Web Users Angered by Anti-Spam 'Captcha'

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Captchas -- the jumbles of letters that users must type to gain access to some websites -- are a growing irritation, the Wall Street Journal reports. But programmers hope to make new variations that are both easier to decipher and harder to crack. From the article: 'Some captchas have been solved with more than 90% accuracy by scientists specializing in computer vision research at the University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere. Hobbyists also regularly write code to solve captchas on commercial sites with a high degree of accuracy. ... Henry Baird, a professor of computer science at Lehigh University who studies PC users' responses to the codes, has been working with colleagues to develop new generations of captchas that are designed to be easier on humans but baffling for computers.'"

Comments

Image Key Sets & Dynamic Captchas

[eldavojohn]

I had heard once of a very cunning strategy around captchas. I'm not sure if this is true but there is a story of a p0rn site making large sums of cash by selling key sets to the images. Certain sites would not dynamically generate images but instead rely on sets of images with protected keys as a captcha.

In order to use the p0rn site he ran, you had to either pay money or spend time identifying captchas. He would then store them in a database and match it up with a checksum of the image. When he had completed a site's captcha key set, he would sell these lookup tables to anyone with money.

All they then had to do was write their program to do a checksum of the image (or the image itself if he had stored it) and then plug the word from the database into the page for verification.

With the introduction of splashers that spatter the statically stored images with lines or dots, the image is stored and a something like an edit distance is applied to it to find the closest match. Once that is accomplished, it references the keyword out of the database. You turn up the splasher and you risk the user not being able to figure out the word.

It seems that evil always finds a way. This is why captchas should always be dynamically generated on the fly from a very large dictionary! Check out Securimage for PHP.

News for Nerds?

[Silver Sloth]

There's not much here, it's written in the WSJ which means it's in language that my mum would understand, and has precious little in the way of hard facts. For those who can't be bothered to RTFA,

1. There are things called 'Captchas'
2. People don't like them
3. Computers are getting better at cracking them
4. Some boffins are trying to make new ones which people like and computers don't

Really, that's all there is.

Re:What?

[deesine]

What gets me in the inconsistent use of case sensitivity. About 20-30% fail for me because of this.