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Worst CAPTCHA Ever

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Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#111

Post by aprescott »

don_draper wrote: post #100

Hey D&B developer here. I'm excited to see so much interest in my work. If the captcha is correct we categorize it as a bot and don't let it through. If the captcha is incorrect then it must be a human and we let them through. Good news: we're hiring! We have day long meetings Mondays and Wednesdays, but other than that it's great.

I don't really understand this approach. Won't the false positive rate be close to 100%? Humans are going to get the captcha right every time. If it's supposed to be a honeypot system, the input should be hidden from human users to avoid that problem.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#112

Post by [deleted] »

senthilnayagam wrote: post #65
fakeer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still loathe reCAPTCHA more than any other captcha out there. I've given up hopes of logging in on many occasions simply because of it. Looks like it's designed for not to be deciphered either by humans or computers.

I totally agree, see this recaptcha which is upside down, how are we supposed to read it http://postimg.org/image/7xgovvhij/

[deleted]

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#113

Post by bjxrn »

aprescott wrote: post #111
don_draper wrote: post #100

Hey D&B developer here. I'm excited to see so much interest in my work. If the captcha is correct we categorize it as a bot and don't let it through. If the captcha is incorrect then it must be a human and we let them through. Good news: we're hiring! We have day long meetings Mondays and Wednesdays, but other than that it's great.

I don't really understand this approach. Won't the false positive rate be close to 100%? Humans are going to get the captcha right every time. If it's supposed to be a honeypot system, the input should be hidden from human users to avoid that problem.

Pssst. I don't think that was seriously a post from a D&B developer.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#114

Post by aprescott »

bjxrn wrote: post #113
aprescott wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand this approach. Won't the false positive rate be close to 100%? Humans are going to get the captcha right every time. If it's supposed to be a honeypot system, the input should be hidden from human users to avoid that problem.

Pssst. I don't think that was seriously a post from a D&B developer.

Damn you, Poe! :(

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#115

Post by mschuster91 »

mzahir wrote: post #14
mschuster91 wrote: post #3

D&B?! Aren't these the guys everyone including Apple trusts for their DUNS number?! Are you fucking serious?

Exactly. They're not the people everybody trusts to determine if incoming traffic is human/machine. Your response implies that they are inept at their area of expertise.

The shown website development bug does not make me confident about the quality of the rest of their website and data handling in general, so yes, I imply that they are not up to protect the data of their customers - which is the area of expertise of anyone handling massive amount of customer data.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#116

Post by lucaspiller »

nostrademons wrote: post #101
Evbn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a protection against typos, because people are lazy and error-prone and it matters because getting it wrong means email delivery fails, whereas a misspelled name is no big deal. So, elegantly, two different issues use the same simple solution.

It's not elegant at all - it makes the user do extra work at signup. Wasn't there an interesting blog post on HN about 5 years ago that showed that each additional field you add to the registration form cuts sign-ups in half? The better solution is to send an e-mail with a confirmation link upon signup. This also protects against deliberately falsified e-mails, and against typing it incorrectly twice, and against fol…

I believe that extra field thing is correct. However I don't think your solution is really great either, by forcing the user to confirm their email before continuing your are interrupting their flow. In some cases when I've had this and the email has been delayed by even a few minutes I haven't bothered coming back.

Edit: Sorry I kind of misread your comment, but what I said is half relavent. None of the protections you state you get without forcing them to click the link before continuing.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#117

Post by goldfeld »

nostrademons wrote: post #103
improv32 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when you enter bad login info, and the site doesn't tell you if it was your email or your password. But on the reset password form it tells you when you put a bad email in.

Well, that's usually a security feature so that hackers can't harvest valid accounts by trying e-mail addresses and seeing what the error message is. It's stupid if they can do that anyway via the password reset form, though (although presumably, if you get the password reset e-mail you'll have an idea that someone else is trying to access your account).

Or the reset password form can simply say an email has been sent to the relevant address, regardless of whether said address actually exists in their database. I've always suspected this is how most of them work.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#118

Post by saraid216 »

zopticity wrote: post #93
saraid216 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's valid, but it's one of those things that shows they're not a web developer. We don't use or anymore. That's what CSS is for.

Nope, you're wrong. is actually still being used to differentiate between . is used for accessibility reasons (making the words enunciate with emphasis, while just makes the words bold by default). If you want to bold a part of the sentence without having emphasis, you'll need to use .

I'd use for making something bold. Because that's a styling thing, so I use a style sheet.

I could even use if I wanted to emphasize something without making it bold. Because that has a functional purpose with screen readers, and isn't strictly a styling thing.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#119

Post by codesuela »

malandrew wrote: post #80
dmazin wrote: post #67

Speaking of, has anyone else noticed that captchas (especially recaptcha) have gotten a lot harder over the last year?

I've noticed that they occasionally have characters that are available in unicode, but are not part of the characters that are available on a 105-key keyboard with or without the shift key. THe most common one I see is the integral symbol that used to be used as an S. On very rare occasions I see characters like: ¡™£¢∞§¶•ªº–≠œ∑®†¥øπ«åß∂ƒ©˙∆˚¬…æΩ≈ç√∫˜µ≤≥÷⁄€‹›fifl‡°·‚—±Œ„´‰ˇÁ¨ˆØ∏»ÅÍÎÏ˝ÓÔÒÚƸ˛Ç◊ı˜Â¯˘¿

Those are the ones googles OCR couldn't decipher. Only one word (the random characters with a asymmetric background and maybe a line through them) matter. Once you know that you stop typing the part that doesn't matter. I usually just type asd (actual captcha)

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#120

Post by Daiz »

wubbfindel wrote: post #102
drostie wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun tip: reCAPTCHA is actually two things, the "re" and the "CAPTCHA". In other words, one half is about testing that you're not a human, while the other half is a legitimately unknown word from a source of failed optical character recognition. You actually don't have to get the latter one anything close to right; and I think you're given the option of at least one typo in the actual CAPTCHA test. So when a CAPTCHA l…

Thanks to this we will now be plagued with ebooks using the word "balls" instead of correct words. Hilarity ensues.

The more immature part of 4chan has for quite literally years tried to do that with the word "nigger"[1], with no real apparent success (not that I've checked myself, though). One of the easiest things done to counter malicious input is to simply validate any unknown words with multiple people before marking them as "recognized".

[1] http://i.eprci.net/op-renigger

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