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Google Scholar Users Report Badly Malfunctioning Captcha (google.com)
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?"
You all have to prove you are cows in order to continue. Please say Moooo. say Moooo! Mooooo! Moooo! Mooooo! Moooooo Cows Moooo! YOU NON-PROVEN COWS!!!
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.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Clearly you aren't smart enough to do a captcha, so hand in your student badge and Star Trek phaser. You're expelled.
Weird and coincidental.
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.
You get what you pay for.
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.
its called conditing.
in short: dont be so nosey. the internet has captcha free pr0n for
masses. join us and be freeeeee
Oh god which university accommodates a "doctoral student and a professor" who relies on Google's toys?
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 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?
Morphing Software
The academic type haven't had the reputation of being intelligent for sometime now, it is likely it is not broken at all.
It was reloading each clicked image, regardless of if it was correct or not. Took a few tries, and spamming the 'right' answers until it seemed to want to register and pass along the proper verification to the page in which it was embedded.
2/3 of the time.
Perhaps it's time to make the captchas so that you only pass if you fail on purpose?
Also, captchas are horrid for accessibility (even with sound versions).
Quit spoiling your coders, google. They have to work for their free lunch now.
He really improved my submission. He RTFA and made the submission more accessible. Thanks.
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Just pay 4chan for the anticaptcha and you can shitpost to your hearts content.
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. :-)
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. Rageface's precious time in that effort? No, they really don't.
Send feedback to Google to notify them of the problem and wait for them to fix it, but save the vitriol for services you pay for. If the process is wasting non-trivial amounts of your time, and that time has value to you, consider paying for a service that won't (or at least claims it won't) waste your valuable time.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time. How do I stop it?
How do you stop it, you ask?
You could start by not turning the entire internet over to Google. Because once you do that, what they do is out of your hands. And when they do it, they do it on a scale nobody ever imagined before.
Stop supporting Google. Stop using them for all your email. Stop using their search engine. Block all their trackers. Don't use Google Docs. Stop using Android. Stop using youtube. Stop using Google Maps and Streetview.
Sound painful? Well, it's painful because you let them get into this position in the first place. And it'll only get worse, the bigger you let them get.
Move back to the original idea of the internet: DEcentralization.
That's how you stop them. But you won't will you? You'll keep building up these mega-companies until they exercise undo influence on the entire fabric of the net, and then act all surprised when they pull shit you don't like.
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... ).
"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?"
Clicking on CAPTHAs sounds like grad-student grunt work to me.
There also seems to be a problem with Google banning VPNs but they don't reject outright. Instead they waste VPN users time by getting them to answer Captchas which they will reject no matter how carefully they answer. Fuck Captcha for the collective misery, frustration and wasted lives it has inflicted on the human race. It's inventors are Mark D. Lillibridge, Martin Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Andrei Z. Broder. Fuck them.
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.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I find that if I use the scholar search slowly and/or infrequently with many pauses, then I can avoid the capcha block for quite a while. But yes, it's completely brain dead and annoying.
-Bob-
grass, grass
grass, grass
grass, grass
grass, grass
Keep clicking the storefronts until no more appear!
NO, YOU STILL HAVE TO SELECT TWO MORE!
Makes me want to... murder things. with violence.
Teh google captchas are horribly browser specific.
(hopefully I have now waited long enough to hit submit)
I tought the answer would be patently obvious to anyone.
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 you as the academics should come up with something better. After all humans are good at image subject identification and only machines and academics are not.
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 most, research projects, wouldn't exist without those grants. We've PAID FOR that content. If we aren't whole owners, then taxpayers certainly have an interest in that content.
So, in effect, we have entire industries, capitalizing on the taxpayer's property.
Let us rephrase your question - When DID corporate America expecting free reign over America's property become acceptable?
Oh - the employer? Many of them DO expect you to work for free. Have you been keeping up with current events? Let's take Mickey D's. They take a decent worker, who is making one hell of a lot of money for Mickey's. He is much more profitable than the average dickweed, so they offer him/her a deal. "How would you like to be a manager trainee? In a few years, you can become a manager yourself!" Sounds good, huh? Except, the trainee actually gets a salary based on minimum wage for 40 hours per week - then is required to work 60 to 80 hours. Mickey's isn't alone, either. It's common practice around this nation to exploit more profitable employees in this manner.
Paperwork. Ever been told that you've got to clock out, but you've got to complete paperwork afterward? It happens.
Bosses everywhere will take advantage of you, if you aren't assertive.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
badly functioning, it should say.
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).
And now people who feel their time matters are getting annoyed includes academics who are bewildered at this, when it's clearly a business.
What is ironic is that the first reply to him from Google seems to be from a robot...
Didn't know that someone could be a "doctoral student and a professor" at the same time! Also why is Google scholar asking for captcha? have you been using your machine as a tor exit node?
This is the world google is building for us, a world where you are only interacting with algorithms - be it something dumb like captcha, or more 'sofisticated' like a self-driving car or youtube copyright enforcement. This is senseless sleepwalking into a world controlled by machines and where humans have no recourse to overcome errors that algorithms inevitably make.
The next logical step is adapting human culture to these flaws - when edge cases that humans can easily understand stop being resolvable altogether (already the case with most google products) - by modifying human behaviours to accept algorithmic decisions as correct by default. And eventually without question.
I've spent my career buildinv software, internet and AI and seeing where specifically google (but also increased military use) is taking the tech, I fear we've created a monster. A monster that has debilitating effect on many young people (not all - some are more resilient to dumbing down), one that will inevitably change the course of human history. I fear not in a positive way.
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 a robot, I'm an academic professional, and this process is wasting nontrivial amounts of my time. How do I stop it?"
E
Use Sci-Hub
aaaaaaa
Google's CAPTCHAs are indeed too complicated. (When I thought that first, they still used distorted letters, but the problem remains the same.) Now I thought up an alternative and spent some time building up a database for it. (My website for it isn't online yet, but I didn't want to advertise it either. Contact me for details.)
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. Filing a bug report got no response.
Also I don't see the point in loading JavaScript from Google. Why would you want to load that from an advertising company.
For most (any) CMS or Framework there are local CAPTCHA's available.
A CAPTCHA isn't good usability, but many website owners seem to think they need just that.
For anti-spam I much prefer a Honeypot (empty input field that should be left empty) or a Nonce. Akismet is quite nice too, but still an external service (that will degrade well if it goes down).
Even a custom anti-spam question (quiz) is better than a CAPTCHA.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
what is an academic professional? someone who professionally is in academia contributing nothing?
srsly -M
"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?"
If you're an academic professional, why aren't you using professional tools to search for scholarly articles?
...and I don't have laser beam eyes.
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.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I have noticed these "find all" captchas on other web sites (Ticketmaster?), and I find them confusing, I have failed at least once. Bad UX.
Q: 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?
A: Stop acting like a robot!
Let me tell you something about these "scholars". I used to work desktop support at a university full of these clowns, and if they had to type their username AND password (instead of the computer remember their username) they would call us in a fit, explaining how it was taking time out of their day, affecting their research, and how they didn't have time for this. Like a child. Just to put things in perspective.
Gateway to all information? Via not trusted corporation?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/05/20/third-cash-owned-5-us-companies/84640704/
attn: cia dabbbft