The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Letting the emails in the inbox pile up until it's too much a mess go to through.

I have that problem. I really do need to sort out my email mess.

[ownedbycats]

It took me 12 tries to complete a CAPTCHA. i'm starting to question my humanity.

[poohbear_nc]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

It took me 12 tries to complete a CAPTCHA. i'm starting to question my humanity.

I feel your pain ... some of those tiny photos are SO out of focus - anything could be in them ... or not ....

[ownedbycats]

Or "select the bus" and one of the tiles has one little corner of a bus tire. If I decided to click it, I was wrong. If I decided not to click it, I was also wrong.

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Or "select the bus" and one of the tiles has one little corner of a bus tire. If I decided to click it, I was wrong. If I decided not to click it, I was also wrong.

I'm glad it's not personal!

[Sirtel]

Hmm... The question now is, is any MR member human? (Because, yeah, it's happened to me too.)

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Hmm... The question now is, is any MR member human? (Because, yeah, it's happened to me too.)

I think the problem is that the AI that generates the test isn't intelligent enough to test humans.

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I think the problem is that the AI that generates the test isn't intelligent enough to test humans.

There also are the proofs that bots can solve capchas much faster and much more consistently than humans. But web sites still use them because "we've always done it that way" along with worse than useless password rules[1] and password change policies[2].

[1] Rules may increase the strength of an individual password but typically don't: "pa$$w0rd" is no stronger than "password". Rules actually weaken the entire corpus of passwords since an attacker knows, for example, that every password must have at least one number and at least one punctuation.

[2] Forced password change policies don't work and in fact have the opposite effect: just as rules encourage users to use bad passwords with easily remembered character alternates (! or 1 for i, 0 for o, etc), change policies encourage the same behavior at the password level: password1, password2, password3, etc.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

I feel your pain ... some of those tiny photos are SO out of focus - anything could be in them ... or not ....

Some do have a voice option which reads out a set of numbers.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Some do have a voice option which reads out a set of numbers.

hCaptcha doesn't. The only option for blind/low-vision users is to give the company their personal information to install a tracking cookie. That is, until they get banned for not being blind.

[ownedbycats]

Sigh....

[Graham44]

I've come to the firm conclusion that as technology progresses and new 'innovations' come out the technology is actually becoming less user friendly and usually less useful.*

Anyone remember the times when you could just buy a CD-ROM (or disks if you go back far enough!) install a program and it just worked forever more?- no system breaking auto updates, no adding new features you didn't ask for just the program as originally installed doing what you installed it to do

*Or maybe I'm becoming dumber

[Renate]

Originally Posted by Graham44

Or maybe I'm becoming dumber

Nah, you're doing just fine. This churn cycle just gets shorter and shorter. The bloat just gets bigger. The (useless) feature list just grows. Complexity for its own sake.

[Graham44]

Originally Posted by Renate

Nah, you're doing just fine. This churn cycle just gets shorter and shorter. The bloat just gets bigger. The (useless) feature list just grows. Complexity for its own sake.

Glad it's not just me!

[John F]

Pick an icon and stick with it. This is the third time (at least) that the "settings" icon has changed on the Alexa app. First it was a cog, then a "hamburger", and now it is some diminishing horizontal lines.