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Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

blog.andrewmunsell.com

121–130 of 238 posts

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#121
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do OCR on every frame, perform majority voting on the result. You just made the spammer's task easier.

Here is an example of a problem that would be hard for computer to solve: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G4y79ZbaBs

How so? the fixed part can be easily extracted. If it also moved (while morphing) then I guess it would be hard, but fixed dots in a moving background would take just a few frames for a computer to solve.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#122
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do OCR on every frame, perform majority voting on the result. You just made the spammer's task easier.

Here is an example of a problem that would be hard for computer to solve: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G4y79ZbaBs

which pixels stay black in all frames?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#124
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, how do you prevent someone from locking you out of your account?

Account gets locked just for that computer.

Oh, you mean just for that IP? Torify. Cookies? Bots don't need to accept them. Do you have something better?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#125

I have no expertise in this area, but how about patterns? Since we're already parsing so much text, why not take strings of legible text (with a minor visual distortion), and strip a connecting word such as a preposition? The user is then prompted to enter the connecting word. Synonyms could be matched. For example: "I can't stand all ____ your lies" (of) or: "This is all too ____ for me to handle!" (much) Sure, some…

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22I+cant+stand+all%22+%22... https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22This+is+all+too%22+%22f...

Then pick the first search result where there is a single word between the segments.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#126
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?

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.

The problem is generating enough unique questions. If you only have 10 questions, they can just hard-code them.

That was the problem with all the "kitten captchas" etc. Very limited image database.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you shouldn't undermine the mission of successfully recording words that can't be identified. It's a pretty noble goal, actually.

I, for one, refuse to be used as the source of free labor by Google just because I want to sign up for a website.

That's ridiculous. reCAPTCHA isn't making you do more work, it's just making work you have to do anyway useful. The benefit Google gets from the OCR work is microscopic, and the world gets old books and New York Times articles.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#128

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…

Given the nature of the games, you may want to consider renaming to areyounorthamerican.com...

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#129
A forum I run in Ireland doesn't have a need for Captchas. The forum is very regional and niche - no genuine foreign visitors - so we blocked every country apart from Ireland and the UK from posting comments. Result - no spam.

This wouldn't work for many forums, but if it's local, you really don't need to open it to the world.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you shouldn't undermine the mission of successfully recording words that can't be identified. It's a pretty noble goal, actually.

I, for one, refuse to be used as the source of free labor by Google just because I want to sign up for a website.

By that logic people I think people should also shred newspapers to make sure someone isn't reading them for free after they have finished them and then soak them in water and add a little sand and oil to make them impossible to recycle and unusable as fuel in furnaces. And stop releasing source code, at least under any sane license.

If it doesn't add extra burden to you (assuming there would just be another captcha that didn't end up feeding googles scanning effort), why do you care?

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