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Gmail CAPTCHA Cracked
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Websense is reporting that Gmail's CAPTCHA has been broken, and that bots are beginning to sign up with a one in five success rate. More interestingly, they have a lot of technical details about how the botnet members coordinate with two different computers during the process. They believe that the second host is either trying to learn to crack the CAPTCHA or that it's a quality check of some sort. Curiously, the bots pretend to read the help information while breaking the CAPTCHA, probably to prevent Google from giving them a timeout message."
Instead, Google should use something akin MENSA tests. This would deter the bots and make the customers feel really good about themselves. And this feeling, my friend, can't be bought cheaply.
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
It would be too obvious if they were reading the ToS.
The bots pass the MENSA test.
Cue overlords posts in 3...2...1...
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm tired of my imaginary friends running off and leaving me alone... I want one with configuration options.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"Websense is reporting that Gmail's CAPTCHA has been broken, and that bots are beginning to sign up with a one in five success rate.
That's better than I can do reading those damn things!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I just checked Google News and there's nothing there about it.
Do I understand correctly that you are holding yourself out as a web usability expert, and in the same post you offer a URL that is not a link?
Wow.
-Peter
It's actually being cracked by a million monkeys clattering away at a million typewriters. Pretty hard to defeat that.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
"Let's say I have a CAPTCHA farm where I have 500 guys willing to sit all day typing in letters. I want you to come up with a system design for a service architecture using a REST-based interface where the input is an image file and I can charge $1 buck a pop by accepting POST requests from scumbags all over the Internet and routing the images to the 500 crappy web browsers I have set up in tents for these people." Then you throw the whiteboard marker over to them and watch them madly scribble boxes and clouds and stick figures.
If they do well with that question then you come at them with the followup: "OK, now say I want to lay off these 500 workers and have my service farm its work off to a distributed network of your grandmothers' compromised PCs. How would you design the messaging architecture and what sort of learning algorithm would you use?" Then maybe needle at them a bit about how the billing system works.
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To prevent capture they dressed as robots, and were stopped at the city gates by two gate robots who administered a PuppyAuth-based anti-Turing test:
John
It's kinda like a honey pot, only with tasty, tasty honeys.
John
It's sad that a bunch of anime nerds can beat out a full team of PhD holding Google Employees.
;-)
No, it's sad that a bunch of anime nerds think their captcha system guards a forum that any spammers would find worth caring about.
-- Alastair
I live in Australia you insensitive clod!
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Million monkeys with mod points? Waiddaminute!