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Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

andrewmunsell.com

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Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#41

Post by jdbernard »

Alupis wrote: post #23
incision wrote: post #19

I was just thinking this yesterday when I had to recover a Flickr account I hadn't used in ages. I had to solve captchas from Yahoo and Microsoft. The Yahoo captcha used rotating, bouncing letters on a scrolling background of more letters - ridiculous. Microsoft's was just a typical smeared mess, but no easier to actually solve. I think I failed each at least 3 times. It's not just difficult captchas, but use of them…

The article's largest complaint is not being able to read one (1) of the two (2) words in the captcha challenge. ReCaptcha only requires one (1) out of two (2) words to be correct in the challenge. It presents one known-by-the-system-word, and one not-known word. If you get the known word correct (the easier of the two to read) then it passes the challenge. ReCaptcha then pools the answers for the second not-known wo…

No, the problem the author mentions is explicitly with ReCaptcha. He addresses your edit in the article, which you would know if you actually read it and didn't just skim. The problem, as evidenced by the author's many examples, is that the control word is often distorted beyond reasonable recognition, and the new word is not valid data. So neither of the two words is solvable.

Edit in response to your edits

You've deleted your previous edit. Still, even with your current edit it is clear you are not actually reading the article. You say:

Again, it's important to note, you only have to get one of the two words correct to pass the challenge. So.. probably 99% of the above list would pass.

However, the author of the article explicitly states that he did this:

I decided to just guess the first word and hope “secretary” was the control. It wasn’t.

So the author correctly identified one of the two words (and makes the same identification as you did), but was still rejected because it was not the control word.

You obviously don't have an accurate understanding of ReCaptcha implementation, and you apparently are not reading the article with comprehension, despite claiming several times that you have.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#42

Post by lfam »

nsxwolf wrote: post #8

The audio captchas are psychotic. They are scarier sounding than anything I've heard in a horror movie lately, and I have never been able to solve one.

Psychotic and almost impossible to solve. I tried an audio captcha recently on a whim and I was bewildered.

I think any site that uses reCAPTCHA must not have any regular vision impaired users.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhFLC8ZZQeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNVcIogEXOo

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#43

Post by krapp »

lfam wrote: post #42
nsxwolf wrote: post #8

The audio captchas are psychotic. They are scarier sounding than anything I've heard in a horror movie lately, and I have never been able to solve one.

Psychotic and almost impossible to solve. I tried an audio captcha recently on a whim and I was bewildered. I think any site that uses reCAPTCHA must not have any regular vision impaired users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhFLC8ZZQeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNVcIogEXOo

Analysis of audio captchas has led to a number of exploits for several captcha systems including recaptcha - which is what all that horrible obfuscation is trying to prevent.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#44

Post by opendais »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #5
opendais wrote: post #2

I agree that those captchas are obscenely bad. :) I think we really, really need a replacement solution for them that works as reliably vs. bots.

So at what point do we 'switch over' which is to say that the Captcha code realizes that if you solve it your a robot/script because humans can't ?

The API stuff that solves these captchas is really akin to Amazon's Mechanical Turk and outsourced to places like India.

http://antigate.com/

Scroll to the bottom.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#45

Post by Alupis »

jdbernard wrote: post #41
Alupis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article's largest complaint is not being able to read one (1) of the two (2) words in the captcha challenge. ReCaptcha only requires one (1) out of two (2) words to be correct in the challenge. It presents one known-by-the-system-word, and one not-known word. If you get the known word correct (the easier of the two to read) then it passes the challenge. ReCaptcha then pools the answers for the second not-known wo…

No, the problem the author mentions is explicitly with ReCaptcha. He addresses your edit in the article, which you would know if you actually read it and didn't just skim. The problem, as evidenced by the author's many examples, is that the control word is often distorted beyond reasonable recognition, and the new word is not valid data. So neither of the two words is solvable. Edit in response to your edits You've d…

> You obviously don't have an accurate understanding of ReCaptcha implementation

I do (I've implemented them many times), but no point in arguing.

I must be the only person who finds the level of security a captcha provides worth the 1 to 2 seconds it takes to type in a Captcha. And if done properly, you should only have to type a captcha once per site.

Which is easier? Allow form spam on your site, or have a user type a captcha once the first time they visit and decide to post a comment or something? Captcha's have provided a tradeoff between inconvenience and protecting your site.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#46

Post by slig »

vinc wrote: post #4

We need a browser extension to help us solve captchas with OCR. This is indeed ridiculous.

I thought about this as well. I went and registered instacaptcha.com but I never managed to do it and the domain expired.

Seems to be doable. The user pays 1 usd/month and gets 100 credits. The extension author can outsource the solving to http://antigate.com/ and get the answer in 15 seconds.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#47

Post by tass »

Alupis wrote: post #30
tass wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please re-read the article

I have. The article's largest complaint is not being able to read one (1) of the two (2) words in the captcha challenge. I was pointing out, that this complaint is not valid since reCaptcha (where all of the article's screenshots are from) only requires one of the 2 words to be correct.

Your original comment said that the biggest problem was home-grown captchas, and that people should use something established like recaptcha - the article was specifically complaining about recaptcha.

After your 'edit' my comment makes no sense.

I don't want to spend more than a second or two working out what a captcha says - if it wasn't something I absolutely needed I'd probably have gone away long before the author's patience ran out.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#48

Post by jdbernard »

peterwwillis wrote: post #18
Tycho wrote: post #12

If only we could invent the verbal equivalent of a trapdoor function. A word puzzle that would be extremely easy for computers to generate and humans to solve (since we understand language), but extremely hard for computers to solve.

It's a nice idea, but you have to consider the complexity of the word puzzles compared to the average human's brain power. Most people are quite dumb. If there aren't a sufficient number of problems/answers, or they're simple enough for computers to solve, or they're too complex for a minority of humans to solve, you're boned. The whole thing is a technology arm's race. The best solution would be one where you simply…

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.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#49

Post by gmjosack »

Alupis wrote: post #30
tass wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please re-read the article

I have. The article's largest complaint is not being able to read one (1) of the two (2) words in the captcha challenge. I was pointing out, that this complaint is not valid since reCaptcha (where all of the article's screenshots are from) only requires one of the 2 words to be correct.

You must have missed the part where he tried to guess with the easier of two words and still failed. The control words are rarely any easier to read than the unknown word.
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