For some reason, after I clicked all the buses, crossroads, motorcycles, etc., I kept on receiving a “fail” even though I was sure I got all of them correctly. I tried being sensitive (clicking when only a bit was in the square) and the opposite (only clicking when the object was obviously in the square), and neither worked. I was only told I failed and had to try again!

Clicking the audio icon was the only way for it to show that it thought I was “sending suspicious network requests” (nope, it was my first time on GOG, I was trying to create an account and it was even one of the first tabs I opened in my browser), and I was actually wasting my time.

I believe the real reason is that Google wants the image recognition data for their own “AI” models and to sell to others, perhaps Musky Tesla, and this is better achieved by having some portion of users get stuck and do the captcha tests repetitively.

What the heck? The whole point of a captcha is to let humans access a website. If it doesn’t let you do that while never telling you about it, and in fact encouraging me to try again, that has to break some sort of law, right?

p.s. I still really hate captchas. In the modern web, we have far better technologies for detecting bots and scrapers, but why do so many websites still use these tests that are so time-consuming and inefficient? Yes, I know it’s because of corporations wanting more data for their algorithms, but still, they could do all that in the background without captchas (and they do, so again, why captchas?)

And they always have so many steps! Why do I have to do the exact same thing like five times to get “verified” as a human, when repetitive action is what machines do best? Why does it take so long (it’s actually insane) for the squares to fade in to show the next pictures you need to click, when it’s only humans who care about time, while machines are oblivious those few extra seconds?