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Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

andrewmunsell.com

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Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#81

Post by kstenerud »

tempestn wrote: post #65
pbreit wrote: post #54

I can't believe we have not figured out something better than captchas by 2014. I would imagine Google could figure at least how to bake something into Chrome which many would eventually follow. It's asinine that all legit customers have to go through such a silly, completely unrelated hoop.

Google has figured out something "better". Basically they use all the data they collect on you to determine whether you're likely to be a bot or not. If not, you most likely won't even see a captcha. (And if so, you'll get a difficult one.)

It must think I'm a bot, then. I get captchas all the time, and they've been definitely getting harder and harder to solve over time. I suspect their algorithm pushes me further and further into the bot camp the more captchas I fail (I have about a 10-20% success rate now, and it's dropping). At this point, I only stick around for the 5-6 tries it takes if I REALLY want to use whatever service it's guarding. Often, I'll just leave the moment a captcha appears because I don't want to be bothered. If it's a contact form, I'll use google to find a direct email address or phone number instead (Yes, I've had to resort to that approach many times).

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#82

Post by Igglyboo »

smackfu wrote: post #74

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/

Same here, maybe they trust people who are using their services more and want them to OCR some google street view stuff.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#83

Post by VLM »

Alupis wrote: post #58
sp332 wrote: post #3

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…

"Captcha's are not going anywhere anytime soon."

Its turning in to the new version of "3rd world outsourced phone support" A strong indicator the user simply doesn't care about the customer experience.

For some industries / companies, this is perfectly OK and BAU. For others it can be a company-killer.

I see a captcha and I know the company doesn't like me, doesn't like what I'm doing, and doesn't care if I know how they feel about me. And for some situations that's perfectly OK. Certainly not all.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#84

Post by adestefan »

scandinavian wrote: post #75
adestefan wrote: post #67

I've recently seen a bunch of them with just one number. Just a single 7 or 4 on a white background and nothing else. Kind of scratch my head at those ones.

Do you mean the house numbers/street signs? Like these: http://i.imgur.com/yD1FrlH.jpg If it's those, I guess google uses recaptcha to get data for streetview.

I've seen that, but I've also seen plain black numbers on white that look like they're right out of MS Word. Got me.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#85

Post by Rylinks »

ademarre wrote: post #77
Nyubis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ This is the way to go. Don't waste any energy on the "unknown" word, just fill out the one that has been smeared out and fill in bogus for the rest. If you want to post on 4chan and don't have a Pass, you need to solve a captcha for every single post. It becomes easier with practice, I fail maybe 1 in 10 captchas. And the more captchas you solve correctly, the easier the captchas for your IP get.

If enough people colluded to use the same unknown word, say "foobar", then couldn't they train recaptcha to believe that is the true value of the word? If I understand recaptcha correctly, and assuming they don't detect collusion well, then eventually the known word pool would get poisoned with a surplus of foobars.

An engineer said they have defenses against this

>Checking for offensive words is only one of the filters we have. Even without that filter, it’s essentially impossible to get recaptcha to return a false result.

http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/27/moot-wins-time-inc-lose...

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#86

Post by tempestn »

arrrg wrote: post #76
tempestn wrote: post #70

Is it not obvious in the first case that "secretary" is the unknown word? Clearly ocr wasn't able to read it due to the fading. Likewise, the cut off words spanning two lines in the later versions are obviously the unknown words. The author states right at the beginning that he understands there is a control and an unknown word; he then proceeds to "hope" that the obvious unknown word is the control in the first case…

What a concise description of why captchas as they exist today are just awful and we have to come up with a better solution! There you are, talking on and on and on about some tiny unimportant but extremely specific implementation detail no one should ever have to care about. People shouldn’t have to read a manual about the inner workings of this captcha implementation (and have some experience with what types of tex…

Fair enough. I didn't mean to suggest that these captchas are in any way good. Only that the author does appear to have technical knowledge of how they work - otherwise they wouldn't use terms like "control word", so it seems that the difficulty experienced was likely contrived for the purpose of writing the blog post.

For me at least, the point would have come across better if that (seemingly) false ignorance were dropped. (Either that, or frame it in terms of, "Here's what an average user sees when they try to log in," or something along those lines.)

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#87

Post by mike-cardwell »

pbreit wrote: post #54

I can't believe we have not figured out something better than captchas by 2014. I would imagine Google could figure at least how to bake something into Chrome which many would eventually follow. It's asinine that all legit customers have to go through such a silly, completely unrelated hoop.

Are you suggesting somehow automating the process of proving you are a human?

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#88

Post by adestefan »

smackfu wrote: post #74

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/

I've also seen a lot of house numbers in Firefox.

Re: Captchas are Becoming Ridiculous

#90

Post by aluhut »

wmf wrote: post #20
aluhut wrote: post #16

I realised an intersting thing there. I also get those complex captaches using firefox. But I also have an Opera12.17 running. With this one my captchas for the same page are ridiculousy easy. Sometimes it's just an house number. One item. I never had one even close to what I get on FF.

I think it depends on a cookie. Once you correctly solve a dozen or so hard captchas they'll give you easy ones from then on.

That would be the logical thing to do. Unfortunately I rarely use Opera. I can't remember solving more then 5 captchas with it. I use FF most of the time with hunderts of solved captchas there. (FF Private Mode did not help either)
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