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Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

andrewmunsell.com

11–20 of 201 posts

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#12
If only we could invent the verbal equivalent of a trapdoor function. A word puzzle that would be extremely easy for computers to generate and humans to solve (since we understand language), but extremely hard for computers to solve.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#14
post #3

The squished-up word is the control word, and the straight one is the unknown one. You only need to get the wavy word right and just guess at all the cut-off examples.

^ This is the way to go. Don't waste any energy on the "unknown" word, just fill out the one that has been smeared out and fill in bogus for the rest.

If you want to post on 4chan and don't have a Pass, you need to solve a captcha for every single post. It becomes easier with practice, I fail maybe 1 in 10 captchas. And the more captchas you solve correctly, the easier the captchas for your IP get.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#16
I realised an intersting thing there. I also get those complex captaches using firefox. But I also have an Opera12.17 running. With this one my captchas for the same page are ridiculousy easy. Sometimes it's just an house number. One item. I never had one even close to what I get on FF.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#17
post #11

I experienced animated GIF captchas with Yahoo's login process. Not sure if that was better or worse than reCaptcha.

I don't get why they're doing this. Animation adds information and makes CAPTCHA easier to break!

Attacker can choose the frame that's easiest to attack and they can segment better with help of motion vectors and differences between frames.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#18
post #12

If only we could invent the verbal equivalent of a trapdoor function. A word puzzle that would be extremely easy for computers to generate and humans to solve (since we understand language), but extremely hard for computers to solve.

It's a nice idea, but you have to consider the complexity of the word puzzles compared to the average human's brain power. Most people are quite dumb. If there aren't a sufficient number of problems/answers, or they're simple enough for computers to solve, or they're too complex for a minority of humans to solve, you're boned.

The whole thing is a technology arm's race. The best solution would be one where you simply verify fixed private information. We use captchas for verifying a human being is not a bot, right? And we do that because we assume the user is anonymous for a short time.

Instead we could simply provide a secured authentication gateway where one could provide private information that is linked to a human identity. That way it can't be abused unless they have an unlimited supply of stolen identities. Even better would be if everyone signed up for a TOTP service provider and used their token generator and service-account to prove their human-ness without needing to put in sensitive information. But that's probably too much work.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#19
I was just thinking this yesterday when I had to recover a Flickr account I hadn't used in ages. I had to solve captchas from Yahoo and Microsoft.

The Yahoo captcha used rotating, bouncing letters on a scrolling background of more letters - ridiculous. Microsoft's was just a typical smeared mess, but no easier to actually solve.

I think I failed each at least 3 times.

It's not just difficult captchas, but use of them everywhere. The site my university recommends for ordering textbooks starts inserting captchas if one searches more often than perhaps twice within a minute. Another I can't recall the details of requires a captcha solve to make any sort of profile change despite being previously authenticated.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#20
post #16

I realised an intersting thing there. I also get those complex captaches using firefox. But I also have an Opera12.17 running. With this one my captchas for the same page are ridiculousy easy. Sometimes it's just an house number. One item. I never had one even close to what I get on FF.

I think it depends on a cookie. Once you correctly solve a dozen or so hard captchas they'll give you easy ones from then on.
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