attempt to use Guernsey Post web site results in infinite captcha ordeal


There is a tendancy to make web sites much, much worse than doing things in real life.

In this case, Guernsey Post made a form that's otherwise fine, but has the "recaptcha" antipattern.  Nothing says "we hate our customers" like making them spend their labor, which as Seneca points out is limited, on training an AI, for free.

After "making an exception" to my rule that I don't do these things, I was taken through an ordeal that involved identifying fire hydrants, steps, motorcycles, traffic lights, and several other categories.  I eventually concluded it was never going to end, and called Guernsey Post, who kindly did the thing.

The web is a total disaster.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the persistent idiocy of "privileged ports" on Unix

TCP and UDP have ports.  These are 16 bit; there are 65535 or so per IP address. These protocols don't care to differentiate between the ports.  Elsewhere, IANA presumes to operate a process to allocate "well-known" ports in the range 1-1023, "registered ports" in the range 1024-49151, and to reserve the remainder, 49152–65535, for "ephemeral" ports.  The caller end has to have a port, which is how replies get back within the virtual connection, and these are conventionally picked from the ephemeral range by the OS's networking stack. The whole idea of ports is ridiculous, because it allows ISPs to arse around presuming to decide which services they will "not allow".  Anything that allows IPSs to do anything other than shift opaque packets will allow ISPs to meddle and break things, and due to the Law of Meddling, if they can, they will.  I am currently working around an issue with Claro, a pretend ISP, blocking port 5060, allocated to SI
Read more

google is giving more and more 500 errors

Image
Total state capture and moral bankruptcy are not the only problems facing Google.  They are also giving an increasing rate of 500 Internal Server errors.  This is the sort that means they've messed up, but not in a way that they should have messed up.  On the other hand, they have drawn a lovely picture of a robot falling apart. Today's example is from Google Calendar under calendar.google.com.  I was trying to make an appointment, and now I'm doing this. I remember, in 2018, a friend trying to convince me that 500 Internal Server Errors no longer happened, or if they did it was my fault, and that they hadn't seen any for years, and some other things.  They assured me that they would love to see screenshots of such a rare specimen, which I bored them with for a while.  That friend happens to be a Google employee. Well, there are plenty of others posting about Google Calendar on twitter today, including screenshots of 500 Internal Server errors, so I doubt this one is en
Read more

7 minute workout: a straightforward audio recording (and two broken google web sites)

Image
 Last year I had a simple rendition of the 7 minute workout routine recorded by a voice artist . I wanted a simple audio track to help get the timings right.  I used to have a good "app" that did it, but that handset died.  Subsequent "app"s have got rubbisher and rubbisher, by having mega-configurable exercise order and making it complicated, with intrusive advertising, by synthesizing unpleasant robot voices instead of simply recording a human voice, and by making everything sound so pumped. Youtube video mmq5zZfmIws is not bad, but they have not been able to resist having ads, and a quick part of the morning routine can not have ads, it's just too tacky.  But one can watch someone doing each exercise and see how to do it properly.  Incidentally, they are at 30M views, also because daily routine.  The track I got recorded, in m4a format, is: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1c91iH6XJrfCiItTJErJAmIbNdGuHN0tr (direct download link) https://dr
Read more