Comment by windward
2 days ago
I wonder if it's an intentional quirk that you can only pass some CAPTCHAs if you're a human who knows what an American fire hydrant or school bus looks like?
2 days ago
I wonder if it's an intentional quirk that you can only pass some CAPTCHAs if you're a human who knows what an American fire hydrant or school bus looks like?
> an American fire hydrant or school bus
So much this. The first time one asked me to click on "crosswalks", I genuinely had to think for a while as I struggled to remember WTF a "crosswalk" was in AmEng. I am a native English speaker, writer, editor and professionally qualified teacher, but my form of English does not have the word "crosswalk" or any word that is a synonym for it. (It has phrases instead.)
Our schoolbuses are ordinary buses with a special number on the front. They are no specific colour.
There are other examples which aren't coming immediately to mind, but it is vexing when the designer of a CAPTCHA isn't testing if I am human but if I am American.
I doubt it’s intentional. Google (owner of reCAPTCHA) is a US company, so it’s more likely they either haven’t considered what they see every day is far from universal; don’t care about other countries; or specifically just care about training for the US.
Google demanding I flag yellow cars when asked to flag taxis is the silliest Americanism I've seen. At least the school bus has SCHOOL BUS written all over it and fire hydrants aren't exactly an American exclusive thing.
On some Russian and Asian site I ran into trouble signing up for a forum using translation software because the CAPTCHA requires me to enter characters I couldn't read or reproduce. It doesn't happen as often as the Google thing, but the problem certainly isn't restricted to American sites!