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Evolution of the 'Captcha'
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?"
In my mind, anything that can be put out by an automated system for purposes of determine whether the communications on the other end is from an automated system can, with enough ingenuity, be answered by an automated system. IOW, all 'captchas' and similar methods are ultimately defeatable. It's an arms race, just like DRM: clever people will always figure out how to defeat what protections you put in place no matter how clever your protections are.
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What word did you have to type to prove you weren't a bot? A good sample might give us an insight into which words are used: why? I had to type 'interest' - which seems to have no real distinguishing feature.
Are they chosen for any good reason, or are they completely arbitrary? Are there letters that bots have trouble with? Fonts? Who knows?
The only thing that's sure is that every protection will eventually be broken.
What's more, maybe if you can't solve a simple word puzzle, I don't want you registering at my site...
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
OK, I am a bit shrotsighted, but still, some of the captcha are so garbled with bright color random pixel/forms while the font color of what was to be read was light gray/pink/blue on white background (and naturally distorted) that frankly I swore loudly while trying for the 5th time to enter the correct random combo of lower case, upper case and digits.
I am not sure if a picture is better, but it is defintively a step forward if I don't have to spend 5 time retrying.
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I always get annoyed by captchas.. its like a forced human intelligence test.
We know that humans are more intelligent than scripts, so I always thought it should be easier to test the lack of intelligence in scripts than proving intelligence in humans.
For example just use a simple honeypot in a html form. Put a dummy input field in a form. You can hide the field with CSS/noscript tag or just mark it: "This field should be left intentionally blank" or something of that nature to make it more human friendly.
Seeing that all form fields are generally blank, the spambot/script will fill your dummy field. On server side check if the field has data, ignore the submission. It would be a VERY intelligent script that could COMPREHEND the purpose of any particular html input field.
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+5 Funny in 7min 15sec AND frost pist! /.
Come to think of it - its great to see fp without some sort of script bollocks - welcome back to
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One day, everybody will have a digital ID. You know, the kind used to digitally sign e-mail. If you had to digitally sign your request to create an account with a certificate issued from a trusted CA, then using a bot creates the potential of the user having his digital certificate revoked.
I read some time ago about a guy who wanted to spam a large ISP (Can't recall the company), so he created a porn site, botted the ISP and scraped the capchas, putting them on his porn site where a good old human was waiting to do the work for him. Seems porn can power anything.
I don't think many people know that its a canary with a machine gun. And i'm not sure i want that many people knocked off the internet in one swell foop
If there are four possible answers even a script will be right 1 in four time... So if they make a registration attempt every second they will still get 900 successful registions an hour.
God Be Gone
No wonder the OCR software can't read them... I had to reload about 4 times before I could identify both words, and even then, I can't help wondering why they added the extra strike-through to make it even harder.
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
Good idea, bad math.
And 3^-3 is (drum roll).... 1/27
Implement a standard CAPTCHA system, with fairly easy to read characters.
Then, for the challenge section, randomly select a prompt from the following (as an image, not plain text):
"Enter only the last letter of the captcha"
"Enter all the numbers included in the captcha"
"Enter all the letters included in the captcha"
"Enter the character from the captcha in reverse order"
"Enter all the vowels from the captcha"
"Enter all the consonants from the captcha"
"Enter the letter of the alphabet that follows the second letter shown in the captcha"
"Enter all the blue characters"
It seems to me that this would make the already-used captchas much harder to crack, as the bots would have to be able to recognize the captcha, locate the prompt graphic (which could be randomly inserted, along with "dummy" images), understand what the prompt is saying, and then apply its instructions to the captcha. Most humans should be able to do this (except maybe the consonant one, for people who never learned what a consonant is), but most computerized means that could do this would be more lucrative sold as commercial software than used to enter captchas on websites.
Your captcha can be defeated by a simple parser + google. Just see if "food+pink" has more hit than "food+hamburger".
:)
Also you would need a small army of people to write the question in the first place (actually you could try to generate category/item couples from a statistical analysis of wikipedia).
Now that I think of it... it's just too easy to beat your captcha randomly (1/4 chances is not that bad for a script).
On a funny note... captcha similar in spirit to the one you propose is http://www.hotcaptcha.com/ based on hotornot. At least it's worth a laugh