Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous • Hacker News Board

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#191

Post by izzydata » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 4:03 PM UTC

Lately I've noticed 90% of my captcha's being a single number. That is it. A number like "1057" with nothing else. what do they honestly expect me to do with this?

Basically I have to fill in the number and then guess whether it was the first or second set of characters and fill out bogus before or after the number and hope I got it right. The numbers weren't even hard for a computer to read. The only thing it does is waste everyones' time.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#192

Post by wernercd » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 4:12 PM UTC

nyrina wrote: post #162

hueving wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can guess which 6-letter epithet for black people they tried to use. 'Blacks'

Hint: It starts with "N" and ends in "igger"

Naggers!

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#193

Post by karlshea » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 4:45 PM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #191

Lately I've noticed 90% of my captcha's being a single number. That is it. A number like "1057" with nothing else. what do they honestly expect me to do with this? Basically I have to fill in the number and then guess whether it was the first or second set of characters and fill out bogus before or after the number and hope I got it right. The numbers weren't even hard for a computer to read. The only thing it does i…

I've seen guesses that those numbers come from addresses in pictures taken by the Google Street View cars.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#194

Post by jobigoud » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 4:51 PM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #191

Lately I've noticed 90% of my captcha's being a single number. That is it. A number like "1057" with nothing else. what do they honestly expect me to do with this? Basically I have to fill in the number and then guess whether it was the first or second set of characters and fill out bogus before or after the number and hope I got it right. The numbers weren't even hard for a computer to read. The only thing it does i…

This happens when they already know there is a fair chance that you are human. So they give you an easy one and get their OCR for free. You are probably already logged in your Google account when it happens. Go incognito, browse with Tor, etc. and you will get the impossible ones.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#195

Post by tjpaxton » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

companyhen wrote: post #13

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

Founder of Are You a Human here. Happy to answer any questions.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#196

Post by tjpaxton » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 5:18 PM UTC

gdilla wrote: post #26

companyhen wrote: post #13

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

it's interesting but two things come to mind. Viewing it on this site makes it seem like it's great, but what about in context? If i came across that, I'm forced to think more than a capthca, just since it's so different and unexpected (maybe that goes away if it's very widespread). Also, it looks like an annoying banner ad game from orbitz or something of years back - that might make me avoid it, ignore or just not…

in context we get about 40%-60% higher conversion rate depending on the use case and have over a 95% success rate. we have a lightbox mode that makes it really apparent what you are doing and only has you attempt a captcha after you submit and the form is validated.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#197

Post by joshfraser » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 6:36 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #169

joshfraser wrote: post #97

I'll repost this once again. Why you should never use a CAPTCHA: http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/07/02/why-you-should-never-...

The proposed alternatives are crap. Why shouldn't an attacker read the CSS...

Many (maybe even most) people who use CAPTCHAs are never going to be targeted with a personalized attack. Instead they're using CAPTCHAs to prevent generic, spray and pray spam. The bots know how to post a comment on a Wordpress blog, but making even a small tweak to your comment form can get rid of 99% of them.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#198

Post by mathattack » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 6:48 PM UTC

I believe that this will eventually become a losing game. Normally there's an arms race between those creating security and those thwarting it. In this case, once the recognition schemes are as good as humans, the game is over for good.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#199

Post by pertinhower » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 6:52 PM UTC

Shoulda stopped at number 5: "and khseeke" seemed pretty clear to me.

But point taken.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#200

Post by yaroslavvb » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 7:29 PM UTC

We found that neural networks can solve CAPTCHAS much better than humans, 99.8% on the "hard" ReCAPTCHA instances: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.6082.pdf

This is why visual recognition is just one of the signals you need to use to tell humans and computers apart http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/04/street-view...