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Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

blog.andrewmunsell.com

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Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#151

Post by icebraining »

john_flintstone wrote: post #129

A forum I run in Ireland doesn't have a need for Captchas. The forum is very regional and niche - no genuine foreign visitors - so we blocked every country apart from Ireland and the UK from posting comments. Result - no spam. This wouldn't work for many forums, but if it's local, you really don't need to open it to the world.

So, if I was an Irish guy travelling (or even an emigrant), I'd be blocked? That seems unfortunate.

On my forum I just added a question about Portuguese history. Anyone who understands the languages can find the answer in a couple of minutes, but bots really aren't that clever.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#152

Post by waterhouse »

Xymak1y wrote: post #134
Jach wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, you mean just for that IP? Torify. Cookies? Bots don't need to accept them. Do you have something better?

How would you login without cookies anyway?

I believe a cookie is a datum given by the server to the client so that the client may present it to the server when making requests later. This is entirely voluntary on the part of the client; the client is free to pretend it has never received any cookies, or to present a made-up cookie (though the server would likely recognize that as suspicious). Browsers are likely to mindlessly accept cookies from servers and to obey servers' instructions as to when to present the cookies back to the server; but obviously a bot is likely to be more sophisticated, and to not present any cookies other than ones that say "You have successfully authenticated yourself as user xxx".

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#154

Post by cynusx »

encoderer wrote: post #31

It's funny that we are advancing the science of OCR and computer vision by funneling grey/blackmarket dollars into the field to break captchas. Makes me wonder what sort of social engineering opportunity this creates. What other fields could be advanced in a similar way.

object recognition? As in, point out object X in this image.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#155

Post by brudgers »

ReCaptcha is free from Google. I would hazard to guess that it is free because the value of the data Google collects is greater than the cost of providing the service. What I notice is that user convenience and blocking bots don't directly enter into the value Google derives, they are only marketing points - i.e. what matters to Google is that the perception of ReCaptcha is suffiently positive that a stream of relevant data is provided.

It would seem to me that having data on an individual's ability to solve Captcha's might provide some correlation with educational, economic, and social characteristics which is potentially useful to advertisers.

I just can't really buy into the idea that Google is offering ReCaptcha as charity.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#157

Post by StavrosK »

brudgers wrote: post #155

ReCaptcha is free from Google. I would hazard to guess that it is free because the value of the data Google collects is greater than the cost of providing the service. What I notice is that user convenience and blocking bots don't directly enter into the value Google derives, they are only marketing points - i.e. what matters to Google is that the perception of ReCaptcha is suffiently positive that a stream of releva…

You know they use it to digitize books, yes?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#158

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

tjpaxton wrote: post #50
streptomycin wrote: post #28

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.)

Take a look at our product at areyouahuman.com We launched in January and are using games to make them easier for people. Some of our early testing showed captchas can decrease signups by up to 25% and we're able to recover almost all of that. We also monitor how you play the game (like mouse movement) so we can ramp up our security without having to make the task more difficult for people. Read more here http://arey…

Damn, people were kind of hard on you. I think it's very clever. Even though sometimes our inventions don't work as perfectly as we expected them to. Your captcha system is new and fresh and many bots are not prepared for it. I'm sure you'll improve over time, the bots will improve over time, you'll counter, so on and so forth.

I'd rather have my signup system use areyouhuman than re-captcha. What makes me uneasy about using it on a massive site is the whole html5 + flash dependency. And the audio captcha alternative you have is terrible. I have better than average hearing and wasn't able to understand anything on my audio sample. That and the re-captcha system helps digitize books while areyouhuman is just playing games. Even though I hate captcha it makes me feel like I'm helping digitize a book when I use recaptcha, so I feel better about it. On the other hand your games are interesting and dare I say it, a little bit addictive, especially with all those congratulatory stars at the end.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#159

Post by StavrosK »

doc4t wrote: post #144
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?

I don't think it would, really...

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#160

Post by DanBC »

encoderer wrote: post #31

It's funny that we are advancing the science of OCR and computer vision by funneling grey/blackmarket dollars into the field to break captchas. Makes me wonder what sort of social engineering opportunity this creates. What other fields could be advanced in a similar way.

"Before we accept your comment we ask you to fold this protein"?
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