181–190 of 201 posts
I always worry that they're getting harder because I'm getting old, so it's comforting that an arms race against bots is the real cause! :)
I literally had the same thought after I unsuccessfully tried to get through a captcha for 10 minutes. It was for a contact form on a vendor's website. Ended up going with another vendor who had identical product
Dear website owners, please, do not use reCaptcha. As was noted in other comments, Google discriminates against the users who try to protect their privacy by showing them nearly unsolvable variant. For instance, I see the hard version all the time since I started to use Privacy Badger for Firefox. It is also not impossible that they discriminate by user-agent. And generally it is a very bad idea to choose the most po…
It's almost like, if they already know you're not a bot, they don't have to try very hard to re-prove it, or something. Think of it in a Bayesian sense. If 10% of anonymous users end up being bots (the prior), and the "hard" recaptcha has a 1% false-negative (incorrectly identifying someone as a human) rate, then of the anonymous users who succeed in getting past the recaptcha, .1% will be bots (the posterior). But i…
The squished-up word is the control word, and the straight one is the unknown one. You only need to get the wavy word right and just guess at all the cut-off examples.
I've solved a lot of captcha's in my time, and really have never experienced the trouble the author is detailing. Not only am I relieved when I see a reCaptcha since they are some of the easiest and most forgiving challenges, but I don't recall ever having repeated bad/unsolvable challenges presented on the same page. Sure, maybe sometimes you get a weird one and fail it. But typically the next challenge is easy to p…
That might be the problem right here. Try browsing with Tor or passing through an anonymizing proxy. The more you solve correctly, the easier they get. The more unknown you are, the harder.
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I got one in Hebrew once: http://twitpic.com/8u8un4
Looks like something you might get with CRAPCHA: http://crapcha.com
I'll repost this once again. Why you should never use a CAPTCHA: http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/07/02/why-you-should-never-...
Dear website owners, please, do not use reCaptcha. As was noted in other comments, Google discriminates against the users who try to protect their privacy by showing them nearly unsolvable variant. For instance, I see the hard version all the time since I started to use Privacy Badger for Firefox. It is also not impossible that they discriminate by user-agent. And generally it is a very bad idea to choose the most po…
It's almost like, if they already know you're not a bot, they don't have to try very hard to re-prove it, or something. Think of it in a Bayesian sense. If 10% of anonymous users end up being bots (the prior), and the "hard" recaptcha has a 1% false-negative (incorrectly identifying someone as a human) rate, then of the anonymous users who succeed in getting past the recaptcha, .1% will be bots (the posterior). But i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I literally had the same thought after I unsuccessfully tried to get through a captcha for 10 minutes. It was for a contact form on a vendor's website. Ended up going with another vendor who had identical product
would you wait instead of entering captcha with hashcash.io widget? Widget like that - https://hashcash.io/auth (notice unlock switch)
the on/off metaphor is not clear either - at least make the "login" button be not enabled until the switch is moved
Its sitting on the login form for at least a minute now, filling up the switch background btw
Here's something interesting. If I go to the ReCaptcha demo page in Chrome that is logged in to Google, I get all house numbers, a lot of which seem like easy OCR. If go to the same demo page in Incognito mode, I get the two word version instead, like this blog is complaining about. http://www.google.com/recaptcha/demo/
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It's almost like, if they already know you're not a bot, they don't have to try very hard to re-prove it, or something. Think of it in a Bayesian sense. If 10% of anonymous users end up being bots (the prior), and the "hard" recaptcha has a 1% false-negative (incorrectly identifying someone as a human) rate, then of the anonymous users who succeed in getting past the recaptcha, .1% will be bots (the posterior). But i…
While Google is worried by the false negative, we as users measure frustration with the false positive (failures to identify an actual human) rate. Ideally they would find a system where both rates are independent or where false positive are rare.
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Except you lose the benefit of anonymity, which is a big draw for many of the places using Captchas. Unless I don't understand your idea, which is possible.
Well anonymity isn't the purpose of captchas. Captchas are intended to provide human-confirmation with the least friction possible, mainly for rate-limiting of services. Having to establish you are a specific individual takes effort, but just typing in a random word is simple. Anonymity is just a by-product of the frictionless [simple] part. You can still come up with new ways to verify someone is a human for specifi…
I agree that anonymity is orthogonal to the purpose of captchas, but usually a captcha is only required when you don't have identity. This can be because you haven't established identity, or because the identity is in question, but also because the site does not want to require identity. In fact, outside of first time user sign ups, most captchas are used specifically to allow people to engage without needing an account. So in most cases you use a captcha because you want to allow anonymity.
There already exists several systems like you describe: login with your Google account, Facebook, Twitter. There are already several comment systems (Disqus for example) which make using these as simple as using a captcha for sites who don't care about anonymity. We don't need to integrate identity into captchas.