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reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

arstechnica.com

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Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#31

Post by olalonde »

pbreit wrote: post #27

I cannot believe that in 2013 captchas remain the most effective way to achieve whatever they are used for. I bet Google could bake something into Chrome to avoid captchas.

I find your statement weirdly amusing. You are deploring a lack of progress regarding something (it is increasingly difficult to tell humans and computers apart) that you would probably view as progress if stated differently (computers are getting increasingly smarter). I feel your pain but this is a very though problem and won't get any easier soon.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#32

Post by akg_67 »

malbs wrote: post #25

I thought maybe I was the only one who struggled with recaptcha captchas. On some sites I have literally tried 10-15 times before finally becoming too frustrated and giving up solving the captcha because whatever it was (form to fill out for a download, fill out a comment on a site), just wasn't worth the time I was wasting. Hugely irritating.

Initially, I was using reCAPTCHA on my site. But after hearing from irate users and specially preventing new users from registering, I decided to disable and use a simplified CAPTCHA. Loosing new potential users to CAPTCHA wasn't acceptable.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#33

Post by nwh »

olalonde wrote: post #30

I wonder if a Javascript based proof-of-work system could be used as an alternative to CAPTCHAs. It wouldn't stop spam entirely but it would rate-limit it and possibly render some forms of spam unprofitable. Aa a bonus, the proof-of-work could be tied to something useful (Folding@home?) just like reCAPTCHA's CAPTCHAs are useful for digitizing books.

Nope. This was tried with Bitcoin back in the day. JavaScript is far too slow, and a spammer could just blast out thousands of times the work with a single CPU running something native. Mobile users would suffer greatly too.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#34

Post by kalleboo »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #13

Perhaps 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…

We tried a ton of those techniques (hidden fields, fields filled out by Javascript, anti-replay tokens) and none of them worked - the spammers appeared to be using botted IE installs.

What worked in the end was a points system for spammy behavior: First post has URL in it? +1 point. User fills out linkedin field on profile? +1 point (seriously, none of our legit users did this...). User posts a word on the blocklist? (viagra, cialis, cvv2, etc) +1 point. User Agent is IE? +1 point (we're a Mac site). After a certain number of points, the user was banned and all their generated content deleted. After a certain number of posts without triggering the ban, they're greenlighted. Spammers quickly noticed their posts disappeared instantly and left the site.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#35

Post by aquadrop »

pbreit wrote: post #27

I cannot believe that in 2013 captchas remain the most effective way to achieve whatever they are used for. I bet Google could bake something into Chrome to avoid captchas.

We should feel lucky that at least captchas can help. In the future, probably, there will be no chance you could separate humans from computers.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#36

Post by tempestn »

kalleboo wrote: post #34
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #13

Perhaps 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…

We tried a ton of those techniques (hidden fields, fields filled out by Javascript, anti-replay tokens) and none of them worked - the spammers appeared to be using botted IE installs. What worked in the end was a points system for spammy behavior: First post has URL in it? +1 point. User fills out linkedin field on profile? +1 point (seriously, none of our legit users did this...). User posts a word on the blocklist?…

If only my blogspammers were that quick on the uptake. I've got moderation turned on, so none of their posts ever see the light of day, and I still get tens of them every day.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#37

Post by tempestn »

aquadrop wrote: post #35
pbreit wrote: post #27

I cannot believe that in 2013 captchas remain the most effective way to achieve whatever they are used for. I bet Google could bake something into Chrome to avoid captchas.

We should feel lucky that at least captchas can help. In the future, probably, there will be no chance you could separate humans from computers.

Very true. So we need to find a way to prevent spam that doesn't involve differentiating between a human and a bot.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#38

Post by tempestn »

magic_haze wrote: post #4
cantcatch22 wrote: post #2

Does this mean that digitizing of books through reCAPTCHAs will be done at a much slower rate or not at all?

I find it difficult to believe the captcha served over the last year or so were actually scanned from books: they were so completely illegible and nonsensical. I usually had to click refresh about half a dozen times before I could even find a sample that I could read correctly.

Half of the captcha (the illegible nonsense) is the actual test. The other half is usually easy to read; that's the scan from the book. You can actually answer anything for that part and still pass the test, although obviously if you do, you're not helping digitize books.

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#39

Post by rspeer »

Larrikin wrote: post #3
cantcatch22 wrote: post #2

Does this mean that digitizing of books through reCAPTCHAs will be done at a much slower rate or not at all?

Are they even digitizing books anymore? I seem to always get a house number. The house numbers make it really easy to know I don't actually have to type that part

It makes the slogan pretty disingenuous.

It still says "Stop spam. Read books." But the book-reading part is over, and now it's "Stop spam. Do Google's work for them."

Re: reCAPTCHAs are finally readable by normal humans

#40

Post by FiloSottile »

toggle wrote: post #19
FiloSottile wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ok, I thought it was intended as a counter-measure to targeted bots.
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