Slashdot Mirror
Fallout From the Fall of CAPTCHAs
An anonymous reader recommends Computerworld's look at the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs, and at some of the ways bad guys are leveraging broken CAPTCHAs to ply their evil trade. "CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work. By January 2008, Yahoo Mail's CAPTCHA had been cracked. Gmail was ripped open soon thereafter. Hotmail's top got popped in April. And then things got bad. There are now programs available online (no, we will not tell you where) that automate CAPTCHA attacks. You don't need to have any cracking skills. All you need is a desire to spread spam, make anonymous online attacks against your enemies, propagate malware or, in general, be an online jerk. And it's not just free e-mail sites that can be made to suffer..."
I'm wrong
Fixed.
then you write a little program that will show nude pictures, if users identify pictures for you. do not underestimate the length some people will go to for seing mostly skin.
preview button, my computer does't have any preview button
No.
You see there is an ongoing war against the postmasters by the webmasters. I am a postmaster, and I get roughly 300ish spam mails per site.
And the webmasters sit and chuckle. Bastards, they could make it stop!
But they don't... animals...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I can't wait until someone's daughter tries to make an account on Barbie's Horse Talk website and is presented with the following CAPTCHA:
Prove that a 3-manifold space has the additional property that each loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point then it is just a three-dimensional sphere.
I read the internet for the articles.
The first thing to actually pass the Turing test will probably be a spam-bot. Isn't that disgusting?
Nyet, but haf you conzidered ze amazing affordability uff zer timezhare at Lake Baikal? Operatorz iz schtanding by!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
The irony about this is that a CAPTCHA is a Turing test, a form of authentication designed to prove that a human is making the request. Given that some CAPTCHAs are rapidly becoming too hard for people to read, the outcomes of the tests are reversed - humans cannot win the test, only computers.
I have CAPTCHAs on my blog, but only deny posters who actually fill them in. Goes a long way to deterring spammers.
M
You just eliminated one third of the US population from accessing your site.. Sad, isn't it.
Now if you had said,
What color of hair does the 3rd girl on the right have,
A: green
B: brown
c: Blond
D: I drive a ferrari, I don't care about hair color!
you would only eliminate about one eighth
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
it is no wonder that the "under 25" crowd now says "myspace me" or "facebook me" and no longer use email. why would they?
Whatever happened to giving someone your phone number and actually talking to them. I asked a girl for her number the other night and she gave me her myspace address. Thanks, but no thanks. At least make the effort and give me a fake phone number if you don't ever really want to talk to me again.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Obviously the solution is to make porn free so that this is no longer an incentive. Obviously also this means that the government should subsidize it.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
I've toyed with the idea of making users write a 500 word essay on a random topic. I would then send this to my high school English teacher, and if it got maybe a B or above I would consider it legit.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
Obligitory XKCD reference: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/a_new_captcha_approach.png
down
saturday
ten
e
two
the
Now your captcha systems has been completely broken by my bots.
Buy some Viagra! she screamed, as the thorny wisps of french looked upon dog. Finally, she embarked, with implacable wit.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Howcome /. is so spam free?
You must be new here.
and blind.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I can't wait until someone's daughter tries to make an account on Barbie's Horse Talk website and is presented with the following CAPTCHA:
Prove that a 3-manifold space has the additional property that each loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point then it is just a three-dimensional sphere.
So thats why Grigori Perelman decided to solve that CAPTCHA.
Image recognition fails on two counts - perception and natural language. One man's ginger is another's man's strawberry blonde, and if you've ever looked women's hair dye you'll know that they have about 50 billion words for "brown".
Now, now gents... No more of this alt.cascade shit -- USENET is dead, remember?
Method of processing duck feet
what is the third word of this sentence?
No, its the first.
And I can't wait until someone's daughter answers back:
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Is logic puzzles. "You are in a room with three guards, one of these guards always lies, one of them always tells the truth, and one of them lets you register this email address. Who do you ask?" Let's see a computer solve that!
Your "random but light noise" idea intrigues me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. Have you also considered using alphanumeric symbols instead of pictures of cats and dogs?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato