Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous • Hacker News Board

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#61

Post by nsxwolf » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:09 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #43

lfam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychotic and almost impossible to solve. I tried an audio captcha recently on a whim and I was bewildered. I think any site that uses reCAPTCHA must not have any regular vision impaired users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhFLC8ZZQeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNVcIogEXOo

Analysis of audio captchas has led to a number of exploits for several captcha systems including recaptcha - which is what all that horrible obfuscation is trying to prevent.

It seems to be really good at preventing visually impaired users from using your site. Unless it is true that they really do develop better hearing.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#62

Post by valarauca1 » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:11 PM UTC

Aardwolf wrote: post #53

If computers get so good at solving captchas, are we also getting better OCR? Time to switch to next, harder, AI problems as captchas :)

I hate to be so simple but XKCD said this first

https://xkcd.com/810/

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#63

Post by drglitch » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:12 PM UTC

joelgrus wrote: post #6

I always worry that they're getting harder because I'm getting old, so it's comforting that an arms race against bots is the real cause! :)

I literally had the same thought after I unsuccessfully tried to get through a captcha for 10 minutes.

It was for a contact form on a vendor's website. Ended up going with another vendor who had identical product

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#64

Post by lfam » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:17 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #43

lfam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychotic and almost impossible to solve. I tried an audio captcha recently on a whim and I was bewildered. I think any site that uses reCAPTCHA must not have any regular vision impaired users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhFLC8ZZQeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNVcIogEXOo

Analysis of audio captchas has led to a number of exploits for several captcha systems including recaptcha - which is what all that horrible obfuscation is trying to prevent.

Yes, the goals of the reCAPTCHA project are to filter out bots and to digitize the text of the world (not necessarily in that order).

The mission statement of the reCAPTCHA project is "Protect your website from spam and abuse while letting real people pass through with ease."

I don't think anybody is passing through the audio captchas with ease. Nor are they helping to digitize anything.

I think that the use of captcha's as a reverse turing test was always secondary for reCAPTCHA anyways. If someone can write software to solve the visual captcha's, that is a great accomplishment. Once that is accomplished, we will need a new type of reverse turing test. Perhaps we are approaching that point.

I'm interested to hear the perspective of users with a visual impairment on the audio captchas.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#65

Post by tempestn » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:18 PM UTC

pbreit wrote: post #54

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.

Google has figured out something "better". Basically they use all the data they collect on you to determine whether you're likely to be a bot or not. If not, you most likely won't even see a captcha. (And if so, you'll get a difficult one.)

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#66

Post by lfam » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:18 PM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #61

krapp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analysis of audio captchas has led to a number of exploits for several captcha systems including recaptcha - which is what all that horrible obfuscation is trying to prevent.

It seems to be really good at preventing visually impaired users from using your site. Unless it is true that they really do develop better hearing.

Yes, I'd really like to hear their perspective on this. I listened to a screen reader once and found it very difficult to understand as well.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#67

Post by adestefan » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:21 PM UTC

I've recently seen a bunch of them with just one number. Just a single 7 or 4 on a white background and nothing else. Kind of scratch my head at those ones.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#68

Post by lfam » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:21 PM UTC

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.

Apparently, if you have good cookies you get an easier captcha

find accessibility: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#69

Post by MrQuincle » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:21 PM UTC

companyhen wrote: post #13

What is everyone thoughts on this type of CAPTCHA? http://areyouahuman.com/site-owners/playthru/

Nice! I am playing with the idea to put it on my site for fun. :-)

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#70

Post by tempestn » Wed, Jun 25, 2014, 7:22 PM UTC

Is it not obvious in the first case that "secretary" is the unknown word? Clearly ocr wasn't able to read it due to the fading. Likewise, the cut off words spanning two lines in the later versions are obviously the unknown words. The author states right at the beginning that he understands there is a control and an unknown word; he then proceeds to "hope" that the obvious unknown word is the control in the first case, then skip numerous captchas where the control word is straightforward and the illegible word is obviously the unknown. This certainly sounds like willful ignorance for the sake of a blog post.

Also, '“Onightsl”? “Onighisl”? Are those even words?' No, my understanding is that dictionary words are never used as the control, so as not to be vulnerable to dictionary attacks.

Edit: I'm not suggesting that these captchas are in any way good; they do clearly have issues. I'm just saying that storyline in the blog post seems contrived. To me it would be more convincing if presented in a more genuine manner. However, perhaps he was simply very unlucky.