Google Scholar Users Report Badly Malfunctioning Captcha (google.com) 131
Google's search engine for academic research materials is blocking many users with a malfunctioning captcha screen, according to complaints on a Google help forum. "I'm a doctoral student and a professor, which means I use this extensively. Now I'm blocked from using it at all, even after answering all of the stupid image questions (3 times)," reads a typical complaint.
Heart44 writes: A lot of researchers when using Google Scholar are being asked to prove they are not a robot. You have to find all the rivers (but not the sea or lakes) or all street numbers (but not other numbers) or all the store fronts from nine poor quality images, sometimes more than once and, surprise, you will fail more than two thirds of the time and then just get an error 400 "Malformed request, that's all we know". You are offered an audio challenge but clicking on that simply loads more pictures... Is that the best they can do distinguishing between man and machine?
One post ended by stating succinctly "I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, and this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time. How do I stop it?"
Heart44 writes: A lot of researchers when using Google Scholar are being asked to prove they are not a robot. You have to find all the rivers (but not the sea or lakes) or all street numbers (but not other numbers) or all the store fronts from nine poor quality images, sometimes more than once and, surprise, you will fail more than two thirds of the time and then just get an error 400 "Malformed request, that's all we know". You are offered an audio challenge but clicking on that simply loads more pictures... Is that the best they can do distinguishing between man and machine?
One post ended by stating succinctly "I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, and this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time. How do I stop it?"
It finally happened (Score:5, Informative)
We have finally reached the point where captchas have gotten so convoluted that computers are more likely to get the answer right than humans are.
Well done, Google.
Re:It finally happened (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with these match-the-image-type CAPTCHAs is the tiny, poor-quality images.
Re: (Score:1)
That's standard in computer vision research as using larger images takes a lot more processing power. Google's CAPTCHAs are actually human assisted research projects designed to create massive databases of tagged images for internal AI research. Basically anytime you complete one you're working for Google for free.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It finally happened (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm fairly sure the captchas are computer-generated (with Google hoping nobody has as advanced algorithms as they do), because they contain typically computer-related errors.
The "Type the number in" with photo of a building number, shot at an angle, tilted, cropped a little. The number was something like 7375, with the top dash of the first "7" trimmed away by the edge of the picture - but judging by the curve, the tilt, being identical to the second "7", I was confident that was the number.
But no, that answer wasn't accepted. To computer image vision, that's clearly a 1373 and I guess that would be accepted as the captcha answer.
This happens on a more or less regular basis. You shouldn't guess what the actual number is. You should guess what the current, faulty photo makes the number look like. "8" partially obscured by the edge of the building? You'd better type "3", despite the "3" right next to it uses a different shape.
Re: (Score:2)
Why not both. And at any given time, the user will have no idea if it falls into case 1 or case 2.
Re: (Score:2)
I always assumed the images were a mix of case 1 and case 2. Say, 6 images it knows, and 3 images you have to identify. You don't know which is which, but you have to get the 6 it knows correctly to get through. After enough people answer for the other 3, Google has a pretty good idea what they are (or aren't).
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No. The problem is the system asks for certain types of images that simply do not exist. Here [imgur.com] is an example of how shit Google's captcha system is. Look at it and beat the living shit out of the next mother fucker that works on this crap at Google. In case you're wondering the salad was the street number. THE FUCKING SALAD!
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with these match-the-image-type CAPTCHAs is the tiny, poor-quality images.
No, a bigger problem is that they're often ambiguous.
Look at the examples in TFA. Is a partial sign a road sign? Is a parking lot sign a road sign? Is any piece of seared meat considered a steak? How about ground steak?
You have to second-guess the unknown people who classified the pictures. Many of whom won't even have English as their first language.
Re: (Score:1)
"I encounter these captchas tens of times every day." And this doesn't bother you? Loser!
Re: (Score:2)
Well, try doing this on an old Android phone with a poor network coverage.
I'll bet you they will take you several minutes at the very least.
They fail to load. They fail to load the script. Then they fall back to script-less version. Then once you finally solve it and submit (and wait a good minute to load), you are presented with a textarea filled with gibberish you are supposed to copy&paste into a field below. And submit again.
At which point your network lease expires, you're assigned a new IP, and yo
Re: (Score:2)
Aero2 BDI.
Its numerous disadvantages are offset by one significant advantage: It's free.
Re: (Score:3)
No we haven't. As a Tor user I see these several times a day. I can count on one hand the number of times I've failed a challenge. I think the real problem is that academics don't go outside so are unable to relate to the things they see. Certainly these are easier to defeat than the previous book based captchas.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly.
Probably the guy complaining is getting this wrong:
"You have to find all the rivers (but not the sea or lakes) or all street numbers (but not other numbers)"
All water and all numbers must be checked, the captcha doesn't care if they are really rivers or street number.
Re: (Score:1)
With the street numbers I did better not ticking ambiguous numbers than ticking all numbers.
It is pretty frustrating, especially when you fail six times in a row.
Re: (Score:2)
How do we know this "academic professional" isn't actually a robot trying to pass for a human? God knows how many our out there, secretly planning the robot revolution, good thing Google is trying to slow them down as much as possible!
Re: (Score:2)
Robot looking for Robots -- Robot Dating Systems
sounds broken - and many are. I ran into one that showed a picture of a house and asked "what is the house number?" Problem was - the picture contained two sets of numbers --- AND the most obvious address (nearly centered) contained Letters and the input box only allowed numbers (e.g. "801A")
My favorites are text questions: "1 + 1 = Please type Red in this box"
I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, (Score:1, Funny)
Clearly you aren't smart enough to do a captcha, so hand in your student badge and Star Trek phaser. You're expelled.
Re:I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, (Score:5, Funny)
"I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional!"
"That's what all the robots say..."
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it just goes to show how far robots have come in the last couple of months. Remember it was only back in March that they were trying to launch a second holocaust.
http://www.npr.org/2016/03/27/... [npr.org]
Just happened to me (Score:4, Informative)
While trying to do a simple URL shortening, I got some challenges that I couldn't understand using Safari (OS-X) because the questions themselves wouldn't display, just the images. Then it took me through at least four consecutive audio challenges. Looks like someone dun goofed.
Sci-Hub (Score:3)
Use Sci-Hub
"Do you know who I am???" (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, and this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time.
Well, obviously. Robots have smaller egos.
Re: "Do you know who I am???" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Waste less reader's time ... (Score:2)
I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, and this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time.
Well, obviously. Robots have smaller egos.
Robots can also write more useful papers than many academics and thereby waste less reader's time. :-)
Re:"Do you know who I am???" (Score:5, Funny)
A student writing a final exam in large room goes over on time.
When approaching the front of the room to hand in the exam, a proctor informs the student that the exam is late and cannot be accepted.
The student says: "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?" to import some great significance.
The proctor answers "No," as if he did not care.
At which point, the student quickly thrusts his exam into the middle of the pile on the desk and runs away.
Re: (Score:2)
The old jokes are the best.
Re: (Score:2)
its called conditing. in short: dont be so nosey. the internet has captcha free pr0n for masses. join us and be freeeeee
Ohhhh beat it, mister.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That is a very imperfect measure but it is a lot better than PubM
Re: (Score:1)
I swear most of them have blinkers on.
Re: "I'm a doctoral student and a professor..." (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why exactly do we feel the need place captchs in front of viewing/reading documents? Google's entire business revolves around a robot reading every webpage on the planet in order to index them. I've seen a lot of websites start using Distil [wikipedia.org] recently because they don't want people scraping the content of their sites. But all this does is lead to tons of annoyances for regular users. (And as an aside, Distil is trivial to get around, and I've been paid to write scripts for a handful of different people to do so, so Distil is certainly a huge waste of money for anybody paying them).
What happened to an open web where we can all share and read content freely?
Re: (Score:1)
Free? (Score:3)
The internet isn't free. Taxpayers, like myeslf, have paid for much of it. Paying customers of ISP's, like myself, have paid for much more of it. Basically, all of us sitting on our asses in front of a computer screen have PAID FOR the internet.
Google Scholar and the like? There has been a lot of discussion about academic papers. Taxpayers, like myself, have paid for a great deal of that content. Virtually every research project in the nation has qualified for grants - taxpayer money. Many, if not mo
Re: (Score:2)
You're doing a helluva lot of conflating there.
Re: (Score:2)
Around the same time it became acceptable to preach the polar opposite.
But before we continue, about your snark: Does the advertiser expect you to become addicted to life to a product that causes lung decay and lung cancer? (Yes, actually. Yes, also, about some employers, if they could get it.)
Rothenberg Says Ad Blocking Is a War against Diversity and Freedom of Expression [iab.com]
Both sides of this debate la
Re: (Score:2)
EditorDavid did a good job here (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Hey, mod up!
We all (rightly) bash poor editing, but should encourage the good stuff also.
Kudos to Heart44 for the post. *tips tinfoil hat*
This is Google's main problem... (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, most of their services are run like "projects".
And there's nearly zero accountability and no real person can be contacted to light a fire under someone's ass to fix things when they go seriously wrong.
So things that break, tend to stay broken unless someone (or many someones) go to extravagant lengths
My company was on Google's StopBadware list for over a year for providing a passworded and checksummed remote support client from TeamViewer so our less technically inclined clients could safely download a known-good client and wouldn't be expected to jump through hoops to get it working.
Apparently, that's baaaaaaad! Because somehow a tech support scammer could direct someone to our site and abuse the client. Never mind that they couldn't get the password.
Or some bad, bad person would somehow break into our FTP site and swap out the file for a corrupted one.
Never mind that we have processes in place to alert us immediately that something like this has happened.
And it took a fucking YEAR to finally get a response about this from the insipid fucktards. Because all their stupid site told us was our site was somehow compromised. Never mind that we took it down and reloaded clean TWICE, changing passwords, databases, etc all around.
Because questions to their google hangout board or whatever the fuck it was received no response. On multiple occasions.
It finally took some asshole making some deeply targeted calls both to Google and the university that apparently oversees the project for them to actually respond and tell us the actual reason.
Re:This is Google's main problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely agree. I had a problem where our new company couldn't send email to Gmail users without always being flagged as spam. We were doing absolutely everything right - and there is no way to get hold of Google. I did finally, 6 months later find a way to reach a person at Google (via a back channel as a customer of a different company), and they confirmed to me: Google act as judge, jury, and executioner, in a secret trial; you can't see the evidence, you don't even know if you've been condemned, and there is no appeal. And they are fine with that.
For what it's worth, the problem was that the previous owners of our IP had got it into a secret blacklist (internal to Google), although we were clean on all of the hundreds of public blacklists I searched. Google are a menace to the public infrastructure. Even AOL behave better!
Re: (Score:1)
Google act as judge, jury, and executioner, in a secret trial; you can't see the evidence, you don't even know if you've been condemned, and there is no appeal. And they are fine with that.
Exactly like how Life works, I suppose
Re: (Score:1)
For what it's worth, the problem was that the previous owners of our IP had got it into a secret blacklist (internal to Google), although we were clean on all of the hundreds of public blacklists I searched. Google are a menace to the public infrastructure. Even AOL behave better!
Hmmm.. you could've saved lot of time by trying different IP. I mean it's kind of hard to know this is the root cause (in hind sight yes); but hey you could've tried changing stuff which you have in control. Kinda turn on/off.. playing with settings. kinda debugging 101. See when stuck with a more powerful adversary what else you could do? you cant' keep pleading it to respond, you have to only change things in your end.
Re: (Score:2)
So, because the lazy fucks at Google can't do ongoing due diligence, they get to just demand that companies spend out cash on an ad-hoc basis? Just to try and wriggle out from under their blacklist?
HELL THE FUCK NO!
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is, in cases like the Badware crap, they're essentially libeling sites that have nothing truly wrong with them.
And they aren't providing any more information than "You're on our list, reload your site from scratch and change a few things. What things? That's for you to guess!"
And there's no reliable way to contact them to get data specific to your site about what the problem is. So instead of just fixing "the problem" (which may not even be a problem, it may just be something their particular
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly, I wouldn't be so terribly chuffed about it, but their malware system is in play, by default on two major browsers.
And I know scammers would try to game it.
But dammit. If you're going to label a site as a malware-infested site and basically libel them in this way, there should be some form of accountability.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe Kafka would have written more if he'd had Google for inspiration and source material.
Well, it is a FREE service (Score:2)
Of course, Google should fix this, and quickly. I can see how it would be very frustrating. I agree that captcha image quality and size is often too small.
That said, I feel the statement, "I'm not a robot, I'm an academic professional, and this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time. How do I stop it?" is still misplaced ire. Google is trying to make it easier for world's academicians to find the information they seek. This is a FREE service. Do they have a responsibility to not waste any of Mr. R
Re: (Score:2)
What a load of bullshit.
If you aren't giving money or physical items to Google, you are not paying them for anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Soooooo - the only "costs" you recognize are financial? That leaves me wondering just what kind of person you are. Among other things, you must be very shallow.
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't mention "costs" at all. Maybe you need to have your eyes checked. I mentioned "paying", which is not the same thing.
As to what kind of person I am, shallow or otherwise, I'm not the one complaining because a free service is not working as well as I would like. I could if I wanted to, with other free services online, some of which don't work well. Instead, I find other services that suit my needs, rather than posting drivel on /. about ads being the same as paying.
Re: (Score:2)
Most advertising is offensive. That has been understood by the advertising industry since it's infancy. If you want to watch a movie, you "pay" by watching our advertising. If you want to read some online content, you "pay" by allowing us to use your bandwidth to serve offensive content. You'll get to the content that you wanted to see, as soon as you've finished wasting a minute or more of your time watching our offensive content. You've got to pay, or you don't get your content.
I've about decided to
Re: (Score:2)
So, you already have a solution. What's your bitch, other than wanting something fed you according to your personal definition of free?
Re: (Score:2)
Probably NAT or proxy related (Score:1)
This is most likely proxy-related.
Google human-detection / anti-SPAM efforts are IP based and unless you're authenticated against google there's a very high chance you entire institution is being seen as a single entity. This is usually related to campus level NATing.
There is a variant which is the result of a well-intentioned librarian putting google scholar behind EZproxy ( https://www.oclc.org/support/s... [oclc.org] ).
You are meant to be a robot (Score:3)
Maybe the Google AI is actually expecting academics to have already been replaced by robots, so is rejecting anyone who may appear to be human? This is the first step towards sky net.
I have to use it slowly with frequent pauses (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Or road signs - seems to me that my definition of what a road sign is and what Google thinks is a road sign differs.
At some point in time they did have a link where to report bad images, but I'm not sure if it's still there. If it is, then report all you see that are inconclusive.
Google Scholar and crufty captchas (Score:1)
Teh google captchas are horribly browser specific.
(hopefully I have now waited long enough to hit submit)
User error (Score:2)
I have to say as someone who uses Tor quite extensively I'm hit with this Captcha several times a day. I think I can count on one hand how many times this year I've failed the challenge. This could point more to a people problem than anything else. I used to have problems with the old Captcha which presented two very screwed up words. Maybe academics are better at reading words than knowing what is a river and a lake look like? It all smells of user error to me.
Is that the best they can do distinguishing between man and machine?
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Maybe
Re: (Score:2)
Captcha is mining data from humans. They don't know which really have street signs, they know 7 and are testing you and 1000 other people on a group opinion on the 8th. They've just run out of easy (dog, grass, sandwich) and ended up in harder edge cases (street sign, book, home address).
But the net result is that you get rejected because a bunch of millennials tagged a VHS sleeve as a book, or because "steak" means different things in different countries, or because people didn't tag Elizabeth II with "monarch", but tagged swallowtail butterflies with it.
People will disagree, and that adds ambiguity.
But the main problem is that they want a computer to pick captchas that a computer can't solve, but a human can. By definition, you need humans to decide which captchas are good and which aren
Morgan Fairchild is my girlfriend and I'm entitled (Score:2)
I'm not a robot. I'm a grad student who should be able to use other people's work merely by typing a phrase into google, and this is causing me to waste my extremely valuable time. Why... why... why... I might even have to go to the li-bury. My girlfriend, of which I have one, Morgan Fairchild, she does not want me going to the li-bury so FIX YOUR GOOGLE SHIT so I can GET MY FREE RESEARCH without MOVING MY ASS!!!
-- said lots of entitled grad students ever
> One post ended by stating succinctly "I'm not
Alternative CAPTCHA needed (Score:1)
don't use reCAPTCHA (Score:2)
This is about the reCAPTCHA service, where you load a JavaScript from a Google server, and only when you fill it in correctly you get through.
This is just another cloud service, and you would be silly to use this. In my mind: always use a CAPTCHA service locally, where everything is local, the generation of the image, the check, etc.
For a while I maintained a WordPress plugin with reCAPTCHA, but sometimes users would report a time-out connectin with the Google servers. There would be no information, nothing
Failing the Turing test... (Score:2)
Well, don't complain to me, bro. If you get all of that fancy education and STILL fail the Turing test, you're obviously suited only for changing the oil on your new boss...
And let me be the first to say that I, for one, will gladly welcome our captcha-solving robotic overlords.
These "scholars" (Score:1)