I just ran int this yesterday. It kept showing pictures full of scooters and asking me to click on the motorcycles.
Have you tried calling an American corporation and getting a human being on the line in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Four? You’d be better off flying to wherever their HQ is, barging into the lobby, and demanding to talk to the CEO.
For over a decade I’ve been paying Comcast for a cable TV + internet + landline package. I haven’t actually used the landline in years, and I realized earlier this year that I barely watch cable anymore since all the shows I’m interested in are on the streaming services, so I decided I wanted to drop the TV and phone parts of my plan and just keep the internet. When I called their customer service line to cancel, it told me I had to speak to an agent, but all their agents were busy (at 2 PM on a Tuesday?) and I needed to make the request online instead. When I tried to cancel online, it sent me to a “live chat” with a “customer service specialist”, but that specialist was just an AI chatbot, and when I told it I wanted to cancel, it told me I needed to call. I had to go to r/comcast_xfinity and post an angry rant and threaten to cancel my debit card so they COULDN’T take my money in order to get a human to contact me and help me set up my new plan.
And now we know why Musk renamed Twitter.
Both banks I use have this option.
Here’s the thing I learned from experience. If you call a corporation, and get the “For English, press 1” runaround, then you need to wait for all the other choices, figure out the one that allows you to cancel your subscription, and hit the key for Cancel. You’ll get a human operator in less than a minute, in my experience.
You’ll get a real live human on the phone in less than a minute, trying to convince you to keep your subscription. Well, you can play along and reluctantly agree to keep your subscription, as long as you can speak with Customer Service, and hopefully adjust your bill payment date.
You’ll be connected to a real, live operator who can help you. Just my experience, yours may vary.
Oh, that used to work. It doesn’t seem to anymore, especially since so many companies have switched to having you talk at the bot instead of pressing buttons, and no amount of “Agent!” or “I want to speak to a human!” seems to work. More often there isn’t even an explicit option to cancel and you have to try and guess what combination of responses will get you to account retention.
Just say, “Cancel.” Even if it’s not there, it’s there. That worked for me.
“Cancel” is what got it to tell me to use the online chatbot. Sometimes I think it’d be easier to fake my own death than to cancel an account.
Sorry, I know this is a Pit thread, but can I ask for an FQ explanation of this? What is the ‘how’ that the algorithm is looking for? That would be good to know.
and this too. I also would have thought that very minimal damage could be caused by hacking into a bill-paying portal. Can you tell more? thanks
Have you seen the simple “I am not a robot” check boxes? Well, of course some bot could find that and click it, but the bot would do it in some really direct way, probably clicking in the middle of the box, straight line mouse movement. The browser actually knows how you typically move your mouse and will offer up the simple button.
Those same sites might require the more complicated matching exercise if you’re in an incognito window.
Anyway, the point is that the eCaptcha will try to determine if it’s a robot or a human clicking buttons, by the way the mouse moves, where it lands when the button is clicked, etc. Apparently, that’s as important as getting the right pictures. I’m sure AIs can find motorcycles easily now, but I guess they still move the mouse too mechanically.
One could, if it were worth it, train a bot to move the mouse any desired way, including to get past any “I am not a robot” checkbox.
One of the criteria it uses is how the mouse moves and the delay between clicks. If you’re really quick and precise with your selections, the system thinks automation is being used. Instead, take a bit of time between clicks and move the mouse around in a less deliberate manner. That helps make the system think it’s a person doing the clicking rather than a program.
So, is just ONE pixel sufficient to qualify as a “motorcycle”? I always choose such a box, if it has say a tiny bit of the exhaust pipe in it, but the web site hardly ever agrees with me, for some strange reason…
I keep running into this at a certain music site I frequent, which is chock-full of data, but said data is not presented in an easy to acquire manner, so you have to constantly click on a bunch of stuff and manually copy it down to get what you need. And they just released a huge new set of data to sift through, except if you actually try to do that, the bot will get angry at you.
An idiot admin once then chimed in after the bot got on my ass, trying to tell me that a average of 1.25 seconds between clicks was the same as an actual constant interval of 1.25 seconds between clicks.
Greatly lessens my desire to go back when these false positives keep porking the enjoyment of actual human users. At the very least change things up a bit, give dinosaurs or pies or guitars or something.
My understanding is that they are trained by other users, so you should click on however many squares you think the average person would.
We have that in the US. Some people, even in Canada, are… hesistant.
OP, do you use Chrome? Because I just went to a CAPTCHA test page and it just has me click the I Am Not A Robot checkbox if I’m in a regular session. If I go to the same page in incognito mode, it makes me do the Find all the cars thing.
I don’t know if that would work the same way with other browsers.
So it’s the Family Feud method of determining what is correct?
So it is testing ME to judge how OTHER hyoomon beungs did on the test, and if MY judgement therein is wrong I am the one which “fails” the idiot test. That’s just focking peachy. 
Its always a portion. THAT box has a small piece of a handlebar. That box has a smidgeon of a tire. That box has what could be a sliver of a tailpipe.
I’m a little worried about this one;
