I don’t mind jumping through a few extra hoops in order to access a website idiosyncratically. But sometimes the process feels overly sectarian.
I was trying out the Tencent cloud without using Tor when I got a CAPTCHA. Sure, whatever. They verified my email. That’s normal. Then they wanted to verify my phone number. Okay. (Using phone numbers to verify accounts is standard practice for Chinese companies.) Then they required me to verify my credit card with a nominal $1 charge. I can understand their wanting to take extra care when it comes to processing international transactions. Then they required me to send a photo of my driver’s licence. Fine. Then they required 24 hours to process my application. Okay. Then they rejected my application. I wonder if that’s what the Internet feels like everyday to non-Americans.
I often anonymize my traffic with Tor. Sometimes I’ll end up on the French or German Google, which helps remind me that the Internet I see everyday is not the Internet everyone else sees.
Other people use Tor too, which is necessary to anonymize my traffic. Some Tor users aren’t really people. They’re bots. By accessing access the Internet from the same Tor exit relays as these bots, websites often suspect me of being a bot.
I encounter many pages like this.
This is a Russian CAPTCHA.
Prove you’re human by typing “вчepaшний garden”. Maybe I should write some OCR software to make proving my humanity less inconvenient.
Another time I had to identify which Chinese characters were written incorrectly.
The most frustrating CAPTCHAs require me to annotate images for self-driving cars. I do not mind annotating images of self-driving cars. I do mind, after having spent several minutes annotating images of self-driving cards, getting rejected based off of a traffic analysis of my IP address.
I do mind, after having spent several minutes annotating images of self-driving cards
I think it’s worst when you have edge cases like the Google Captcha that shows 16 tiles and you have to choose which tiles contain the item they are looking for and some of the tails contain it only a little bit on the edge.
I don’t mind jumping through a few extra hoops in order to access a website idiosyncratically. But sometimes the process feels overly sectarian.
I was trying out the Tencent cloud without using Tor when I got a CAPTCHA. Sure, whatever. They verified my email. That’s normal. Then they wanted to verify my phone number. Okay. (Using phone numbers to verify accounts is standard practice for Chinese companies.) Then they required me to verify my credit card with a nominal $1 charge. I can understand their wanting to take extra care when it comes to processing international transactions. Then they required me to send a photo of my driver’s licence. Fine. Then they required 24 hours to process my application. Okay. Then they rejected my application. I wonder if that’s what the Internet feels like everyday to non-Americans.
I often anonymize my traffic with Tor. Sometimes I’ll end up on the French or German Google, which helps remind me that the Internet I see everyday is not the Internet everyone else sees.
Other people use Tor too, which is necessary to anonymize my traffic. Some Tor users aren’t really people. They’re bots. By accessing access the Internet from the same Tor exit relays as these bots, websites often suspect me of being a bot.
I encounter many pages like this.
This is a Russian CAPTCHA.
Prove you’re human by typing “вчepaшний garden”. Maybe I should write some OCR software to make proving my humanity less inconvenient.
Another time I had to identify which Chinese characters were written incorrectly.
The most frustrating CAPTCHAs require me to annotate images for self-driving cars. I do not mind annotating images of self-driving cars. I do mind, after having spent several minutes annotating images of self-driving cards, getting rejected based off of a traffic analysis of my IP address.
I think it’s worst when you have edge cases like the Google Captcha that shows 16 tiles and you have to choose which tiles contain the item they are looking for and some of the tails contain it only a little bit on the edge.