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Evolution of the 'Captcha'

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the why-can't-i-even-read-them-half-the-time dept.

FireballX301 writes "The New York Times is running an article about the small word puzzles various sites use in order to defeat automated script registration while still letting humans through. It seems many people can't actually solve them anymore, so new alternatives (image recognition) are being created. This, of course, seems breakable as well — is there a feasible alternative to the captcha, or are we stuck jumping through more and more hoops to register at places?"

2 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Stop testing the Humans, test the Robots by Kijori · · Score: 4, Informative

    The problem is that the solutions are being coded for individual sites not one size fits all. A custom solution would have no problem with that system at all.

  2. Re:Stop testing the Humans, test the Robots by CodeBuster · · Score: 3, Informative

    It would be a VERY intelligent script that could COMPREHEND the purpose of any particular html input field.

    Not really, considering that most of these scripts are targeted at large sites (yahoo, hotmail, etc) OR common site frameworks (PhpNuke, Drupal, Blogger, etc) where common hidden field input patterns would very quickly be tested and coded around by the script writers. The whole point of CAPTCHA in the first place was that it presented a random and dynamic test which was easy enough for users to solve (at least in theory) while hard enough to foil simple analysis by script. This might work on a small custom website where it is not worth the trouble of the script writers to code a version specifically for the hidden input pattern of your site, but this hidden field stuff was tried and failed on big sites even before CAPTCHA was in common use.