Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous • Hacker News Board

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#141

Post by Perdition » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 4:07 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #137

mzd348 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try solving these actual examples: First one: a rhaval Second one: a onsupsel You need to realize that only one word needs to be entered. For the other word just enter any string (or even no string works in some/all cases).

How the hell is anyone "to realize that only one word needs to be entered" when that's not what the instructions say to do?

Experience with reCaptcha.

I can totally understand why those would frustrate non-technical users, but on a site like HN I would expect people to know how reCaptcha works.

That said I think reCaptcha has been getting much harder recently due to the arms race with bots. I now sometimes fail 3-4 times in a row.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#142

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 4:08 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #137

mzd348 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try solving these actual examples: First one: a rhaval Second one: a onsupsel You need to realize that only one word needs to be entered. For the other word just enter any string (or even no string works in some/all cases).

How the hell is anyone "to realize that only one word needs to be entered" when that's not what the instructions say to do?

[deleted]

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#143

Post by arseniclifeform » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 4:29 AM UTC

kroger wrote: post #29

gildas wrote: post #15

Here's the one I got on linkedin recently https://twitter.com/check_ca/status/480784849260019712

I got one in Hebrew once: http://twitpic.com/8u8un4

Looks like something you might get with CRAPCHA:

http://crapcha.com

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#144

Post by mukyu » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 4:58 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #137

mzd348 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try solving these actual examples: First one: a rhaval Second one: a onsupsel You need to realize that only one word needs to be entered. For the other word just enter any string (or even no string works in some/all cases).

How the hell is anyone "to realize that only one word needs to be entered" when that's not what the instructions say to do?

You aren't supposed to realize it or do it. Google uses the human's work on solving the unknown word to either get street numbers from photos or digitize books.

However, the whole point of them having the humans do that work is /they do not know the correct answer/. Since they do not know the correct answer they cannot be basing the test of the CAPTCHA on it. From there it is not a big leap to surmise that you are only actually being tested on the word that actually looks distorted on purpose.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#145

Post by bigbugbag » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 5:01 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #137

mzd348 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try solving these actual examples: First one: a rhaval Second one: a onsupsel You need to realize that only one word needs to be entered. For the other word just enter any string (or even no string works in some/all cases).

How the hell is anyone "to realize that only one word needs to be entered" when that's not what the instructions say to do?

Either you just know because internet or you get it from trial and error.

It's probably written on recaptcha website or wikipedia article, but basically you get presented one word that machine can't read (the distorted letters) and something out of a book that google had digitized and uses you to ocr it. You also get a lot of address numbers for google street view.

Just input the distorted word and type anything for the other, and it will work. Of course the instructions won't tell you that or else people would act accordingly and google would lose this free labor source for the tedious work of proofreading digitized version of books.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#146

Post by kkhire » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 5:07 AM UTC

If i am relaxing back and have to enter a difficult captcha to watch a movie, I am not watching that movie.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#147

Post by Swizec » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 5:30 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #137

mzd348 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try solving these actual examples: First one: a rhaval Second one: a onsupsel You need to realize that only one word needs to be entered. For the other word just enter any string (or even no string works in some/all cases).

How the hell is anyone "to realize that only one word needs to be entered" when that's not what the instructions say to do?

Same reason 4chan reCaptcha is no longer used to digitize the other word. If they had their way the correct answer to all reCaptchas would eventually become "nigger nigger"[1].

Fun times.

[1] the idea was to always write the correct word and just enter "nigger" as the other word. This eventually led to reCaptcha disregarding 4chan answers from the pool of resolving weird words.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#148

Post by x0054 » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 5:57 AM UTC

wingerlang wrote: post #28

Off topic slightly, but does people with dyslexia have a hard time with captchas?

I have dyslexia, no problems with captchas though. In fact I found the examples from OP article to be not all that difficult. Maybe it's because when I am solving the capture, I just look at one letter at a time, instead of trying to read and comprehend the word. I found it that in many cases the control word isn't actually a word at all, just string of characters. I usually have 80-90% success rate nowadays, used to be 100%, but they are really getting more and more difficult.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#149

Post by lauradhamilton » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 6:25 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #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.

Who writes the question and answer?

Although...maybe you could outsource the question and answering to Mechanical Turk. Turn the whole thing on its head. Have a real person write a question to try to trick the bot into revealing its botness, have the real human grade the answer.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#150

Post by neurobro » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 6:27 AM UTC

jdbernard wrote: post #55

Alupis wrote: 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…

Minor point, but reCAPTCHA was purchased by Google, not created by them.