Thread

CAPTCHAs don't prove you're human – they prove you're American (2017)

92 points · 90 comments · theanonymousone

kybernetikos · 1790412590 · focus · HN ↗
Other common issues - crosswalks and fire hydrants are common questions too, and crosswalks are not called that in most of the world and fire hydrants look pretty different depending on country.
1. TFNA · 1790412951 · focus · HN ↗
  This is perhaps a declining problem, as young people in so many countries are growing up as proficient US English speakers due to heavy social media consumption, to the point that US English CAPTCHA challenges would just feel normal. I suspect there are more young people around the world now for whom "crosswalk" is more natural than "zebra" -- in my country, the latter is already a shibboleth that one is an oldie who learned UK English, now regarded here as an antiquated standard after teaching switched to US English.
  1. mcintyre1994 · 1790413137 · focus · HN ↗
    Also a declining problem because any recent LLM can solve them all for you. FWIW though I don’t know anyone in the UK who uses the term crosswalk, though I think most would probably understand it in context.
    arrowsmith · 1790414026 · focus · HN ↗
    I've noticed that "Santa" is really starting to displace "Father Christmas" in British English. When I was a kid if you said "Santa" you'd have been scolded for using the American name, but listening to kids now I hear them say "Santa" all the time. I blame TV.
    "Crosswalk" sounds extremely American to me and I've never heard anyone say it in Britain, but maybe I'm just getting old.
    mcintyre1994 · 1790434298 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s a fair example, I think I’ve always seen Santa and Father Christmas as interchangeable and wouldn’t necessarily associate one of them with being the American one. A hypothesis I’d be curious about - I wonder if there’s a correlation between how commercialised something is and how Americanised it becomes. In that case I guess we won’t be calling them crosswalks any time soon.
    ikidd · 1790439302 · focus · HN ↗
    Interestingly, Santa is an American thing because of the early Dutch influence using Sinterklaas.
    arrowsmith · 1790503926 · focus · HN ↗
    The modern folklore (comes down the chimney, rides reindeer etc) is an American invention that came to Britain in the 19th Century. “Father Christmas” was an older British folk figure who got merged into the American tradition.
  2. pjc50 · 1790413422 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe we should ask Americans what a Belisha beacon is.
    arrowsmith · 1790413724 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm British and I never knew that those yellow-ball-on-black-and-white-pole-by-pedestrian-crossing things had a name. TIL
    pjc50 · 1790435981 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Hore-Belisha" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Hore-Belisha
    Forgotten otherwise, but responsible for introducing speed limits and the driving test.
    (Before looking him up I had no idea there was a brief 'fuck it no speed limit' period in the 30s, until obviously a number of people were killed)
    arrowsmith · 1790499788 · focus · HN ↗
    Interesting — so Belisha beacons were like the 1930s equivalent of Boris bikes.
    “Bobby” and (in Northern Ireland) “peeler” as slang terms for a policeman are two more examples of things named after a politician.
    wowczarek · 1790413939 · focus · HN ↗
    "Please identify a [PELICAN/PUFFIN/toucan] crossing."
    I'd love that. Good luck.
    ben_w · 1790414382 · focus · HN ↗
    Don't forget pegasus crossings. The one specifically for horse riders.
    biglyburrito · 1790421106 · focus · HN ↗
    It sounds delicious. I'll take two, please.
  3. [deleted] · 1790413734 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  4. [deleted] · 1790413855 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  5. hasley · 1790414222 · focus · HN ↗
    There are more people than only young, intelligent people who want to use the world wide web.
    As mentioned somewhere else in the comments here: This is just one aspect where US American culture is being favored and forced on other people and their culture.
    Yes, I know how fire hydrants look like in the USA. But this is not the point. It is about respecting other people's abilities and cultures.
    TFNA · 1790414933 · focus · HN ↗
    The thing about all those other people, though, is that they eventually get ousted by mortality and cultural change by the younger people.
    I certainly agree with you that the spread of US American culture is creepy. But such complaints are falling on deaf ears among younger generations now, at least in my corner of Europe: people brought up on this stuff often don't see the problem, they perceive this as normal and fine. In fact, if you advocate for anti-globalization sentiments -- a cornerstone of the European left 25 years ago -- you might even be taken as a far-right supporter now!
2. retired · 1790413094 · focus · HN ↗
  -Post removed as rate limiting does not allow me to comment and keep the discussion going-
  1. mcintyre1994 · 1790413183 · focus · HN ↗
    In the UK the captcha uses crosswalk, which isn’t the common name here.
  2. OJFord · 1790413271 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe it's translated, but it's definitely not localised. Captchas are nonsense in the UK, and a lot of Europe browses in English even if not their first language.
3. unwind · 1790413929 · focus · HN ↗
  Fire hydrants don't exist, they're just part of that cool media-pushed picture of some mythological place where things are ... weird and different.
4. skissane · 1790414271 · focus · HN ↗
  > and crosswalks are not called that in most of the world
  As an Australian, I'd never call them that, but I know what the American word means.
  In fact, the average Australian has a pretty good understanding of Americanisms, even if they've never been to the US, due to lifelong consumption of US TV shows, films, and other cultural exports.
  1. sam_lowry_ · 1790414639 · focus · HN ↗
    Like pretty much anyone in the world, actually.
    skissane · 1790417428 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think that's generally true outside the English-speaking world.
    The majority of people worldwide don't know English well-enough to consume English language media in the original language. A lot of people globally, if they watch US TV shows or movies at all, they'll watch them dubbed, which means the issue of Americanisms largely doesn't come up.
    TFNA · 1790423219 · focus · HN ↗
    This is swiftly changing. I spend about half of every year traveling the developing world, and I am constantly seeing young people consuming English-language social media from their phones. Particuarly young women seem drawn to TikTok beauty-influencer content in highly idiomatic English.
5. throwaway63467 · 1790414408 · focus · HN ↗
  Doesn’t recaptcha have localization? Not sure now that I think about it maybe not
  1. thephyber · 1790415204 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, the reCAPTCHA widget is localized[1], but that doesn't automatically mean every term is localized properly.
    But the underlying point of the article stands. This is similar to the mythical statement that some park ranger once stated "it's very hard to design a trash can that no bears can use, but that every human can."
    reCAPTCHA, like CloudFlare, benefits the wider population of the internet to the extent that everybody can use them, but there are edge cases where some outlier users get locked out of necessary internet infrastructure because they can't grok the ask, can't correctly identify the options, or because their computer / IP is being abused by bots so they are in the splash damage range of the bot checkers.
    [1] <a href="https://github.com/google/recaptcha/issues/68" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/google/recaptcha/issues/68
6. aaron695 · 1790415915 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
7. sieabahlpark · 1790429727 · focus · HN ↗
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