While it's nice that they're trying to design the captchas to be more user friendly, these new number captchas are quite easy to crack. This might lead to an uptick in spam as recaptcha ocrs become easier to create.
reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
11–20 of 40 posts
Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
#12While it's nice that they're trying to design the captchas to be more user friendly, these new number captchas are quite easy to crack. This might lead to an uptick in spam as recaptcha ocrs become easier to create.
You are missing the whole point. The new "easier" captchas are shown only to people that they are sure are humans already. I suspect they are looking at the number of previous captchas you have solved correctly, are you logged into gmail, etc.
Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
#13Perhaps in some glorious future utopian society, humans won't have to see CAPTCHAs at all.
They don't. You can implement basic defenses like hidden input forms or checkboxes that are masked by CSS rules or served on the client side with JavaScript to weed out bots from human users, among other less intrusive techniques.
Of course some bots may make use of high-level browser engines (such as those provided by acceptance testing frameworks) to try and get around this, plus you'll always have cheap human labor. But ultimately, anti-spam is an arms race and simple tactics like this will get rid of most unwanted agents.
Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
#14While it's nice that they're trying to design the captchas to be more user friendly, these new number captchas are quite easy to crack. This might lead to an uptick in spam as recaptcha ocrs become easier to create.
You are missing the whole point. The new "easier" captchas are shown only to people that they are sure are humans already. I suspect they are looking at the number of previous captchas you have solved correctly, are you logged into gmail, etc.
You're correct. Refreshing the page a couple of times reverts the captcha to the old one with letters. So I guess they keep track of how many times they serve captchas to your ip address in an hour, and if you go over some limit they start serving you the harder captcha .
Thanks :)
Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
#15Perhaps in some glorious future utopian society, humans won't have to see CAPTCHAs at all. They don't. You can implement basic defenses like hidden input forms or checkboxes that are masked by CSS rules or served on the client side with JavaScript to weed out bots from human users, among other less intrusive techniques. Of course some bots may make use of high-level browser engines (such as those provided by acceptan…
> You can implement basic defenses like hidden input forms or checkboxes that are masked by CSS rules or served on the client side with JavaScript to weed out bots from human users, among other less intrusive techniques.
Umh, anything that will end up in the POST request will be reproduced by a bot, I don't even actually look at the page when implementing screen scraping modules, but just at the Network tab of the Chrome Dev Tools.
What I think have the potential to remove the need for conscious CAPTCHA solving is what Google is supposedly doing here: machine learning on behavioral patterns in the user interaction with the form (instead of just with the CAPTCHA).
Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are missing the whole point. The new "easier" captchas are shown only to people that they are sure are humans already. I suspect they are looking at the number of previous captchas you have solved correctly, are you logged into gmail, etc.
You're correct. Refreshing the page a couple of times reverts the captcha to the old one with letters. So I guess they keep track of how many times they serve captchas to your ip address in an hour, and if you go over some limit they start serving you the harder captcha . Thanks :)
That's going to end badly for 4chan, as every post requires you to fill in a captcha.
The daily routine for a 4chan poster will constitute solving that captcha 20 to 30 times.
Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
#17Google knows your searches, and I am pretty sure google knows every site you visit, via google analytics, which most sites run.
Combine this with browser fingerprinting (your browser's fingerprint is incredibly unique), and the fact that you probably have a google account. There is a high probability they know who you are. From your history they can determine if you're human or not.
Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
#18...and why, pray tell, are they still providing turing tests to humans, if they already know who the humans are, you ask?
Well! Very obviously, any human can behave just as maliciously as a bot might! So captchas are there to slow us down. Point blank. They are flood control. They prevent spam, be it from bot or human.
The real question is, why would Ars Technica be so chicken-shit, that they can't come out and say that?
Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
#19Perhaps in some glorious future utopian society, humans won't have to see CAPTCHAs at all. They don't. You can implement basic defenses like hidden input forms or checkboxes that are masked by CSS rules or served on the client side with JavaScript to weed out bots from human users, among other less intrusive techniques. Of course some bots may make use of high-level browser engines (such as those provided by acceptan…
> You can implement basic defenses like hidden input forms or checkboxes that are masked by CSS rules or served on the client side with JavaScript to weed out bots from human users, among other less intrusive techniques. Umh, anything that will end up in the POST request will be reproduced by a bot, I don't even actually look at the page when implementing screen scraping modules, but just at the Network tab of the Ch…
No no, the hidden input fields would not be filled in by a human (because they're positioned off screen by CSS, for example), whereas a bot would fill them in because the bot is just scraping the HTML for all input fields and filling them in with something.
It seems like you had that backwards -- hope that clears it up.
Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans
#20Personally I have an easier time typing the letter/word based captchas than the digit ones.