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If time was ticking and you were tasked with choosing the biggest cat from a series of small cat photos, would you be able to?
What if there was even a Telfar bag?
Last week, the fashion brand was led by the groundbreaking designer Telfar Clemens, has released a limited number of new bags known as “drops”. When this happens, chaos often ensues and bags run out in a matter of minutes. This time was no exception.
Often, fellow Telfar fans and dexterity are the biggest barriers to securing one of these sought-after bags. Consumers should be quick to purchase them online.
This time, however, Telfar hopefuls found themselves baffled and stuck with Captcha tests used on their website to determine whether a visitor (usually a consumer) is human. It is meant to deter hackers and software programs that run automated tasks (known as retail bots).
Captchas seemed very specific – and perhaps more difficult than ever. One was fill-in-the-blank: It asked users to complete the phrase “Not for you – for ___”. (The answer was Telfar’s motto: “Not for you – for everyone”). Another asked the recipient to evaluate multiple photos of different cats and draw a box around the largest one.
Frustrated consumers flooded Twitter with jokes and pleas to help solve the puzzles.
“Bots were picking up bags while people were answering captcha questions! They’re actually annoying!!!” She directly texted Rae Foston, 19, who was trying to buy a small red Telfar shopping bag, “Not because they’re difficult and I understand the purpose of having them, but do they really serve their purpose?”
Jayshawn Williams, 33, also had trouble trying to crack the code. Trying to buy a medium shopping bag, Mr. Williams said it took him about five minutes to answer the Captcha question.
“After finding the answer, I laughed to myself and had a bit of a ‘hah’ moment,” he wrote. (Mr Williams also couldn’t hold a purse.)
But this madness had a method. Telfar, like many coveted brands releasing inventory this way, has taken an interest in automated bots. buy stock in the past. The original Captcha puzzles were an attempt to deceive people, not them.
“The truth is, the reason people can’t get the bag is not because they have to draw a box around the cat,” Babak Radboy, Mr. Clemens’ business partner, told The New York Times. “This actually allows more people and fewer boats to buy bags. The reason people don’t get the bag is because there are more tens of thousands of people requesting a bag at any given minute than there are bags to be bought.”
He defended the new security measures: “It takes time to get things right. Our thinking is long-term.”
In recent years bots have gotten better and better at cracking the codes traditionally used in these security systems. Simple Captchas, especially text-based ones, have become trivial to skip, according to Jason Polakis, a researcher and lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“As machine learning continues to advance at a rapid pace, some tasks that used to be very difficult for machines (for example, identifying which images show a glass of wine) are now within their capabilities. In fact, for certain tasks machines are probably better than average users,” Mr. Polakis wrote in an email. “As a result, captcha services have made their difficulty more and more difficult to reduce the effectiveness of automated solvers.”
These automatic solvers or bots increase the value of items. Telfar’s shopping bags often end up on resale sites like StockX, Poshmark, and Grailed, and sometimes by collectives claiming to be in the hands of collectives like Hypernova Group. bought more than 60 percent Telfar’s stock dropped in a bag last summer. The sweep caused the brand to respond on Instagram: “Telfar is for people. Not boots.”
While many customers crave for easier Captchas, some came out of this fall empty-handed but still found the humor in them.
“I will say that I have never come across that cat captcha before and was surprised. It was kind of funny,” wrote Miss Foston. Although the humor came later – “not then because it’s an intense 2 minutes trying to get a telfar,” he wrote.
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