Worst CAPTCHA Ever • Hacker News Board

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#71

Post by civilian » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:21 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #64

superdude wrote: post #50

One of my buddies worked in the accounting department at our state government. He needed to get a bunch of documents from another agency (like hundreds every month) to process claims. Well this other agency requires everyone to go through their website and download each document one at a time. They said it was to prevent abuse. For some reason they couldn't just send a batch of them to us, even a fellow state agency.…

Isn't that one ambitious DA away from being a felony these days?

Batman: You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I can do those things. Because I'm not a hero, not like Dent. I killed those people. That's what I can be.

Lt. James Gordon: No, no, you can't! You're not! Batman: I'm whatever Gotham needs me to be.

[cut to Gordon at Dent's funeral]

Lt. James Gordon: A hero. Not the hero we deserved but the hero we needed. Nothing less than a knight. Shining.

[Gordon is shown on top of Gotham Central. An axe is in his hand. He is being watched by an assortment of reporters and police officers. The next lines are heard in voiceover]

Lt. James Gordon: They'll hunt you.

Batman: You'll hunt me. You'll condemn me. Set the dogs on me.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#72

Post by lmkg » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:23 PM UTC

fakeer wrote: post #44

_ikke_ wrote: post #2

Well, it is a good way to tell computers and humans apart. Computers can read it, while humans can't. They should reject corectly filled in captchas.

I still loathe reCAPTCHA more than any other captcha out there. I've given up hopes of logging in on many occasions simply because of it. Looks like it's designed for not to be deciphered either by humans or computers.

Technically somewhat true. Their source material is fragments of books being OCR'd that their program had issues on, some of which are literally impossible (I've seen math equations that require non-unicode characters). On top of this, they add extra distortions.

BUT! These are actually easy to solve. reCAPTCHA will give you two words, only one of which it knows the ground truth on (it's using you to solve the other). It will accept any gibberish for the one word it doesn't know. I've made a point of trying to guess which one is the 'real' captcha (usually the more-distorted one), but next time you see Cyrillic or an integral, just mash the keyboard.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#73

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:25 PM UTC

sabe__ wrote: post #48

ef4 wrote: post #8

A wonderful example of cargo cult programming.

It's like all these sites that requires you to enter your current password before you can change it, but deleting the entire account is just ticking a check box (at least twitter and dribbble worked this way back when I had accounts there). Some things we been doing for so long that we forget why we do them at all.

Or ones that make you confirm an e-mail address by entering it twice.

The reason you confirm a password is because you can't see the password, and so you never know if you mistyped it. Confirming an e-mail address, in a normal text field, is just stupid busywork.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#74

Post by nnq » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:25 PM UTC

fakeer wrote: post #44

_ikke_ wrote: post #2

Well, it is a good way to tell computers and humans apart. Computers can read it, while humans can't. They should reject corectly filled in captchas.

I still loathe reCAPTCHA more than any other captcha out there. I've given up hopes of logging in on many occasions simply because of it. Looks like it's designed for not to be deciphered either by humans or computers.

And at the same time, most captcha solving services I've tried break recaptcha with no problem! And they aren't even expensive. Now, I dunno if they use fancy ML techniques or sweatshops with little African children receiving electroshocks when they get one wrong, but they do work to the point that nowadays captchas only repel legit users and very badly engineered spam bots, the good bots are already ahead of the game... I even thought of writing a browser extension that would use a captcha solving service to save legit users from the pain of captchas, but I'm too lazy to do it...

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#75

Post by superdude » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:26 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #64

superdude wrote: post #50

One of my buddies worked in the accounting department at our state government. He needed to get a bunch of documents from another agency (like hundreds every month) to process claims. Well this other agency requires everyone to go through their website and download each document one at a time. They said it was to prevent abuse. For some reason they couldn't just send a batch of them to us, even a fellow state agency.…

Isn't that one ambitious DA away from being a felony these days?

No, it was publicly accessible information from a public-facing website.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#76

Post by dEnigma » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:26 PM UTC

senthilnayagam wrote: post #65

fakeer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still loathe reCAPTCHA more than any other captcha out there. I've given up hopes of logging in on many occasions simply because of it. Looks like it's designed for not to be deciphered either by humans or computers.

I totally agree, see this recaptcha which is upside down, how are we supposed to read it http://postimg.org/image/7xgovvhij/

This is a joke, right? Everbody should be able to read upside down text. In any way, only the distorted word counts, so it doesn't matter.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#77

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:29 PM UTC

nlh wrote: post #69

dmazin wrote: post #67

Speaking of, has anyone else noticed that captchas (especially recaptcha) have gotten a lot harder over the last year?

I have indeed. Anyone have more details? At one point I recall (re)CAPTCHAs being about helping OCR slightly less-readable words from book scans. But they were actual words. They seem to be gibberish words now.

[deleted]

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#78

Post by dEnigma » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:29 PM UTC

ihsw wrote: post #22

fosap wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great idea. If i was ever to create a product for colorblinds only i'd use that.

It's not an uncommon strategy (eg: fill up a comment form with hidden but obviously named form fields) and since people won't be filling in those hidden fields then bots will have revealed themselves. This isn't by any means a complete solution however it does catch 90% of drive-by spam.

That's an interesting approach, but I guess as soon as it would become mainstream, the bots would adapt without many problems.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#79

Post by dhughes » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:31 PM UTC

senthilnayagam wrote: post #65

fakeer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still loathe reCAPTCHA more than any other captcha out there. I've given up hopes of logging in on many occasions simply because of it. Looks like it's designed for not to be deciphered either by humans or computers.

I totally agree, see this recaptcha which is upside down, how are we supposed to read it http://postimg.org/image/7xgovvhij/

I saw a mirror image d once.

Re: Worst CAPTCHA Ever

#80

Post by malandrew » Sat, Mar 30, 2013, 7:32 PM UTC

dmazin wrote: post #67

Speaking of, has anyone else noticed that captchas (especially recaptcha) have gotten a lot harder over the last year?

I've noticed that they occasionally have characters that are available in unicode, but are not part of the characters that are available on a 105-key keyboard with or without the shift key.

THe most common one I see is the integral symbol that used to be used as an S. On very rare occasions I see characters like: