Given that any type of human-solvable captcha can be easily outsourced for cheap, I think the next best alternative is some computationally expensive operation per form submission.
Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
81–90 of 238 posts
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#82It'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?'
Did you mean for humans or for English speaking humans?
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#83I feel like the author of this article is still slightly misunderstanding the reCaptcha. Not to criticize him, but it's almost immediately clear which word you are actually being tested on, because it's has the same general 'look' to it each time. Take the first one: 'Secretary' is clearly out of some book. The other thing is the real test. Now, reCaptcha never gives you real words as a test, so he shouldn't be surpr…
I feel like you didn't read the article, because the author already addresses what you said and had you read the article you'd realize you made incorrect assumptions that, again, he already addressed.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#84For an interesting alternative to traditional captcha check out Solve Media - they monetize your captcha for you by making you input brand messages (that are retained better than just seeing a banner ad). I thought it was an interesting idea when I met the founder Max & team (although I was just slightly skeptical of the level of security provided). They seem great though, so it's worth checking out.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?'
Did you mean for humans or for English speaking humans?
given that recapture uses english words and Roman lettering, it's already pandering to a particular audience.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#86"Understandably, I forgot my password"
That's not understandable, that's stupid.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#87[deleted]
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#88One nice thing about recaptcha is that you know those cut off words don't matter (badly OCR'd) and can just enter gibberish for them.
But it has gotten to the point that about half of the control words are unintelligible by a human.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#89I 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?
Or how about short stories, something like; "Brian came home very late. He couldn't find Mr. Hat. While he was thinking where his cat might be, he noticed the window was wide opened." What's the name of the cat?
I don't know if it's hard or easy to guess it algorithmically.
Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous
#90It'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?'
I remember it was demonstrated that these questions can be easily answered with high margin of accuracy using wolframalpaha and google search.