Facebook serves up shaved, pierced, tattooed 'butterfly' as CAPTCHA Reg reader Mike W has sent us something rather interesting from Facebook, which asked him to prove he's human with the test below that asked him to pick out pictures of butterflies. We'll explain the white space at grid position A2 after the image. Facebook Butterfly Captcha Back to that white space, which we excised because …
"Deckard: You're reading a magazine. You come across a full-page nude photo of a girl.
Rachael: Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?"
The film got that a bit wrong. The grumble fans of the 21st century would have said "what's a magazine?"
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Many years ago, (the best parts of my life are way behind me) I made a quick visit to the toilet when I arrived at a 'hip' restaurant-bar for a meal with friends. On the wall was a framed photograph, of a close-up of a human eye and my immediate impression was of an old sun-weathered farmer staring at me. The skin was wrinkled and the eyebrows were ragged; he had a large tear duct and the eye itself was remarkably clear with healthy blue iris and no blood vessels in the white of the eye. A very 'arty' picture, quite nice.
I mentioned it to my friends as we had our meal. I was told to go and look at it again and turn my head ninety degrees to the left. It was an artificial eye in an unusual setting.
Tut Tut everyone knows the orchid euphemism is for use on the male side of the bed.
Even to the point that the surgical operation for a well known gentlemans cancer is named a radical orchidectomy. Leaves a scar a bit like an appendix as the offending organ and associated plumbing is popped up and out through the abdomen.
I apologize for inserting this comment near the top after reading 44 other comments, but El Reg's readership seems sadly misinformed where it comes to slang terms for a lady's outer parts. Instead of blaming a computer algorithm for misidentifying that picture, go to Reddit, subreddit Gone Wild, subreddit Labia Gone Wild, and you will plainly see (literally) a number of snaps clearly identified as butterflies. I would link directly to one but since the pictures are extremely NSFW I will leave it to you all to follow the final link posted.
If, as is implied, the images used in the captcha were selected by a computer which matched them as being a butterfly then what is the point in using them?
The whole point of captcha is to prevent forms being completed by automated computer systems, if the images are selected as being a butterfly by an automated system then surely another automated system could pick them out the larger set of butterfly and non-butterfly images as well, it would know it was looking for butterflies since it is identified in the question text.
"If, as is implied, the images used in the captcha were selected by a computer which matched them as being a butterfly then what is the point in using them?"
I get the impression that captcha answers are also being used to train a recognition system. Previous ones have combined a set of distorted letters with a picture of a house number plate.
In the case of the pictures here - there could be a range of certainty or uncertainty. Some of them it knows are definitely butterflies - and some are definitely not. Then there are the ones which its algorithms suggest might be butterflies.
If an overwhelming majority of users give the same answer for an "undecided" element then the system can categorise that for future use.
"If, as is implied, the images used in the captcha were selected by a computer which matched them as being a butterfly then what is the point in using them?"
That is exactly the point. If machines selected all these pictures as butterflies then the machines would be unable to deal with this Captcha correctly. Only a human would be able to tell which ones are really butterflies.
People select those images.
Mechanical Turks compete directly with software for money, and with other people. Some of those Turks are not trying to make a living at it or bring in much needed money but instead do it for fun.
As a result many such "errors" can occur.
If you are using the service you can pay a little extra to have the results checked by other Turks.
People are being used to make computer services appear more advanced than they are.
Erm, wait a minute. If the images are selected by computer through image recognition what's to stop black hatters just running the same algorithms? Presumably the algorithms selecting the images also have metadata to work with which increases the accuracy and in this case they fell for an image tagged with butterfly. I wonder if there's a new sport to be had here, tagging up images wrongly to see if they appear in odd places. Oh the fun that could be had.
"Ummm... the average 13 year old is usually quite adept at finding pr0n on his/her own.."
The proverbial wind-blown hedge is apparently still a going concern. Yesterday I tidied up what looked like a TV magazine partly under my back fence. Turned out to be two magazines of a very graphic nature. It's been visible under the fence for a few days - so it is fortunate that the neighbours' pre-teens hadn't found it - assuming they didn't put it there for safe-keeping.
"You'd expect the word Knowingly in there, but increasingly British laws don't include it"
Some single issue groups and State agencies want summary convictions because they "just know" that people are guilty of a thought crime. However - proving "intent" is apparently too hard in many cases - so trying to drop the troublesome word from new laws appears to be a favourite tactic.
I heard from a colleague in the hospital that they once had a lady in for surgery who had green dyed pubes and a tattoo across the top of it reading "Keep off the grass".
When the lady woke up, the theatre nurse had written across her belly in surgical marker pen "Sorry, we had to mow the lawn."
"People who aren't used to bodymods can get a bit worked up about such things. Leave them to snigger and make faces for a bit, they'll get over it."
Nonono, I love the shaved look and the rings, it's the depiction of the demon that says "keep out".
I reckon for the internet win you'd have to go with the same art composition but use a Gug as the depicted subject.
Or the Mouth of Sauron. That would work too.
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I was expecting some creative Labia Art, that would have to hurt, rather than some No Entry bits of Metal headlined by a Gateway To Hell tattoo done by Fat Slob 'Up Close and Personal' Tattoo Bob.
Still.. whatever Paints Your Wagon.
Strange to say this afternoon I uploaded a cat picture to one of the picture hosting services in a misplaced effort to explain html things and then modified the index.html and my browser was redirected to a caching proxy server....
Server: cat factory 1.0
Presumably FaceBook is using their own 'image guessing' software and pictures posted to their own servers in order to create their 'Captchas'.
Hopefully the poster of the Fanny Armoury involved had set their, lack of 'privacy', permissions up to avoid that sort of intrusion.. Then again, apparently not or rather the option was not available or it was ignored.
I hope she sues them.
This basically implies that FB think they have an algorithm that chooses pictures that are used to prove you are human is good enough to pick those pictures. The implication seems to be that they think their algo is good enough to *be* human. What kind of arrogant twat really thinks they are a good enough programmer (amongst other disciplines) to do that?
A human, with epic myopia, on a really bad day, with a screaming hangover, distracted by a nuclear war breaking out next door, might, by accident, click on that image thinking it's a butterfly. Only if it is scaled down to 15x15 pixels though ...
Why am I reminded of this:
"Oh yeah. But he's got some quality control problems. He can detect porn but he can't detect what kind of porn - which can be a little disturbing at times. For instance last week when one of our part timers discovered a fetish for geriatrics."
— The name's BOFH - James BOFH
Seems Facebook's image tagging has the same problem.
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