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Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

blog.andrewmunsell.com

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Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#191

Post by mseebach »

sams99 wrote: post #184
mikeash wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any unique solution will work well for a small site, because it's not worth the effort to program a bot specifically for your system. For the longest time, my blog's comments were protected by a "captcha" that simply asked the user to type the word "elbow" into a text box. The word never changed and was not obscured in any way. Worked pretty well. Such solutions do not scale to larger web sites, though.

sure they do, you randomize algorithms or add proof of work.

But then it's not "such" a solution anymore.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#192

Post by realo »

dchichkov wrote: post #104
mgurlitz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Captchas are hard because there's only so much an algorithm can extract from spatial information. Computers are excellent with temporal data, given essentially unlimited memory for past video frames. Computers benefit more from increased information than humans do.

This is computer vision, an I'm somewhat an expert in the area. I can tell that video sequence recognition is _much_ harder problem than image recognition. For example, if you would show an letter made out of random noise moving through random noise, current computer vision algorithms would not be able to recognize anything. And you would pick out that letter immediately. Human visual subsystem is really amazing in t…

This is simple, brillant. The best solution I have seen ever.

Do you have a patent already? :)

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#193

Post by hk__2 »

bnr wrote: post #171
hk__2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so stupid. Your CAPTCHA is unusable by blind people, and your audio CAPTCHA is inaccessible (you have to see the element to know where to click to access to the audio CAPTCHA). Do you consider that blind people are bots?

Look at the "download MP3" link's URL, the audio captcha comes from google.com/recaptcha. I agree that the button itself should be easier to discover for blind people, like an image link with a title tag.

If you want to download or listen the audio CAPTCHA, you have to click on a element, which is totally unusable by a blind people. It's like saying “Look, we've made an elevator, but you have to climb some stairs to take it”.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#194

Post by tomjen3 »

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.

I would destroy it if I could.

If they want to. If they want we me to scan old books, they bloody better pay me.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#195

Post by tomjen3 »

icebraining wrote: post #147
slowpoke wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ask twenty regular users who have been forced to fill that crap out.

Nobody reads the about page. Put it on the front page (or the embedded widget, if that is what the user sees) in clear large letters that are easy to see or accept that we consider you scum.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#196

Post by jrockway »

hesselink wrote: post #181
jrockway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Note that captchas are not (only) to prevent brute forcing passwords, but (also) to prevent bots from signing up for accounts. This would not work against that.

"Please call us between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM to talk to an account creation specialist."

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#197

Post by icebraining »

tomjen3 wrote: post #195
icebraining wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ask twenty regular users who have been forced to fill that crap out. Nobody reads the about page. Put it on the front page (or the embedded widget, if that is what the user sees) in clear large letters that are easy to see or accept that we consider you scum.

(They do put it on the front page, I already pointed that out)

So, assuming you don't consider HN scum (you're here, after all), can you please explain to me how is this different from YCombinator using HN to publicize their own companies? There's nothing in the front or signup pages explaining that.

Frankly, I don't see why is that a problem. They're offering a free service in exchange for having words manually OCRed. If you have a problem with it I think you should take it to the site that's using reCaptcha, not with Google.

(By the way, I'm not affiliated with Google and I'm not even an heavy user of their services anymore)

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#198

Post by streptomycin »

seandougall wrote: post #150
streptomycin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When a horse dies, it doesn't stay in a constant preserved state forever, it slowly decays :)

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#199

Post by kattuviriyan »

morsch wrote: post #174
raverbashing wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to wait 1s between attempts (per user) could be enough to prevent brute force attacks Of course, if one ip is making too many requests, it gets blocked or captchaed

That prevents brute force attacks against one specific account, but not against an attack against all users of a site. If you have the capability to make, say, 10k login attempts per second (no idea if that's realistic), you don't slow down to 1 attempt/second, you just attack 10k different accounts once every second. IP blocks can be countered in other ways (botnets, tor, etc). I'm not saying it's a bad idea though,…

The site should have the capability to detect login attempt for multiple attempts - Show captcha Same account login attempt from multiple IPs - show captcha With the above: a simple time wait for next attempt could solve the issue for most legit attempts right?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#200

Post by tjpaxton »

hk__2 wrote: post #106
tjpaxton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is so stupid. Your CAPTCHA is unusable by blind people, and your audio CAPTCHA is inaccessible (you have to see the element to know where to click to access to the audio CAPTCHA). Do you consider that blind people are bots?

Actually, we should be worked be ADA compliant and have worked to make this accessible.

Screen readers should pick up the alternate text.

Please complete this audio captcha before submitting the form

Also, I know the audio sucks, but it's the most secure out there, otherwise it would just be a giant hole for bots to get through. It's one of the things we want to make better.

In fact, we've experimented with audio games and had some good results.

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