Things I Find Irritating About Tech - #447

If you use a VPN, you see these stupid things all the time. 16 Times People Struggled With These Captchas So Much, They Shared It Online.

There’s something mildly dispiriting about being asked to identify blurry fire hydrants, distorted crosswalks, virtually unidentifiable parking meters, and bent traffic lights arranged to look nothing like they do in real life. But hey, Captcha, officially known as Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, is simply doing its job.

I have most of them figured out, but some of them are just stupid. It seems that the people running Google don't know the difference between a parking meter and a rural mailbox. (Click thru and page down to example #4.) I guess that is to be expected since they never leave their apartments/condos/gated communities except to drive to their office.

But the real interesting thing - something that spread across most parts of Google/Alphabet - is that there is no way to tell them that they have their heads up their asses. They are right, even when they are wrong. Just shut up and do what we tell you.

One of the many reasons I stopped using Google as a search engine... I would see a reCaptcha. Fill it in. See the results of my search. Click on a link. Peruse the article/website in question and hit back. I would see another reCaptcha. Rinse. Repeat. To say this is annoying is not even in the ballpark. You're not even in the parking-lot outside the ballpark. Add in the fact that they answer the question they were sure you meant to ask, and what is the point of Google?