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Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

andrewmunsell.com

91–100 of 201 posts

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#91
There are plenty of tricks around Visual Captchas. What you need is a semantic captcha that's only recognizable as such by a human. Hide a simple question somewhere in a piece of text.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#92
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ 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.

If enough people colluded to use the same unknown word, say "foobar", then couldn't they train recaptcha to believe that is the true value of the word? If I understand recaptcha correctly, and assuming they don't detect collusion well, then eventually the known word pool would get poisoned with a surplus of foobars.

ReCaptcha does do some collusion detection, and I assume they do it well, since it has not publicly been stated to be a problem area.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#93

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…

It's also clearly "onightsl" and not "onighisl". A couple of years ago, captchas were just as easy / difficult as they are now.

Except for some untrusted websites / users who can get really difficult captchas sometimes: https://i.imgur.com/6pAatnC.png

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#96
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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] man…

I don't think you understand how to implement a captcha on your website. Unless you use a 3rd party CMS where implementing a captcha is just a checkbox and pasting in your api key, then it's a lot more work.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#98
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.

Are you suggesting somehow automating the process of proving you are a human?

No. Just trying to avoid something that is completely stupid on many levels.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

It must think I'm a bot, then. I get captchas all the time, and they've been definitely getting harder and harder to solve over time. I suspect their algorithm pushes me further and further into the bot camp the more captchas I fail (I have about a 10-20% success rate now, and it's dropping). At this point, I only stick around for the 5-6 tries it takes if I REALLY want to use whatever service it's guarding. Often, I…

Hmm ya, I could certainly see a positive feedback loop developing. Out of curiosity, do you regularly log into a google account and/or use services like gmail? I'm guessing not, since presumably that would give it plenty of data. (Unless you actually are a spammer... ;) ) Also, are you connecting from a location that Google might see as more likely to produce spam? (I would guess any non-"western" country to some extent, with Nigeria likely being at the far end of the scale.)

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must think I'm a bot, then. I get captchas all the time, and they've been definitely getting harder and harder to solve over time. I suspect their algorithm pushes me further and further into the bot camp the more captchas I fail (I have about a 10-20% success rate now, and it's dropping). At this point, I only stick around for the 5-6 tries it takes if I REALLY want to use whatever service it's guarding. Often, I…

Hmm ya, I could certainly see a positive feedback loop developing. Out of curiosity, do you regularly log into a google account and/or use services like gmail? I'm guessing not, since presumably that would give it plenty of data. (Unless you actually are a spammer... ;) ) Also, are you connecting from a location that Google might see as more likely to produce spam? (I would guess any non-"western" country to some ext…

I have gmail open most of the time, but it rarely asks me to log in. It's only when I try to use other services that use recaptcha, or the rare occasions where I have to relog into google and mistype my password more than once. Last time that happened it locked me out of my account for 24 hours because I couldn't solve the captcha (although I could still access gmail on my phone).
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