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Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

blog.andrewmunsell.com

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Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#141

Post by quarterto »

slowpoke wrote: post #132
praxulus wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous. reCAPTCHA isn't making you do more work, it's just making work you have to do anyway useful. The benefit Google gets from the OCR work is microscopic, and the world gets old books and New York Times articles.

See, I would have much less of a problem with this if Google actually told this to everyone. Instead, they silently use you for free labor. That's dishonest. I'm all in for crowdsourcing if you tell me about it and nicely ask me to participate. Not when I am forced to do it.

It says right there on the reCAPTCHA widget "Stop spam, read books". How is that dishonest?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#142

Post by olliesaunders »

neotek wrote: post #34

CAPTCHA seems relatively pointless at stopping spammers since there are dozens of online services that use human labour to solve them for a dollar per thousand. In tests on my own sites I've found that introducing reCAPTCHA during the registration process leads to a significant increase in people abandoning their registration when they fail at recognising the text the first time, without putting a significant dent in…

You could even allow these accounts to exist but then have the content created by them invisible to anyone else.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#143

Post by brigade »

rotskoff wrote: post #92
brigade wrote: post #88

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.

Everyone entering something different is just as valid as entering nothing at all for determining whether a word is identifiable. Even more so actually, since a null response has at least four distinct meanings that I can think of. (user took too long to enter captcha, user couldn't read OCR word, user couldn't read control word, and user didn't feel like entering OCR word)

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#144

Post by doc4t »

josscrowcroft wrote: post #137

Every time I read something like this I pine for never having the opportunity to turn MotionCAPTCHA[0] into a real (secure) system. Everyone said it couldn't be done, but I know it can! [0] http://www.josscrowcroft.com/demos/motioncaptcha/

Clever. Not knowing the details of how computers beat CAPTCHAa can you explain why it would be difficult to create a program to trace the path?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#145

Post by sigkill »

repsilat wrote: post #113
sigkill wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An even more outrageous but possible solution has already been implemented here. http://random.irb.hr/signup.php

That one is actually pretty easy to beat - the OCR is easy enough, and you can refresh the page until you get an easy question. Some of them are very simple integer arithmetic exercises. As for the harder questions, Wolfram Alpha is better able to do them than the average human.

I'm not sure about which OCR you're talking about but I've tried ABBYY and because of the fractions ie top and bottom halves the thing craps out. Granted, if you get a single line problem it could easily be solved. Definitely there's the problem of application as well. Since this is a quantum bit service Site, you can expect people to know a minimum of integration. But I don't expect Facebook login to have anything even close to 8th grade mathematics.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#146

Post by icebraining »

z92 wrote: post #90
andrewfelix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?'

I remember it was demonstrated that these questions can be easily answered with high margin of accuracy using wolframalpaha and google search.

So, try manually answering one with WA and Google until you find one which can't be answered?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#147

Post by icebraining »

slowpoke wrote: post #132
praxulus wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous. reCAPTCHA isn't making you do more work, it's just making work you have to do anyway useful. The benefit Google gets from the OCR work is microscopic, and the world gets old books and New York Times articles.

See, I would have much less of a problem with this if Google actually told this to everyone. Instead, they silently use you for free labor. That's dishonest. I'm all in for crowdsourcing if you tell me about it and nicely ask me to participate. Not when I am forced to do it.

From the landing page of reCaptcha: "reCAPTCHA IS A FREE ANTI-BOT SERVICE THAT HELPS DIGITIZE BOOKS".

The "What is reCAPTCHA" explains the OCR process clearly and has the phrase "Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books."

And if you click on the "HELP" link in a reCAPTCHA, it opens a small page with the instructions and a paragraph explain the OCR and a link to Learn More.

How are they _not_ telling this to everyone?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#148

Post by Fando »

Your article's title should be: Captchas are sometimes so ridiculous, that they take 1 second longer to solve because you need to refresh them which is besides the point that is that we are due for a new way of thinking about authenticating human presence on the web.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#149

Post by ballooney »

Fando wrote: post #148

Your article's title should be: Captchas are sometimes so ridiculous, that they take 1 second longer to solve because you need to refresh them which is besides the point that is that we are due for a new way of thinking about authenticating human presence on the web.

Catchy.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#150

Post by seandougall »

streptomycin wrote: post #37
jdale27 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but what is your point? That one should never say "X is broken" without inventing a Y that is better than X?

It's fine to say "X is broken", but I doubt you can find anyone on Hacker News who didn't read an article like this years ago and thus already knows X is broken. This article is beating a dead horse. The fact remains, captchas are the worst technique to prevent bots from filling out a form, except for all the other ones.

Yes, though, to be fair, this particular horse does seem to find a way to get deader as the years go on.
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