Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

blog.andrewmunsell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 238 posts

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#41

Post by nathancahill »

festivusr wrote: post #27

There was an interesting talk that mentioned CAPTCHA by one of its creators, Luis von Ahn, at the AAAI-12 conference on AI and robotics this past week. In ReCAPTCHA, the two-word CAPTCHA version, one of the two words is taken from a scanned book. That (unknown) word was one that failed OCR for that book. The other word is one that captcha already knows the answer to. The assumption is if you get the known captcha cor…

Luis von Ahn is one of the very few tech entrepreneurs from Guatemala. He's killing it.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#42

Post by ricardobeat »

Isn't that a result of the massive deployment of reCaptcha? It appears that all the easy words have already been solved with enough confidence, so there's only garbled scans left. Add more books?

That said, there are plenty of alternative solutions with good success rates (and far lower abandonment rates), like requiring the answer to a simple question (not math), photo captchas, randomizing inputs, using javascript techniques and honeypot forms. Captchas are so popular because they are easy to implement.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#43

Post by freditup »

I feel like the author of this article is still slightly misunderstanding the reCaptcha. Not to criticize him, but it's almost immediately clear which word you are actually being tested on, because it's has the same general 'look' to it each time.

Take the first one: 'Secretary' is clearly out of some book. The other thing is the real test. Now, reCaptcha never gives you real words as a test, so he shouldn't be surprised that it isn't a real word.

The third captcha complained about is actually incredibly easy. The first thing is clearly the word form a book, so you can just type a short bit of nonsense there. The second thing is 'ndaaar'. It's pretty legible and easy to enter. Other 'impossible' ones are pretty easy also.

Again, not trying to pick on the author, but hopefully someone will have an easier time after reading this comment. And while Captchas are annoying, I don't really feel they are impossible.

Edit: To the commenter below - I have no idea what green names mean here, so I don't know how that influences people. What do they represent?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#44

Post by iamgopal »

reCaptchas are very good for small sites which can be easily affected by spamming. Even if hackable, the hacker will need strong reward for hacking such site with captcha. For bigger sites, there are better methods to prevent hacking. and with reCaptcha you are allow to be almost right.

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#47

Post by cbr »

Kilimanjaro wrote: post #29

Filters are coming to CSS so I guess it will be possible to show an image with hidden numbers (or words) and let the user pick a color filter that applied to the image will show the numbers and submit the color and the number to the server for verification. Like color blindness tests. How about that for a captcha?

What about that sounds hard to automate?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#48

Post by [deleted] »

Kilimanjaro wrote: post #29

Filters are coming to CSS so I guess it will be possible to show an image with hidden numbers (or words) and let the user pick a color filter that applied to the image will show the numbers and submit the color and the number to the server for verification. Like color blindness tests. How about that for a captcha?

[deleted]

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#49

Post by asto »

rickdale wrote: post #40
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?

Right now I think the best solution is no captcha. HN doesnt use one for the sign up form. Yes, the HN community is flooded, but for the most part I dont think a captcha would change that.

HN is a (largely) community moderated content aggregation site. What if you don't have the benefit of a community to moderate? If you're an email service and want to stop bots from signing up and spamming the world at large, how would you do that?

Re: Captchas Are Becoming Ridiculous

#50

Post by tjpaxton »

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://areyouahuman.com/how-playthru-stops-the-bots

Post reply on HN