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.'"

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[LiquidCoooled]

HOT GRITS

I prefer kitten auth.

Different method entirely

[Volante3192]

Just throwing this out, but maybe there should be a very basic question asked instead? Since these already presume literacy, maybe something like:

Which of these is a number: A 2 R P?

Seems that regardless of what they come up with there's going to be some part of the population that won't figure it out anyway, and if the whole point is to confuse auto-registerers, then I'd think it'd be harder for those to account for every possible question and answer set.

(Yea, it's in TFA, but mentioned like an aside...)

Re:Different method entirely

[93 Escort Wagon]

"Which of these is a number: A 2 R P?"

Or, even better, put it to music - and add a time limit!

"One of these things is not like the others,
one of these things just doesn't belong.
Can you tell me which thing is not like the others,
before I finish this song?"

Re:captchas discriminate against the blind

[Rob_Warwick]

Which is why you should /always/ use proper alt tags!

Re:90% accuracy? Not bad.

[aztec rain god]

Not sure if cryptic is the right word

Re:The human factor

[CohibaVancouver]

If I wanted to be really sadistic, I could instead present site readers with a sentence, in which they have to fill in either "their," "there," or "they're."

Your a looser for even sugesting such a thing!

Re:News for Nerds?

[Red Flayer]

And yet, the discussion of the article will prove to be much more illuminating than the article.

What's wrong with an article being a spark for more in-depth discussion? How else are things rarely discussed in the media and never in depth (like most tech topics) going to be discussed on slashdot?

Sure, I know this post (and the parent) are off-topic, but it bugs me when people think that the purpose of slashdot is just to accumulate articles... that's what RSS feeds are for.

The discussion is what keeps me coming back, and typically, no matter how moronic the article is, there are several posts that give the kind of information that I wish was included in the article (but isn't). At the very least, people provide links to more comprehensive information and/or discussion of the issues concerned.

Re:Image Key Sets & Dynamic Captchas

[odyaws]

In order to use the p0rn site he ran, you had to either pay money or spend time identifying captchas.

I saw a talk recently by Luis von Ahn, one of the inventors of the captchas. There were two interesting ways he said people were getting around captchas. One was a real-time approach similar to what you describe. Rather than storing a big database of these things, the bot that was signing up for email addresses or whatever would, upon encountering the captcha, sent that image off to someone browing the porn site (posing as a legitimate captcha - "We need to verify you're a person and not some bot stealing our porn for another site"). In order to continue browsing, the user would have to solve the captcha. Naturally they tend to do this very quickly and accurately :)

The second approach was simply to set up captcha solving sweatshops somewhere in Asia with cheap labor, with people paid a few cents an hour to sit and solve captchas all day. This brought the cost of a new email address up to something like 1/3 cent, which for many spammers is still a viable price. The cost does limit this approach, though, so the captcha still helps.

The interesting thing about both of these strategies is that they use humans to solve a problem that is difficult for computers, which is von Ahn's research area - he's also one of those behind The ESP Game (caution - this can be shockingly addictive). There's essentially nothing that can be done to defeat either approach without also making a system a huge pain in the ass for legitimate users. From this point of view, spending time trying to come up with more advanced captchas is kind of pointless.