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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?"
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.
my anonymous 2c
Indeed: these things are getting to be an appalling nuisance. If I see a site that use them I increasingly just say 'fuck it' and leave; particularly the sites that keep asking for another one every few pages.
Meanwhile, having an automated system feed them to Chinese people on $0.50 an hour can't be too hard, and they'll have at least as good a chance of getting the correct result as I do.
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