Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

andrewmunsell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 201 posts

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#51

Post by biggerfisch »

peterwwillis wrote: post #18
Tycho wrote: 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…

> Most people are quite dumb.

I know what you're trying to say here, but consider today's xkcd[0] as a counter-point. I think "most people" are quite capable of solving a lot of puzzles. This issue is that any puzzle that we can solve in a reasonable timeframe is often a good target for a computer-generated solution as well.

[0] http://xkcd.com/1386/

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#52

Post by EddieLomax »

nsxwolf wrote: post #8

The audio captchas are psychotic. They are scarier sounding than anything I've heard in a horror movie lately, and I have never been able to solve one.

They are especially hard because the numbers overlap with each other-- so the numbers "three", "five", and "seven" become this weird mash of "threeven".

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#54

Post by pbreit »

I can't believe we have not figured out something better than captchas by 2014. I would imagine Google could figure at least how to bake something into Chrome which many would eventually follow. It's asinine that all legit customers have to go through such a silly, completely unrelated hoop.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#55

Post by jdbernard »

Alupis wrote: post #45
jdbernard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the problem the author mentions is explicitly with ReCaptcha. He addresses your edit in the article, which you would know if you actually read it and didn't just skim. The problem, as evidenced by the author's many examples, is that the control word is often distorted beyond reasonable recognition, and the new word is not valid data. So neither of the two words is solvable. Edit in response to your edits You've d…

> You obviously don't have an accurate understanding of ReCaptcha implementation I do (I've implemented them many times), but no point in arguing. I must be the only person who finds the level of security a captcha provides worth the 1 to 2 seconds it takes to type in a Captcha. And if done properly, you should only have to type a captcha once per site. Which is easier? Allow form spam on your site, or have a user ty…

Pardon my confusion, but wasn't your original comment arguing against homebrew Captchas?

Also, you say that you have an accurate understanding of ReCaptcha implementation based on the qualification that you have "implemented them many times". ReCaptcha was created by Google, so unless you work for Google on the team that implemented ReCaptcha, it doesn't seem possible for you to have "implemented them [ReCaptcha] many times".

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#57

Post by wellactually »

biggerfisch wrote: post #51
peterwwillis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Most people are quite dumb. I know what you're trying to say here, but consider today's xkcd[0] as a counter-point. I think "most people" are quite capable of solving a lot of puzzles. This issue is that any puzzle that we can solve in a reasonable timeframe is often a good target for a computer-generated solution as well. [0] http://xkcd.com/1386/

The xkcd is only necessarily true when it is the median average that is considered. However, most people are not necessarily of mean average intelligence.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#58

Post by Alupis »

sp332 wrote: 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.

I've solved a lot of captcha's in my time, and really have never experienced the trouble the author is detailing. Not only am I relieved when I see a reCaptcha since they are some of the easiest and most forgiving challenges, but I don't recall ever having repeated bad/unsolvable challenges presented on the same page.

Sure, maybe sometimes you get a weird one and fail it. But typically the next challenge is easy to pass. Seems the author cherry-picked some of the worst reCaptcha examples for the article, but wrote it in a way that made it seem they were presented back-to-back.

Besides this -- the article makes no attempt to offer a better solution.

Captcha's are really the best way we have right now to "prove" someone is not a bot. Hidden Form fields, etc, don't work and are easily spoofed. Sure Captcha's can be beaten by bots sometimes -- but I trust Google's scale/volume with ReCaptcha to handle that for me (for the most part).

Captcha's are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#59

Post by _Adam »

isomorphic wrote: post #37
Alupis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article's largest complaint is not being able to read one (1) of the two (2) words in the captcha challenge. ReCaptcha only requires one (1) out of two (2) words to be correct in the challenge. It presents one known-by-the-system-word, and one not-known word. If you get the known word correct (the easier of the two to read) then it passes the challenge. ReCaptcha then pools the answers for the second not-known wo…

Don't re-invent the wheel? That is, please continue to give useful data to Google for free? From the article, in the context of ReCaptcha, it seems like Google has stabbed itself in the face with the sword of data. Google may think the data is telling it something, but what it's really managing to do is irritate legions of humans with terrible (borderline hostile in this case) UI/UX.

Yes, please do. Because Google has and will continue to make way better use of that data than anyone else.
Post reply on HN