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Show HN: BoundIt CAPTCHA: highlight objects in photos to prove you're human

boundit.co

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Re: Show HN: BoundIt CAPTCHA: highlight objects in photos to prove you're human

#11

Post by mdisraeli »

More importantly than the technical issues, CAPTCHA completion is already big business. Where the common scripts are known to fail, malware developers just feed the CAPTCHAs over to call centres in Africa or somewhere else cheap.

Everyone wants CAPTCHAs that minimise the annoyance to end users, and that are hard for a machine to crack. But the above business model means that, as a service designer, you either need to accept some degree of CAPTCHA fail, or somehow not annoy your valid users whilst also make solving them take unprofitably long for a remote worker to do.

Re: Show HN: BoundIt CAPTCHA: highlight objects in photos to prove you're human

#12

Post by munger »

mdisraeli wrote: post #11

More importantly than the technical issues, CAPTCHA completion is already big business. Where the common scripts are known to fail, malware developers just feed the CAPTCHAs over to call centres in Africa or somewhere else cheap. Everyone wants CAPTCHAs that minimise the annoyance to end users, and that are hard for a machine to crack. But the above business model means that, as a service designer, you either need to…

Yeah this.

SEO/internet marketers who want to go create a bunch of spammy backlinks through user profiles / blog comments on forum sites and blogs (anything that allows account creation and user generated content) to target affiliate marketing sites they own have pretty great automated tools to do this that integrate with the commercial captcha solving services.

The captcha solving aspect is around $1 - $1.50 per 1000.

You can't really prevent this and it really doesn't matter how effective the captcha is because outsourcing the human required to solve it is so ridiculously cheap.

Re: Show HN: BoundIt CAPTCHA: highlight objects in photos to prove you're human

#13

Post by emingo »

joshguthrie wrote: post #8

I was a robot four times out of five. This sheds a new light on my existence. On a serious tone, apart from a cool showcase of technology, do we REALLY need this? CAPTCHAs are the bane of everyone's internet time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes I have to write strange unicode letters, when it fails I have to go back and re-input everything in the form,... And more importantly, the persons it's su…

Ditto :( I was almost embarrassed to post!

Re: Show HN: BoundIt CAPTCHA: highlight objects in photos to prove you're human

#15

Post by sukuriant »

Isn't object recognition in a not-distorted environment relatively easy? Click-and-drag is something UI automation does all the time, so that's not the hard part, either.

A couple more thoughts: This requires a huge, human-written database (or it requires an algorithm ... and, oh wait, we already decided that if an algorithm can do it, then it's not really worth of being a captcha)

Also, a few of the images, especially the coffee mug ones, look like they could be solved by selecting the whole image.

Re: Show HN: BoundIt CAPTCHA: highlight objects in photos to prove you're human

#16

Post by mdisraeli »

mdisraeli wrote: post #9

Four out of five attempts... I'm a robot. I tried a couple more, with slightly better success, however one of those times I saw the same image in both panels. And then, it broke rather oddly: http://i.imgur.com/LwYtKe2.png (time approximately 00:45 BST, firefox 21.0, Win7)

(in case it's unclear, several screen grabs of the same single prompt at various scroll positions)

Re: Show HN: BoundIt CAPTCHA: highlight objects in photos to prove you're human

#17

Post by j2d3 »

You might consider using photos that have more than the target object in them. It is easy as heck for a computer to determine the bounds of an object in a photo, and increasingly easy for it to know what that object is. It's certainly no challenge to a bot to determine the bounds of the "coffeemug" when it is the only object in the photo.

Also, CAPTCHA of any sort just sucks. As a user, I only will bother with a site that uses CAPTCHA if it is providing something I absolutely must have. If it's something I may or may not use, and I'm presented with a CAPTCHA (of any kind), I leave.

Re: Show HN: BoundIt CAPTCHA: highlight objects in photos to prove you're human

#18

Post by boyter »

A few issues,

1. Not going to work for those with sight impairments. 2. Not going to work on mobile (in current form). 3. Its not any harder to break in an automated way then most other CAPTCHA's

I hate CAPTCHA's. With a passion. I even write automated CAPTCHA decoders for fun http://wausita.com/captcha/

If there is one thing the world does not need its another CAPTCHA. If you have something to protect all the CAPTCHA's in the world are not going to stop those who want to exploit it. They can be automated or outsourced (easily and for peanuts). CAPTCHA's should only be considered suitable for keeping random spam bots off your site, and even then adding a honeypot field is a safer bet.

If you are being targeted a CAPTCHA is next to useless.

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