[HN Gopher] MapTCHA, the open-source CAPTCHA that improves OpenS...
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MapTCHA, the open-source CAPTCHA that improves OpenStreetMap
[video]
Presentation Video:
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5879-mapt...
Repo: https://github.com/ciupava/maptcha_dev Demo:
https://maptcha.crown-shy.com/ I didn't make this I just wanted to
share here before I add it to my weekly urbanism roundup newsletter
https://urbanismnow.com
Author : raybb
Score : 93 points
Date : 2025-02-13 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fosdem.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (fosdem.org)
| thepuppet33r wrote:
| This is amazing. Much prefer this to helping train autonomous
| vehicles.
| poisonborz wrote:
| You mean killer drones
|
| https://www.vegard.net/google-helps-pentagon-train-killer-dr...
| barbazoo wrote:
| I'm not sure how effective captchas really are at filtering out
| bots. But if they do work, I'd much rather have my efforts
| contribute to a public good like OSM rather than feeding data to
| Google, which seems to be the default these days.
|
| If anyone from OSM is listening, it would be great to have a way
| to flag malicious uses of captchas, like in phishing attempts.
| The existing captcha platforms make this very hard.
| raybb wrote:
| I'm not from OSM but could you say more about malicious uses of
| captchas or how it's related to phishing?
| bradleyjkemp wrote:
| It's really common now for phishing kits to use interstitial
| pages that require solving a captcha before the actual
| phishing content is shown
|
| Victims just click through the captcha without thinking, but
| it makes automatic verdicting by security scanners a pain
| because they just see a captcha page: can't tell the brand
| being impersonated, or even if it's a phishing site
|
| I wrote a post about a number of these which actually pretend
| to be Cloudflare! https://phish.report/blog/fake-cloudflare-
| interstitials
| barbazoo wrote:
| Interesting! What I was thinking of was use of legitimate
| captcha integrations (reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha) in front of fake
| banking websites. Drives me crazy that there isn't an easy
| avenue to report those.
| bradleyjkemp wrote:
| Oh some of them definitely use a real reCAPTCHA,
| hCAPTCHA, or Turnstile widget. It actually useful
| sometimes to track the same API key being used across
| multiple different domains
|
| But yeah, I wouldn't even know where to report those API
| keys for abuse
| cm2187 wrote:
| Mostly they were created on the absolutely wrong assumption
| that they wouldn't annoy as fuck the users. Unless I badly need
| to get in, I tend to browse away when prompted for a captcha.
| The ones I hate the most are those where you are supposed to
| click on the part of the picture that contain a motorcycle, and
| like are you supposed to click if the motorcycle overlaps by 2
| pixels, are you supposed to click on the passenger, and if it's
| a traffic light, is the pole part of the traffic light, etc?
|
| This is as user hostile as it gets (and of course always
| combined with a gdpr pop up followed by a subscribe to email
| pop up which overlaps with the please login pop up).
| j-bos wrote:
| > are you supposed to click if the motorcycle overlaps by 2
| pixels, are you supposed to click on the passenger, and if
| it's a traffic light, is the pole part of the traffic light
|
| 100%, I have never passed those captcha, guess I'm really not
| human.
| fragebogen wrote:
| Fun and potentially useful project, love it! When I tried it
| though, it was quite often hard to see whether the bounding box
| is "really" correct, as it hides what's underneath. Maybe some
| slight opaqueness could help.
|
| Also, my first image had no bounding box at all. Being met by
| "Swipe right if the red shape is correctly outlining a building.
| If not swipe left", it felt like the wording or the UX could be
| improved by filtering for images that are guaranteed to have such
| a box.
| glaucon wrote:
| Positive about the general idea, I hope it works out.
|
| > Also, my first image had no bounding box at all.
|
| Me too.
|
| > "Swipe right if the red shape is correctly outlining a
| building. If not swipe left"
|
| Rather confusing on a laptop which was showing "Correct" and
| "Incorrect" buttons.
| szundi wrote:
| Most demotivated sloppy contributors coming
| Eduard wrote:
| playing with the demo at https://maptcha.crown-shy.com/ , I had
| problems recognizing the outlines, as they often were colored
| similar to their structure (low contrast). Some examples I
| couldn't find any outline at all.
|
| Also, seeing a rectangular outlined thing from above, it's often
| impossible to tell if it qualifies as a building.
| gregoriol wrote:
| Same feeling here about the demo: sometimes there is not red
| shape, so should I click correct or incorrect? sometimes the
| red shape covers two different styles of roof (I don't know if
| it is one or two buildings), is this correct or incorrect?
| sometimes the shape covers a very small thing, could be a phone
| box or kiosk, it's not clear compared to other buildings
| around, is this correct or incorrect?
|
| I really hope such a project can thrive and be useful though,
| will check it again after some time!
| smashah wrote:
| What's stopping this work from being used to oppress people?
| glaucon wrote:
| As I said elsewhere I applaud the idea, a couple of comments.
|
| 1. On Firefox on Ubuntu the text is _far_ too faint, to the
| extent the initial text is essentially unreadable.
|
| 2. I was getting brown coloured areas surrounded by a slightly
| different brown colour. The outlined area could have been a roof
| or just some slight change in l and colour. I understand this is
| why help is needed to classify them but it felt wrong clicking
| either "Correct" or "Incorrect" ... maybe with enough input it
| doesn't matter ? Not sure.
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