West Somerset Railway General Discussion

Plagiarism! The SVR Charitable Trust has a magazine of that name.

In seriousness, I've been impressed by how railways have upped their game to keep interest up.

Patrick

 

Worked ok for me, BUT I almost gave up after the fourth "Are you human" "Select the squares in the picture" puzzle, two if which asked about crosswalks. As I've no idea what they are, it perhaps didn't help...

 

To be fair, the plc responded to my second e-mail, complaining about being left out. I now have 'Platform' on my PC; hoping that I am now back in the land of the living!

John

 

Ironically....

I read the item on the website, so signed up there for it, but so far no Platform by that route.
Later, I got a message from HOPS with a link to a copy.
Later again, I got a message from FoBAS with a copy.

Anyone want spare???

I wonder if S&DRT members will get copies ???

 

Why should one need to be human to get a copy? - a bit discriminatory for intelligent chimps, visiting aliens and AIs

 

I edited my post because the plc replied to my second e-mail and sent me 'Platform'. So, I gave them the benefit of the doubt as to receiving future communications, such as Annual Reports and AGM notices. Better to light a candle than complain about the darkness!

John

 

I would expect the monthly newsletters to be published on the official site here:

www.west-somerset-railway.co.uk/monthly-newsletters

Not there yet though. 'The Platform' appears to have replaced the defunct newsletter 'On Line'.

 

So where's the newsletter - I've signed up, but no newsletter?

I think they could do with rather more explicit information about how the railway is going to use my data as well; I couldn't see any point in the process where that was explained - something I would have thought was pretty basic requirement these days.

Tom

 

GDPR has yet to reach some parts of Somerset.....

 

So it seems - and its a serious point, not least for trust.

Tom

 

I'm pretty certain those things work largely regardless of what you click on - what they are testing is the ability to click, not the ability to recognise a crosswalk.

Years ago, the reCaptcha images were based on text that had been distorted. Apart from proving a human was looking at the text, both the right and wrong answers were very useful to software developers who were working on text recognition algorithms, i.e. being able to extract text from images.

That problem is largely solved, so the reCaptchas - at least the common ones you see, which are from Google - show street scenes, and you have to recognise features such as traffic lights, buses, pedestrians etc. Cumulatively the billions of answers given - both right and wrong - are teaching Google's AI robots about traffic recognition which is of importance for developing the software that controls driverless cars...

Tom

 

On more general point, what does it matter to the Plc if the 'person' seeks subscription is just a 'bot'? All that will happen probably is that the newsletter will be sent to the net equivalent of a 'black hole'. So what? OK, so there may actually be less humans reading the newsletter than the subscription list might suggest, but so what? After all, in the absence of any GDPR details, one presumes that the Plc has no other use for the info?

 

The purpose of putting a reCaptcha on a form isn't primarily to ensure that only humans get your newsletter: it is to try to stop bots probing your website, either to find security vulnerabilities, or to launch a denial of service attack.

Tom

 

https://www.west-somerset-railway.co.uk/news/detail/west-somerset-railway-newsletter-june-2020

 

Thanks

Tom

 

There may also be a cost associated with the online distribution of the newsletter, or the number of subscriptions in which case deterring bots has a financial value as well.

I have seen a situation where 5 figure charges have been racked up as the result of a bot attack, where the unit cost was a small fraction of a penny.

I still hate ReCaptchas with a passion though...


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Probably a website glitch, there's no repeat on the PDF I downloaded.

 

Just the opposite. <BJ>