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Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

blog.andrewmunsell.com

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Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#61

Post by 1337biz »

tjpaxton wrote: post #50
streptomycin wrote: post #28

It'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.)

Take a look at our product at areyouahuman.com We launched in January and are using games to make them easier for people. Some of our early testing showed captchas can decrease signups by up to 25% and we're able to recover almost all of that. We also monitor how you play the game (like mouse movement) so we can ramp up our security without having to make the task more difficult for people. Read more here http://arey…

This is a neat idea, but these game captchas have some high level of similarity with in-banner-games (at least to me). Not sure if theses "catch the monkey" banners are still around but they were extremely annoying. I hope you are doing some testing to make absolutely sure that this great idea is not mistakenly experienced as some form of banner ad.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#62

Post by bbrtyth »

Kilimanjaro wrote: post #22
jvrossb wrote: post #17

I 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.

More than that, since they would guess one of {e,t,o,i,n}.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#64

Post by tjpaxton »

1337biz wrote: post #61
tjpaxton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at our product at areyouahuman.com We launched in January and are using games to make them easier for people. Some of our early testing showed captchas can decrease signups by up to 25% and we're able to recover almost all of that. We also monitor how you play the game (like mouse movement) so we can ramp up our security without having to make the task more difficult for people. Read more here http://arey…

This is a neat idea, but these game captchas have some high level of similarity with in-banner-games (at least to me). Not sure if theses "catch the monkey" banners are still around but they were extremely annoying. I hope you are doing some testing to make absolutely sure that this great idea is not mistakenly experienced as some form of banner ad.

Thanks. We certainly don't want to become the equivalent of 'catch the monkey' We constantly do UX testing. Early on it was an issue that people thought we were just and ad on the page, but we updated our start screen and design. By default, we also show our games in a modal window after people click submit, so they know they have to do it. With these two things we saw registrations increase by 40% over recaptcha.

We're also getting ready to roll out an update to our API that will allow you to hide/disable the submit button until the game is played. Our testing showed this helped increase submission rates even more.

Finally, we are also trying different styles of games to see what people respond to best.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#66

Post by prophetjohn »

zhoutong wrote: post #53

I can't seem to understand the "Onightsl secretary" CAPTCHA. We all know that the first word is extremely hard to identify, and according to the author "secretary" wasn't the control word. This means that reCAPTCHA knows the first word. Identified by OCR? Not possible unless reCAPTCHA deliberately distorted the image. Identified by N other people? Not possible to determine such a word with confidence either. Or am I…

> unless reCAPTCHA deliberately distorted the image.

Isn't it obvious that this is the case? There is one word in every image that is distorted in the same way and another image that might appear in some other way that Google wants to know what the word is.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#67

Post by bhickey »

tjpaxton wrote: post #50
streptomycin wrote: post #28

It'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.)

Take a look at our product at areyouahuman.com We launched in January and are using games to make them easier for people. Some of our early testing showed captchas can decrease signups by up to 25% and we're able to recover almost all of that. We also monitor how you play the game (like mouse movement) so we can ramp up our security without having to make the task more difficult for people. Read more here http://arey…

Do you have any response to claims that your product is easily broken? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791

I'm skeptical of your efforts to distinguish humans from bots by mouse movements and other inputs. Anything you can infer can be modeled. It's unreasonable to expect a smart captcha cracker to resemble a zero reaction time Counter Strike aimbot.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#68

Post by prophetjohn »

coderdude wrote: post #38
neotek wrote: post #34

CAPTCHA seems relatively pointless at stopping spammers since there are dozens of online services that use human labour to solve them for a dollar per thousand. In tests on my own sites I've found that introducing reCAPTCHA during the registration process leads to a significant increase in people abandoning their registration when they fail at recognising the text the first time, without putting a significant dent in…

Randomizing the field names is a great idea but as you said they would just need to scrape the HTML each time they wanted to register. Have you considered sprinkling in random bits of markup to throw off the people using regex and other lazy parsing methods? That might make it a real pain to scrape your forms depending on how the spammer parses your page.

One way to avoid this issue might be to plop a hidden input box on the page if this input has text in it when it's submitted, you silently drop the registration.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#69

Post by andrewfelix »

streptomycin wrote: post #28

It'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.)

Why not pose questions with answers that are obvious to humans but difficult for ai.

Eg. 'What's 4 times four?' or 'How many times does the word four appear within this sentence?'

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#70

Post by sigkill »

andrewfelix wrote: post #69
streptomycin wrote: post #28

It'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.)

Why not pose questions with answers that are obvious to humans but difficult for ai. Eg. 'What's 4 times four?' or 'How many times does the word four appear within this sentence?'

An even more outrageous but possible solution has already been implemented here.

http://random.irb.hr/signup.php

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