111–120 of 238 posts
One nice thing about recaptcha is that you know those cut off words don't matter (badly OCR'd) and can just enter gibberish for them. But it has gotten to the point that about half of the control words are unintelligible by a human.
Sure, but you shouldn't undermine the mission of successfully recording words that can't be identified. It's a pretty noble goal, actually.
I have no expertise in this area, but how about patterns? Since we're already parsing so much text, why not take strings of legible text (with a minor visual distortion), and strip a connecting word such as a preposition? The user is then prompted to enter the connecting word. Synonyms could be matched. For example: "I can't stand all ____ your lies" (of) or: "This is all too ____ for me to handle!" (much) Sure, some…
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Why not pose questions with answers that are obvious to humans but difficult for ai. Eg. 'What's 4 times four?' or 'How many times does the word four appear within this sentence?'
An even more outrageous but possible solution has already been implemented here. http://random.irb.hr/signup.php
As for the harder questions, Wolfram Alpha is better able to do them than the average human.
I have no expertise in this area, but how about patterns? Since we're already parsing so much text, why not take strings of legible text (with a minor visual distortion), and strip a connecting word such as a preposition? The user is then prompted to enter the connecting word. Synonyms could be matched. For example: "I can't stand all ____ your lies" (of) or: "This is all too ____ for me to handle!" (much) Sure, some…
It's easy to criticize captchas. That's why there are so many articles like this, which we all knowingly nod along to as we read. It's much harder to provide productive criticism that leads to an actual improvement over the status quo. (Although it is easy to suggest bad alternatives to captchas, which is why they appear in every comment thread about captchas on Hacker News, including this one.)
The best anyone else has come up with is, "You've typed your password wrong one time. Your account is now disabled, please call a customer service representative at 1-900-TIME-WASTE between the hours of 10:30 AM and 3:30 PM Indian Standard Time. Please note that we are closed on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday, and that we have lunch between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM."
I remember shaking my head at the absurdity of it all. I'm glad I'm not the only one.
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The best anyone else has come up with is, "You've typed your password wrong one time. Your account is now disabled, please call a customer service representative at 1-900-TIME-WASTE between the hours of 10:30 AM and 3:30 PM Indian Standard Time. Please note that we are closed on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday, and that we have lunch between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM."
What about just "You've typed your password wrong N times; you must now wait 2^N seconds before trying again"?
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Do OCR on every frame, perform majority voting on the result. You just made the spammer's task easier.
Here is an example of a problem that would be hard for computer to solve: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G4y79ZbaBs
One nice thing about recaptcha is that you know those cut off words don't matter (badly OCR'd) and can just enter gibberish for them. But it has gotten to the point that about half of the control words are unintelligible by a human.
Sure, but you shouldn't undermine the mission of successfully recording words that can't be identified. It's a pretty noble goal, actually.