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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?"
As a Christian fundamentalist, I cannot in good conscience believe that catchpas have evolved, yet at the same time since I can never figure out what to type to make them work, I cannot believe any intelligence was involved in their design.
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The other day I saw a system that posed the question:
'Germany is a country in Africa?'
Your duty to prove you were human was to change it to the proper continent and the question mark to a period. Seems pretty fool proof, especially if you combine it with things like "and make 'country' all capitals."
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.
Ask the user to perform a task that only a computer is likely to succeed at, like factorizing a 6-digit number. If the user gives the right answer, and this is the cunning part: Then it's not a human!
MAN, I feel clever some times.
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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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.
Shamus Young (the creator of the "DM of the Rings") recently introduced a captcha on his site to deal with comment spam. In his post about using a captcha on his site, he notes that:
Emphasis mine. He's running a fairly popular site, and using a captcha based off of a single, unchanging, three-character phrase. Just the presence of the captcha was enough to effectively eliminate his spam problem. The indication seems to be that just the presence of a captcha is enough to keep spam off of even a moderately popular site.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
"Unintelligent Design"?
Is that like "Despite the fact that God created the Universe, people keep getting stupider"?
Or is it some sly jab at Windows?
Or maybe it's a scientific theory derived from studying governments!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
So rather than put the burden of proof on humans to prove they're not a machine, put the burden of proof on the machines to prove they're a human?
Take your average HTML form:
Rather than have 1 textbox for a field value, have 10. UserName1, UserName2, UserName3, etc.
Use javascript to randomly assign one of them as visible. The rest are hidden from the user.
On the server, watch to see which textbox is filled. Presumably, with decent enough javascript skills, and stupid enough bots, your humans will fill out what they see, which is the correct combination. The bots won't.
Granted, this method can be defeated if the bot checks for field level visibility after the page finishes loading, but even then, with decent enough javascript, you can continue to provide unobtrusive checks to ensure that your user is real -- e.g., unless the bot is running a macro through a web browser itself, your onblur events probably won't be tripped. And so on.
This puts a burden on the developers to come up with clever ways of defeating the bots, but in reality, that's where the battle is -- html application devs. vs spambot devs. Users shouldn't have to be dragged into the middle.