I'm a big fan of logic captchas. Not only are they way more accessible than image captchas, but the frustration factor is not nearly as high.
Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
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Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#22I had just noticed that captchas were getting worse. I always thought sites should just make the user perform an operation. Display a hard to read but still legible "type the second letter of the third word". 'e' would be the correct response. There's got to be a reason this isn't done already, does someone know why?
Bots would spam your site once every 26 tries.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#23I had just noticed that captchas were getting worse. I always thought sites should just make the user perform an operation. Display a hard to read but still legible "type the second letter of the third word". 'e' would be the correct response. There's got to be a reason this isn't done already, does someone know why?
Parsing and responding to a question like that isn't difficult when the questions are algorithmically generated from a finite number of human-designed types.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's actually pretty interesting. With time the number of computers/processors required to do these tasks will go down, but for now and based on that experiment, it almost seems more efficient to use picture based captchas.
I don't think you 'get it' Andrew :-) The folks who bust captchas, 16,000 machines is chump change, they run botnets of hundreds of thousands of machines, they dynamically buy EC2 instances, they make a lot of money. That is the primary reason why I believe that people who use the term 'computationally unfeasible' (you see that a lot in crypto papers) never counted on the kinds of growth we've seen in computers coupl…
Cryptosystems that require 2^128 tries to crack aren't going to be much easier even if you have a billion machines; you really need a theoretical breakthrough. :)
Of course that doesn't apply here.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#25With ReCAPTCHA, you only have to get one of the two words right. I've never had it be the illegible word (or my terrible guesses match the "correct" answer), as one might expect given the one you need is necessarily the one for which they have the answer.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#26The hard part about captcha is making it accessible to users with disabilities.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#27There was an interesting talk that mentioned CAPTCHA by one of its creators, Luis von Ahn, at the AAAI-12 conference on AI and robotics this past week.
In ReCAPTCHA, the two-word CAPTCHA version, one of the two words is taken from a scanned book. That (unknown) word was one that failed OCR for that book.
The other word is one that captcha already knows the answer to.
The assumption is if you get the known captcha correct, then you probably got the other one correct as well (if it was possible to read it). The answer to the unknown word supplements the OCR of the book.
The captchas are put in random order, and you only have to get one of them right.
Luis's thought was that people are wasting all this time doing captcha - why not use that time to do something useful, like help digitize books.
As an aside, he's also one of the principal people behind duolingo, which is a quite awesome language learning / human-assisted translation engine.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#28It's easy to criticize captchas. That's why there are so many articles like this, which we all knowingly nod along to as we read.
It's much harder to provide productive criticism that leads to an actual improvement over the status quo. (Although it is easy to suggest bad alternatives to captchas, which is why they appear in every comment thread about captchas on Hacker News, including this one.)
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#29Filters are coming to CSS so I guess it will be possible to show an image with hidden numbers (or words) and let the user pick a color filter that applied to the image will show the numbers and submit the color and the number to the server for verification. Like color blindness tests.
How about that for a captcha?
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#30I had just noticed that captchas were getting worse. I always thought sites should just make the user perform an operation. Display a hard to read but still legible "type the second letter of the third word". 'e' would be the correct response. There's got to be a reason this isn't done already, does someone know why?
It assumes that the user reads English fluently.