Now Even Photo CAPTCHAs Have Been Cracked

MoonUnit writes "Technology Review has an interesting article about the way CAPTCHAS are fueling AI research. Following recent news about various textual CAPTCHAs being cracked, the article notes that a researcher at Palo Alto Research Center has now found a way crack photo-based CAPTCHAs too. Most approaches are based on statistical learning, however, so Luis von Ahn (one of the inventors of the CAPTCHA) says it is usually possible to make a CAPTCHA more difficult to break by making a few simple changes."

Comments

damn it

[ThorGod]

They're already hard to read. Why do I feel that soon I wont be able to read ANY of them!?

Re:damn it

[D'Sphitz]

Try being colorblind sometime. I've had several that I had to take a screenshot of, paste into photoshop and play with the contrast until i could read it. And even the ones without problem colors like red and green usually take several tries.

Re:Not a security feature

[Abstrackt]

CAPTCHA is not a security feature. It's a way to help avoid robots pretending to be humans. Anyone using it as a security feature is just giving more reasons for people to find ways to break them. All in all, it's time to get rid of CAPTCHA and move on to some more logical system that would be more difficult, such as a system where users are asked to answer a simple question that contains the answer, such as: If you were born in 1973 and JFK was shot in 1961, were you alive when he was shot? How many liters of water fit into a five-liter bottle?

It sounds like a great idea, but I've met plenty of people who wouldn't be able to answer either of your questions. To steal a random quote from the internet:

"Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open -- you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it's actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can't get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."