on the metro, so what do I know...


You're comparing solving a typically simple puzzle with breaking and entering.


Breaking and entering is not particularly difficult, in fact it's probably easier than a lot of CAPTCHAs. The reason people inclined to do illegal / immoral things don't do it is the likelihood of getting caught and the consequences therein.

Of course most people aren't spammers or burglars so in most cases it doesn't matter.


The Lockpicking Lawyer should publish videos comparing times to break a locks vs solving captchas :)


The way he does it (non-destructive, undetectable) is extremely difficult though. I was assuming most people would go for sledgehammer / crowbar / bolt cutters.


You're saying that but in ~2007 I wanted to sign up to Steam and simply gave up after like 10 failed Captchas.

I think I made my account around 3 years later.


That's a terrible analogy. Are you saying that once a visitor completes a captcha on your website, they can steal all your stuff? In that case, the problem is with you and your website security.


Seems like an apt analogy - adding in friction for the small minority of instances where someone would undertake an action you don't want them to. Not literally "if I don't make someone choose 5 firetrucks out of 9 pictures they're going to steal my stuff".


> That's a terrible analogy

Well, a more apt one would be that someone breaks into your house or car and puts all their litter everywhere so that you have to spend hours or days cleaning.

Sometimes I don't get the logic of these spambot creators. Do they honestly believe that creating thousands of fake accounts with links to "hot dating site" in my webshop will help them in any way? These data are completely invisible outside (why would anyone want to present their customer data to the world).


> Well, a more apt one would be that someone breaks into your house [...] and puts all their litter everywhere so that you have to spend hours or days cleaning.

wow, this actually happened to a coworker. He waked up one day discovering a broken window and human excrement everywhere.

For sure he closes everything now.


> Sometimes I don't get the logic of these spambot creators. Do they honestly believe that creating thousands of fake accounts with links to "hot dating site" in my webshop will help them in any way? These data are completely invisible outside (why would anyone want to present their customer data to the world).

The goal is link building[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_building


I get these spam links all the time, and a disproportionate number of them are for SEO and similar services addressed to me specifically.

I don't think they actually expect the links to be published, so much as they expect the webmaster to read them in their moderation panel.


Truthfully, I think the costs of automating posts is so low that the spammers don't care if they waste some time posting on sites that might require moderator approval. It's easier to let their bots run wild and pay the $0.0012 it costs to spam your site.


A friend of mine had a startup that they wanted to be disability friendly as a large part of their community was from that group, so they avoided CAPTCHA for a long time.

Eventually they even added it. Spam and vandalism was just too bad.


Unless it's a big site that will get targeted specifically, custom solutions can be made without being such a hassle. Lichess have you move a chess piece. Forums I've used have had a simple question ala "what is 4 + five". A newspaper has a question based on the article before you can comment to prove you read it.

These are much better for the users, you share less data with Google and others, and are fairly trivial to implement. Easy to circumvent, but spammers aren't looking at you specifically.


Somebody tries to break into your house 10% of the time you leave?


> Somebody tries to break into your house 10% of the time you leave?

Option A: 10% of time their unlocked house is broken into.

Option B: The poster was using an analogy to illustrate a point.


My joke did not work this time


The single worst captcha I've ever had to this day was the « gift » of German hosting company 1&1, which managed to stonewall their customer support (I think) by putting it behind a captcha made exclusively of a string of the digit 1 and the lower case letter l in a font where they look nearly identical. I remember trying for an hour to get past it but never could. It left such a sour taste in my mouth that even 15 years later it's still engraved in my mind, and I refuse to ever do business with that company again.


I mean, nobody is complaining to support about not being able to solve the captcha so how bad could it be?


That's the moment I'd recommend you to close the website and book a hotel.

The whole pandemic reminded me I miss staying in hotels.

Not having to worry about groceries, lunch, cleaning ... A great hotel experience turns your holiday into a holiday experience. The older I get the whole bnb experience feels like a premium stressful hostel.


Plus if you stay in a hotel you don't have to worry about taking housing away from the local residents of the place. I loathe AirBnB for multiple reasons, but that's the primary one.


> you don't have to worry about taking housing away from the local residents

Why not? Isn't the hotel taking up space that could otherwise be housing?


No, because it's zoned for being a hotel. What's happening with AirBnB is completely different as you're having people (1) buy up existing housing to convert it to AirBnB and (2) it's not zoned for tourists. Believe it or not, tourists are considered in city planning, and that's why they have special zoning laws for hotels and hostels. What's happening is tourists now feel they have the right to 'live as a local', and that eats up the housing supply the locals would use, which is zoned for residential use. Thus forcing the locals out. To suggest hostels/hotels suffer from the same issues is to ignore the fact that they're often planned into the city to accommodate tourists, whereas residential housing is, well, for residents.


Couldn't you say that city planners are to blame for not providing enough supply to meet the demand?

Also, I wonder if maybe lots of people don't like existing hotels for some reason?

It seems the locals get forced out wherever demand vastly exceeds supply, like in the beach town where I used to live, where so many people want to visit and there just isn't enough housing/hotels for them. The locals are opposed to more housing, so inevitably prices goes up and they eventually turn into weekly rentals.


> Couldn't you say that city planners are to blame for not providing enough supply to meet the demand?

But there often is enough supply to meet the demand. The issue is tourists feeling entitled to living in a house, not the fact that all hotels are 100% booked all weekend.

> Also, I wonder if maybe lots of people don't like existing hotels for some reason?

I'm sure that's it, honestly. But when you're traveling away from home, well, don't expect to have a home waiting for you. That's the entitlement.

> It seems the locals get forced out wherever demand vastly exceeds supply, like in the beach town where I used to live, where so many people want to visit and there just isn't enough housing/hotels for them.

Or, just stop short-term rentals. Then the demand wouldn't exceed the supply (at least by the same margin). Or have specific areas designated for them (which most do, and which AirBnB conveniently ignores)

> The locals are opposed to more housing, so inevitably prices goes up and they eventually turn into weekly rentals.

I mean, I can understand why the locals would be opposed to more when there's enough for their demand, it's just the entitled tourists coming in and taking over things that makes it an issue.

That said, there are some fundamental differences with beach condos and mountain cabins (usually built to be rent out, not for locals) as opposed to what goes on in most AirBnB situations (built for residential, then moved away). The former two are generally considered in city planning, whereas people taking over residential neighborhoods is not.


Why do the locals feel entitled to housing over non-locals? Sounds like a lot of entitlement, which goes both ways.

The issue is that locals feel entitled to corral scary outsiders into certain zones, which is a high level of entitlement that exacerbates the problem.

When you realize your argument just boils down to xenophobia and "outsiders bad" it mostly falls apart. Locals don't get special rights because they're locals.


> Why do the locals feel entitled to housing over non-locals? Sounds like a lot of entitlement, which goes both ways.

I mean, if you don't believe that the people who actually reside, work and live their lives permanently in an area are more deserving of the housing in that area than people who come maybe once a year for a week, then we'll never agree.

> The issue is that locals feel entitled to corral scary outsiders into certain zones, which is a high level of entitlement that exacerbates the problem.

> When you realize your argument just boils down to xenophobia and "outsiders bad" it mostly falls apart. Locals don't get special rights because they're locals.

Nobody said anything about 'scary outsiders', or xenophobia. I'm not advocating for the abolition of tourism. I'm saying tourism shouldn't come at the expense of the people who literally live and work and provide the amenities those tourists so desire when they visit. And AirBnB facilitates all of this. Locals absolutely should get special rights, especially in terms of housing, when they're the ones who will still be there after the tourists have left. The fact that you try to make this an argument about me being xenophobic or saying 'outsiders bad' shows you're not arguing in good faith.


> I mean, if you don't believe that the people who actually reside, work and live their lives permanently in an area are more deserving

An area like the beach is an interesting. Do the limited set of people who happened to move there first get to exclude everyone else from a limited desirable natural resource?

Or what about a city that incentivizes job creation but doesn't allow more housing to be built?


>I'm saying tourism shouldn't come at the expense of the people who literally live and work and provide the amenities those tourists so desire when they visit

No one is forcing locals to provide those amenities - they're taking them in exchange for the dollars they so desire from the tourists who visit. Locals are free to deny all tourist dollars and turn down money for Airbnbs in exchange for renting it cheaper to other locals.

But they feel entitled to tourist dollars for some reason, without having to put up with tourists. Can't have it both ways, no matter how "special" you feel.


I like hotels just fine but:

- AirBNB is better for extended stays, where being able to cook / heat food, or make breakfast is a necessity (for budgetary or dietary reasons… or the fact that having to constantly leave the place to eat can become stressful).

- I work while traveling. Working from a hotel room is usually not nice (if possible at all), unless it’s an expensive room.


You really can't compare. I've booked Airbnb for $99 for an entire week in a one bedroom apartment in a city where a single hotel room was $350/night.


I use airbnb and booking.com specifically for searching cheaper alternatives to hotels. If their value for money proposition wasn't better than a hotel I doubt they would even exist at all.


Their value-to-money is better because the externalize all the cost to the local community where they remove supply and up the rent for what supply is left.


This sounds like a problem for local regulators and not Airbnb. We can't expect corporate actors to operate for much more than legally attained profits. They have a fiduciary duty to do so. And many localities do regulate Airbnb. In many cases locals vote for those regulators. Don't want corporate actors who optimize for wealth? Expect conditions far worse than a neighborhood with a bunch of Airbnb units.


The problem I see is that for certain trips a Hotel is simply bad.

My last one was a Chaos Communication Congress where I knew I'd be in my room exactly 6h-8h per night for like 4 days. All I really need is a bed and a shower. In the end I chose a hostel for that but if I don't use 90% of the amenities of the hotel (not even storing my luggage there), why would I pay that high amount?

Maybe it's too situational, maybe what I would have wanted was a capsule hotel with a tiny room with a bed (or something to put my sleeping bag on), and it wouldn't have to be the same one every night if I had a locker there.

Disclaimer: Have never used AirBnb or alternatives before, but I think it has its uses. For example sharing a flat with 6 people is sometimes half the cost of 3-4 hotel rooms (depending on how you can split)


> For example sharing a flat with 6 people is sometimes half the cost of 3-4 hotel rooms (depending on how you can split)

And, again, this is the whole problem. Because that's a flat that could have gone to someone who actually lives and works in the local area, not a tourist. It's cheaper because it externalizes that cost.

I'm fine with hostels too, I see no problem with people choosing them. I'm not fine with converting residential homes into unlicensed hotels . It destroys the local community, and drives up prices for all the other people who are left trying to live there, and further feeds housing crises.


I feel like airbnb is not as affordable these days. They started allowing extra fees (like electricity bills etc) for short stays and always pile up absurd cleaning/other fees so by the time you leave the apartment you end up spending more than a decent hotel would cost.


Yeah, you know what computers suck at but it's relatively easy for humans? Summing numbers. /s

edit: I mean the captcha could keep all the "hard for robot" elements (recognizing top face, recognizing symbols) and remove the "hard for human" one (sum), like "select the dice that have the following symbols on top: <red circle>, <blue rectangle>, <green triangle>".


Problem with the latter example is those that are colour blind although I guess it's not much worse than asking people to sum up dice.

I'm guessing though they are more so looking at % correct and the actual behaviour of making a selection rather than just whether you are capable of adding up numbers.


Good point on accessibility, it could always be black-on-white shapes, numbers, letters.

Not to mention blind users, it looks like OP's captcha had a speaker icon on the captcha, I wonder if it would have made the challenge easier.


Well that's not the case. I made a mistake on the fifth one and had to start all again from the start.

So it's 100% correct or redo. Infuriating


I don't see why if I got my credentials right, I have to prove I am not a robot. What if I wanted a robot to access my account on my behalf?


Because their site is valuable data and if you automate access to it, you can re-sell their services without having to use their site with all its tracking/ads/metrics etc.

They want people to hit their site and get cross-sold, not order through some aggregator.


Because they can't distinguish that from a robot ran by a malicious hacker trying to access other people's accounts using stolen credentials.

Particularly for Airbnb, who deals with travelers (visits from international locations; shared IP ranges like airport wifi and cgNAT, etc).


Your last sentence is interesting. I never considered that AirBnB needs to battle more of this hard-to-distinguish traffic. In another thread on this page, someone else mentioned that -- when logged in with your Google account -- various Google sites/assets never show CAPTCHAS, because it has so much information about your account that they can reliably predict if you are human or robot. I'm surprised they don't offer this as a feature to 3rd party commercial websites. "Add Google login and we can remove 99% of your CAPTCHAS (but you have to be X cents per login)."


I assume they’re trying to fight against bots buying up “hot” Airbnbs that sell out quickly. It’s a weird captcha for sure, but understandable why they wouldn’t want bots accessing the site.


They probably want to reduce scraping and definitely unauthorized account access. In addition, Airbnb has thousands of A/B tests running at all times. Scrapers may try to decode pricing algorithms, price fluctuations, etc. The traffic and interest to an offering also has an impact on its search ranking.

There are also anon account crews that will make many fake accounts using sourced credentials from their social group or bought on darknets. Generally, those only result in things like pop-up events from which entry fees are collected. I assume some could use the same method to commit robbery. Another method is to use a botnet of fake accounts and use the bots to build up fake reputation, eg offer a fake listing, book the fake listing, leave good reviews, etc.

There are also some weird currency arbitrage opportunities that might be found if someone was really inclined. From what I saw of that aspect, you'd have to be really looking for pennies in the couch seams.

Source: Did major customer support work for Airbnb pre-ipo


Wait, what does a robot do once it rents a house?


It sets up a workshop inside to build more robots.


Perhaps it takes 'pre-orderes'.

You want a place to stay, inform the bot "give me anything good in this area when available", pay the bot extra money, and then the bot goes out and hits the good rooms in the area the moment they become available.


Depends if its a member of the Church of Appliantology, let alone those miniature rubberized homo replicas.


Dream of electric sheep?


Sublet it to a human.

It's a market, so it's potentially susceptible to HFT and arbitrage bots like anything else.


Sublet it? I mean it's possible that someone really dedicated writes a bot to reserve a room for themselves, but more likely it'd be done by someone who will list it somewhere else for an even higher fee.


Airbnb could just raise their prices by 10% if they detect a bot; that would be a way to take a cut of someone doing that. It would be really subtle too, so they wouldn't know that they'd been detected.


This sound like a great idea for Futurama (TV show) episode with Bender (the robot).


Does this actually happen??


It is a way to bankrupt competing Airbnb properties. Book them all up with hundreds of fake accounts with stolen credit cards.

Nobody ends up staying in them, but it can bankrupt the Airbnb host pretty quickly if they have many properties on highly leveraged mortgages.


And why would they care if it did, if the robots are "buying" the properties, implying payment?


That makes the impression that Airbnb is always out of service, and the other platform selling Airbnb rent is more available. It creates a competitor and worsen the service of Airbnb at the same time.


implying payment, until the last second when the robot's operators decide they can only have one unit to live in. Or any other such scams


If you have bots buying your merchandise as fast as possible you don't have a bot problem, you have a pricing problem.


There can be good reasons to keep prices "below market value".


There’s nothing immoral about taking advantage of someone else’s marketing budget. If they feel like pricing below market that’s great. If you can resell their stuff for more great. If they don’t like it they can try to stop you. You can’t fix the real price of things far from market demand without the full force of the state behind you and that usually doesn’t work either.


here we go


No can do.

You would be in breach of the AirBNB terms of service: "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform. "


A browser is a bot that interacts with the platform.

It's not physically possible to use any website except by directing a tool to do it for you.


That’s pedantic and not even that right. The browser is an agent, not a bot. A bot takes semi-autonomous actions after being instructed by a human, for an undetermined amount of time; A browser just does something it’s told for a few seconds (or as long as the website’s open)


By your definition would a screen reader turn the browser into a bot? If not, if a I program my own “bot” isn’t it just working as my own agent?


Maybe depends on whether you are "driving" the agent personally?


If it’s my bot, it’s literally doing what I told it to do (how I bought a PS5 in my sleep, actually).


I'll just use Selenium to direct the browser then.


I suspect this how a large part of web UI spam occurs. Selenium combined with the latest browsers provide almost perfect control over a real web browser. It makes me wonder if this is how Google tests its "I am not a bot" test. Basically, generate billions of actions -- surfing a web UI -- with slightly different mouse movements (Selenium). Then, use machine learning to generate a network to differentiate between robots and humans. (The humans training data would come from a highly quality population... like all Googlers using internal Google assets/websites.)


Using a headless browser would muddy the waters then.


Yes, it seems everybody has forgotten the meaning of User Agent.


Probably the nuance that is not spelled out (and certainly should be) is that AirBNB expects only interactive user agents, and not automated/batch user agents.


All those lines of code in a browser are automation.


Not to mention screen readers.


Do you always go for the technicality and the gotcha? Isn't that best applied elsewhere rather than here? Because sure, lines of code in a browser are technically automation, but they don't automate your actions so your whole point is moot. And you know this, I'm sure, so you're wasting your (and everybody else's) time.


They do exactly in fact automate your actions.

You decided you wanted to kick off a rather large process by clicking a link, and the browser performed countless individual and dynamic actions as a result.

Just to take one macroscopic crude simple example since we apparently don't have much imagination to work with here, did you evaluate every one of the individual http fetches in that page to decide if you wanted to fetch or render tgem, or did your ublock origin plugin do that for you?

You may not like the inconvenience implied by the fact that a statement like "no automation" is invalid and therefor unusable, but that doesn't change the fact. It's inconvenient not incorrect.


> since we apparently don't have much imagination to work with here

Oh, I'm much more likely to engage in a great conversation after an ad hominem. Sigh.

I am well aware of how browsers work and what they automate for you. But you called them bots. You lumped them with several other types of software, which doesn't make sense. I never said you were incorrect — I said you were going for the technically correct and the gotcha.

Do browsers include automation? Yes. Do things get automated when you use them? Yes. Is software development automation at heart? Yes. The fact that you are correct about these things doesn't make the deception any less obvious: you are using these technicalities to misrepresent what a browser is — which doesn't make sense in the context of the thread -, and that's all I pointed out.


Pedantic was not an insult, but unimaginative was, got it.


Eh, arguably you can do it without bots by opening a telnet (or openssl s_client) connection and typing the commands yourself. Though ironically some websites will block your attempts because it doesn't look enough like a browser.

You also can't really pass Captcha's this way, as far as I know.


Hey... Real Question: How about JAWS (screen reader) software [1] users that are blind / visually disabled? Do those assistant tools count? Can someone do something like control JAWS programatically and navigate website UIs using a robot? It seems possible. I am sure JAWS has a crazy web browser footprint. (I have seen videos at my office where a junior trader was blind and using JAWS on Bloomberg and a trading app. The sound was so fast that it sounded like jibberish... but she could move around super fast.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_(screen_reader)


If I recall correctly, GitLab has a concept of "keys" (akin to SSH keys) that you can grant for your account. On of the categories is API -- which is specifically for this use case. If I ran my own commercial website, I would probably also disallow robot logins for the UI. It seems like too much trouble with no commecial upside. However, I could imagine allowing robot accounts to access tiny sliver of the API.


That looks like a really poor captcha, as overhyped as machine learning is I think defeating a system like this accurately is something you’d give as a class project. It might slow down legitimate users but anyone nefarious will get through. Never mind you can outsource solving these to Bali for a penny each - maybe less.


I'm not sure how effective an AI would really be on this. Distinguishing from a pattern on top of the dice vs a pattern on the side/front seems like it would actually produce a lot of false positives.


I don't know - with some edge detection I think you could distinguish between the faces of each die, and some heuristics would probably get you the upwards-facing one. Another thing that may be useful is that in each image the only face that is fully visible for all dice is the upward one (who knows if that is just for this example though).


I think if you iterated over enough pictures of the dice from the CAPTCHAs along with the correct sums, you could easily train a model to solve it.


I think the trick is to change the puzzle very often or produce 1000 puzzles and randomly assign one


Captchas are often used to prevent credential stuffing where an attacker has a list of email addresses and passwords and runs a script to try those out on different sites.

They also help prevent password brute force, i.e. an attacker has your email and tries the top 100 passwords to crack your account.

There are other ways to tackle this, for example email OTP where a code (or link) is emailed to you before you login.

Probably the reason Captchas are getting harder is that there are services on the internet that will use human operators to crack captchas in a semi automated fashion.


If they need a human to solve the puzzle, it is doing its job.

The problem is that somewhere along the way, we've decided that Robot⇒Evil and Human⇒Good and forgotten that evil humans exist.


And as another user said in this thread that there are even extensions which can break captchas. Very questionable then what captchas are even doing on web.


The extensions can only break the captcha given a real user on a unique browser, something the “robots” struggle with massively at scale which is why Google don’t mind the extensions existing.


I came across a website that wanted to force-feed ads to me before watching a video yesterday. However, they wanted me to select the best-fitting ad of 5 different ads with one ad playing automatically after 30s of not choosing one to play.

Sometimes this branch of reality feels like it wasn't meant for productive use. Needless to say I will never come back.


Aachener Zeitung does this when you visit with an ad blocker.


I've run into these before, on a site run by DataBricks. If you've never tried them, then you need to believe OP: There is something deeply broken about them. I suspect they're only used when the company doesn't want you to access the resource they're protecting.


I don’t know if Rockstar Social Club dice CAPTCHA is still around, but about half a year ago I’ve had an opportunity to experience it. That CAPTCHA required you to select one image out of six in which two displayed dice would add up to a certain number. To pass the test, you had to do this 10 times in a row, making no mistakes. The worst part was that it didn’t even tell you that you failed; it restarted the whole thing only when you finished selecting the last 10th image.


Maybe it's part of the SHA-256 algorithm and they use it to compute crypto-hashes!!! It's proof of work farmed out to humans!


Maybe someone should do a solver for this CAPTCHA and put the code on GitHub. It does look really easy to solve using Machine Learning.


If I was a betting man, I’d wager the reason why they give these weirder types of challenges is because solving CAPTCHAs means you’re labelling them, which gives who ever is hosting it labelled data to train their own models against. that’s why CAPTCHAs sometimes ask ppl to spot all the zebra crossings and stuff etc - no machine can solve it yet, so ppl can do it, and by doing it and solving it, you produce a labelled dataset for autonomous cars.


Yes, which is why every time you are given one of those captchas you deliberately pick at least one incorrect image, and it still lets you through. Back in the day when google captcha had you typing in words, it was super clear which one was generated and which one was scanned from a book or whatever - you'd always type in the scanned word completely randomly and it would still accept it.


That's how hCaptcha does it https://www.hcaptcha.com/labeling You play to get a dataset labelled and trained.


Except there are now enough labelled datasets of those things, even public freely available ones.

If you wanted to increase the precision of the model further, you'd end up using very ambiguous images which wouldn't be suitable for a captcha.


If CAPTCHA was only about trying to keep bots out of websites, it wouldn't be that hard.

CAPTCHA is a profitable enterprise, because every user response is used to train an AI. It is presented as a free service for website owners, but actually it uses your users to be trainers.

A truly free open-source captcha wouldn't be very hard to implement or to keep updated, but no one does it because it would be very expensive to host the server.


You can subscribe here for whenever it happens: https://github.com/dessant/buster/issues/320


All CAPTCHA are abusive and hostile against the user. Soon the EUPARL will debate&introduce a regulation to forbid CAPTHCA across EU. The service providers/SaaS must find another way to protect their servers from abuse/DDOS, by not penalizing the users.


The other week I was in an argument with a product owner regarding an interface for creating new items in our web portal. His take was that we should make it more difficult to make new items, since that would make it annoying for our competitors to map our site and functionality. I would have loved watching Steve Jobs reaction to someone suggesting that to him.


Just a tip, if you find a place that looks nice to book on airbnb, try checking for booking directly. I found a place on airbnb and was in a hurry, but later when I checked the cabin rental's website, I found that the money I spent in fees to airbnb could get me an upgrade to a much nicer cabin if I had booked directly with the cabin rental company.


Many times you can find the same place with search for apartments on booking.com. You will get full address and most of the times cheaper.


4 times out of 5 I find the price on booking.com to be 20% ~ 40% cheaper than the price on the place’s own website. Even when I call them for a price like booking.com (because I hate giving Booking my money), the place says the best price is on Booking and I should book there.


I compared booking.com to Airbnb. Booking.com is mostly cheaper. You can get cheaper if you are at reception desk and talk to owner. It means place to stay is not part of a chain. Or you are extending your stay at reception.


Funnily enough I got this captcha 2 days ago and tried searching out to see if anyone else had thought about how ridiculous this captcha is - couldn't find any discussions elsewhere though at the time. Glad someone has brought it up though.

There has to be better way to determine if someone is a robot or not surely.


They didn't steal it, you voluntary gave it to them.


I call this "protection from real customers".

If it takes me 5 minutes to solve this puzzle of yours, I just lost 5/60 of my hourly wage, which could easily be $10 or more.

What a novel idea to protect your website from real customers. The worst is when they do these puzzles when you simply want to access some static information like the product page, the cost of serving which is way below 1¢.


OP is literally encourages this behavior by solving those captchas. The right way is to say "fuck you" and use another service.


OP here. TBH I was that close of doing that, I totaly understand your reaction.

But until this day I was happy with the service provided, never had a bad surprise, and my profile is very shiny with good reviews from everywhere I stayed, alone or with my (young) kids so I never have problem to book any place I go.

But maybe it's time to try other services


Sunk cost then. Understandable, but a bit irrational. My heart is with you, though.


Just like RIAA and MPAA you have a strange definition of stealing.


Why can't Google and apple solve the 'are you a human?' check at operating system level. As a user on mobile phone they are already tracking our clicks and should be easy to communicate that to the apps and browsers.


If Google or Apple were to do that, then bad actors could do the same - even if they have to run a bank of old Android phones. Then we'd need some way of distinguishing bot from non-bot - so we'd be back to captcha.


lol no thanks I'd rather not have an OS based tracking API, even worse for every website out there. Just dont use captchas. "Are you a human" is not something a website should know.


> "Are you a human" is not something a website should know.

This is the only long term solution as ML gets closer to AI.

If your website is fucked because it can't handle the traffic, that's better solved at the source (hardware/software/bandwidth)

If your website is fucked because someone can trivially scrape the most important bits from the web interface, you need to have a business conversation, not a technology conversation.


Putting besides the fact that I'm 100% certain it's not to hard to brake it with AI and it being dam annoying:

There are people with Discalculia, for them such a think is torture. This is an accessibility nightmare.


It feels like sometimes that developers are more interested in showing how clever they are than proving Im not a robot. If I can correctly choose 2 buses from 3 then surely give me the benefit of the doubt!


The issue is, we want tasks where it s easy to generate lots of data that a human of any level of healthy intelligence can solve with simple intuition and low prior skill.

I.e. exactly the kind of tasks where ML excels.


Captchas in general are user hostile and rude, when possible I back out and won’t use a website when I see them. If you give a company money when they fuck you, they are gonna keep fucking you.


Do you have a bunch of ad blockers or similar types of add-ons running? I doubt they’re using this sort of captcha for every user, and I wouldn’t be surprised if something about your setup flagged you as potentially malicious or fraudulent.

If your aim is to deactivate every other possible strategy a site has for knowing if you’re a real user or not, then of course you’re going to end up with stuff like this. This can’t possibly be a surprise to you, can it?


I found the world has more confusing captcha for foreigners...Like this Chinese captcha provider named TongDun. A Rubik's Cube like experience. Interesting. https://postimg.cc/rdyh52mc https://postimg.cc/HJL2V0Zk


I could understand if this was for a job application, but it does seem excessive

Requiring the sum of one set would (I think) be almost as effective and less painful


In the usa you can sue airbnb for ada accessibility compliance (this captcha spunds like an a obvious fail). all it takes to qualify tis feeling "embarrassed" by the way they treated you / or exparte. You can do this in small claims court on your own, or behalf of an organization that helps other disabled web users.


If it is indeed Arkose like other commenters are claiming, they offer audio and other a11y-complaint alternatives.


I remember interviewing for Airbnb and how every interviewer made it a point to say user experience & design is in their core. In my head I was thinking slow page load time, dark user patterns, it takes several clicks to get to search results, home page feed is pretty much static.


At least they don't make you work for a company you possibly detest, like RECAPCHA forcing you to work for Google. It often boggles my mind how serious businesses do that kind of thing to their customers.


You're lucky. I always get prompted to access new terms of use and when I say yes, I get an error that I've tried to change something I don't have the right to change.


I have to say, knowing to only read the 'top' number in a picture that is two dimensions is kind of a heavy lift.

Part of my really wants to just add up every number I see in the picture.


I could solve one of these in about 15-20 seconds but more than one would suck. I don’t know if it’s any worse than the cat box h captcha though


Secure. But bad UX. Probably some ML engine behind the scene decided you were more suspicious than others so you got a more difficult challenge.


You use both ABP and uBlock Origin? Why?


OP here: And all that is behind a Pi-hole :-D

With default conf, sometimes one doesn't block what the other blocks.

Maybe if I spend time tuning and configuring them one will be enough.

At this very moment, I'm on a page where both block 1 thing, not the same


Likely so they can look as much like a bot or malicious user as possible, and then complain when websites treat them as such.


and Privacy Badger


Privacy Badger doesn't provide the same thing.

With PB you can choose to just block cookies from a website but still view content.


Counting spots? Not the biggest challenge for a robot.

I wonder if there are any disability legal concerns with this?


Well, counting spots and also printed numbers in a specific font. And then figuring out if the question is to sum them, or identify the highest number, or "how many threes?", etc.


It's just not Airbnb, Ronin Wallet also does this. It's definitely a waste of time.


LOL CAN WE STICK WITH SPIRAL GALAXIES, IT IS WAY WAY EASIER.


I remember when Google's new CAPTCHA system was introduced and you just had one click and could get through, now you have to spend ages clicking photos of american busses.


Minor and basically unrelated but it’s dice, not dices. Like sheep, it’s singular and plural.


<pedant>The singular is "die" not "dice".</pedant>


Interestingly this is one case where I think the technically incorrect version is winning. Many of us who who know that it's "one die" and "two dice" would still say something like "what does the dice say?" or "pass the dice", if only because "what does the die say" or "pass the die" sounds a bit awkward.

This is one I'm not worried about, I'd be more annoyed if "more then" or "should of" started taking off :D


New captcha question: "What is the should of 20?"


Shh.. They will use this as the next Captcha. Pick the plural form of the following words no one cares about:


I think we should just let the language treadmill do its thing. Singular: dices, plural: diceses.


Could be dicey though!


That pun was to die for!

(Apologies for continuing the off topic, but in a funk right now and that comment really put a much needed smile on my face).


Well, die is the singular.


Yes, but it can also be der or das.




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