Recaptcha nonsense

[Kim]

Surely 'street signs' is simply USAnian for 'road signs'?

Possibly, but this is Great Britain, and Sainsbury's is British.  Why the hell should I be expected to interpret into colonialspeak just to use their bloody website?  What the matter with them, they have passwords and stuff, why the need to some sort of twisted quiz game just to buy stuff from them?

Because it's computers and we got over having to deal with USAnian spelling and terminology when dealing with computer stuff in about 1987?  Insisting otherwise would put us on a level with the French and their "courriel".

Sainsbury's may be British, but the captcha nonsense won't be, in the same way that your operating system isn't^[1].  We can localise things for convenience, but like all abstractions, it leaks eventually.


_{[1] Unless you're running RISC OS, which is slightly less unlikely than it would normally be, given the context.}

[Jaded]

If Captcha was brilliant, then Apple and others would use it.

I have always thought it was a clandestine way of assessing web users' intelligence.

I've never had a problem with it.

[hellymedic]

This recent Sainsbury's Captcha shite was an ablist pile of poo which discriminated against the hard of vision and those with a different language skillset.

I don't think you should need to pass an IQ test to buy a bunch of bananas!

[Zipperhead]

I don't think you should need to pass an IQ test to buy a bunch of bananas!

After the brexit vote I heard someone on question time say that she was going to vote remain but on the day of the vote she went to the supermarket and saw straight bananas so she voted for exit.

So yes, I think you should have to pass an IQ test to buy a bunch of bananas.

[tonycollinet]

I disagree - but you should have to pass an IQ test to vote.

The problem with democracy is that half the voters are below average intelligence.

[Cudzoziemiec]

What do the people who don't like picture captcha think of the letters and numbers version? Or the people who do like it, come to that.

[Mr Larrington]

If you can't see well enough to read the letters, there's no difference.

[hellymedic]

After several log-ins without this crap, I had a picture Captcha last night.

I see Sainsbury's now email you when your order has been packed.

Can't decide whether Yet Another Email is annoying or if notification about absent Picotta cherries is useful enough to trump the irritation.

[Cudzoziemiec]

If you can't see well enough to read the letters, there's no difference.

True. But if you can see well enough to read the letters, they're often obscured by dots and, due to the mix of fonts, sizes and alignments, it can be hard to tell whether some characters are upper case or lower case or even if they're letters or numbers; is that a 9 or a g?

[citoyen]

There's a lot of misguided thinking behind Recaptcha nonsense, principally the idea that they have to make the test harder in order to fool unsophisticated robots, but all that does is alienate legitimate users. It's up there with making everyone take their shoes off at the airport to prevent terrorists, or making riders answer tricky info control questions to prevent cheating by looking at Google Maps - the supposed benefits are too slight to justify making people jump through these hoops.

I've noticed some sites eschew the Recaptcha nonsense in favour of a simple checkbox for you to indicate that "I am not a robot". I had been wondering how such a system could possibly beat a robot - surely robots these days are sophisticated enough to be able to lie, which probably has Isaac Asimov turning in his grave but hey, that's the harsh reality - but I understand this works by analysing your mouse movements as part of the process, so there's more to it than just ticking the box. Very clever.

[philip]

I've noticed some sites eschew the Recaptcha nonsense in favour of a simple checkbox for you to indicate that "I am not a robot".

That is usually still reCAPTCHA, but your browser is leaking enough information that Google has already decided that you are a human.

[citoyen]

I've noticed some sites eschew the Recaptcha nonsense in favour of a simple checkbox for you to indicate that "I am not a robot".

That is usually still reCAPTCHA, but your browser is leaking enough information that Google has already decided that you are a human.

Yes, there's definitely something slightly sinister and Big Brother-ish about how it works, but on the whole I think it's preferable to having to interpret some indecipherable text.

[Kim]

The main benefit of captchas is that they've pushed the limits of AI, to the point where humans are regularly failing their Turing test.

[Ham]

I've noticed some sites eschew the Recaptcha nonsense in favour of a simple checkbox for you to indicate that "I am not a robot".

It always puts me in mind of