Slashdot Mirror
Campaign To Kill CAPTCHA Kicks Off
Bismillah writes "CAPTCHA may be popular with webmasters and others running different sites, but it's a source of annoyance to blind and partially sighted people — and dyslexic people and older ones — who often end up being locked out of important websites as they can't read wonky, obfuscated letters any more than spambots can. A campaign in Australia has started to rid sites of CAPTCHA to improve accessibility for everyone."
"W3C has suggested other techniques such as logic puzzles, limited-use accounts and non-interactive checks to prevent abuse such as fraudulent account creation and spamming."
Its going to be far harder to make an AI that can create a decent logic puzzle as well as make it accessible and hard for computers to solve than it it to make an image and warp it a bit. I think any such puzzle will probably be worse than the audio captcha button.
Yes it is stupid. I understand that spam is a problem, but if you run a website, it's *YOUR* problem. CAPTCHAs make it *MY* problem and that's just stupid.
If taking a couple seconds to answer a CAPTCHA is too much effort, I probably don't really care what you have to say in the comment section.
I understand that spam is a problem, but if you run a website, it's *YOUR* problem. CAPTCHAs make it *MY* problem and that's just stupid.
If the website you use is overrun by spam to the point of being unusable, then it's your problem as well.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
As someone that runs a website, without CAPTCHAs I'd be fucked.
There are bots that can automatically register on a site, then check the email account for the activation link, in order to start spamming, so that's not a solution.
The newer 'flash games' e.g. 'out of 5 objects, put the drinks in the cooler' are an interesting solution, but that probably still won't work for people with accessibility issues.
Moderation can work on sites like slashdot, but on lower traffic sites not so much, and the signal to noise ratio will be awful.
If Australia pass this and actually clamp down on 'offenders' it will do more harm than good as the only recourse webmasters will have is to not allow people to register/interact with the site as the cost of cleaning up spam will be too high.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
there isnt a single thing that everyone will like or approve of.
let's say you change it do you have to answer a simple addition math problem. what you get is someone crying, "i have to answer 5+8?! but i dunno maths you insensitive clod!"
you know that person really exists.
Yes they do. The solution is that they learn simple math so they're a fully functioning member of society. I suggest an intensive period of schooling - say 11-13 years. Oh wait...
Who are you going to cater for next? The guy that can't read the damn form. "But I'm illiterate you insensitive clod"? It's not a question of eliminating all objections, just ones that actually stump your audience. Capture is the worst of the worst. You can have a PhD. and get it wrong a substantial portion of the time.
Mission Accomplished.
If taking a couple seconds to answer a CAPTCHA is too much effort, I probably don't really care what you have to say in the comment section.
Or a couple of minutes considering most capchas are illegible.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Add some fields which start out as regular text fields but then hide them with Javascript. You can give them labels or default values like "Don't change this" in case someone doesn't have Javascript enabled. Give the real fields in your form random names. For the hidden fields, give them names like "subject" or "comments" or "url" (don't use common names for personal info like "email", "fname" etc that the browser might automatically fill out). When they submit the form, check for values in those hidden fields (either any value at all, or a value different than the default). If they are filled out, reject the form. Hiding the fields with Javascript will work for virtually everyone and it doesn't require real people to do anything extra. This will fail against bots that bother to actually render the page or bots that specifically target your site (which can be remedied if you randomize all field names and store the random names in the session to match them up when the form gets submitted), but those are far less common than bots that just get the HTML and parse it to look for form actions and field names.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I'd be curious about what "technical measures" you are talking about. There are some "universal IDs" that help to filter out some of the spam, but it still can slip through in a way that Captchas help prevent. There is also something philosophically wrong with trusting in some huge 3rd party vendor like Facebook, Microsoft, or Google to be processing authentication on your website, not to mention concerns about the NSA tracking everybody who is logging into your website as well.
Again, I'd be curious about what technical measures you are talking about.
If taking a couple seconds to answer a CAPTCHA is too much effort, I probably don't really care what you have to say in the comment section.
It's not longer just a couple of seconds when one has to hit the reload button a dozen or so times before they get a CAPTCHA that's remotely readable.
And half the sites bit-bucket at least some of the data you've entered just as further punishment. So you have to type that in again.
Show me the captcha before I enter any data please. That alone would confuse half the bots out there. (For a while).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
People seem to forget that the term "CAPTCHA" (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) applies to a much broader set of tests than just those obfuscated text-based things that most of us loathe. Banning CAPTCHAs is a silly notion that would adversely affect every site currently using them, as they become swarmed by spammers. Instead of banning them, they should be asking people to use sane, simple CAPTCHAs.
For instance, on a forum I run for a group in a game, I use a form of CAPTCHA that has people drag words into categories. As an example, if our group name was "Guild X of Y", I might make the categories "Words in our group's name" and "Words not in our group's name", then ask them to categorize the words "Guild", "Elephants", "X", "Tree", "Honor", "Plus", and "Ocean". I have about two dozen sets of categories and words configured, and so far it's had a 100% success rate at stopping spammers from registering. It's also made it easier for people to register, since the number of e-mails and other off-forum messages I've received complaining about the difficulty of the CAPTCHA has dropped to 0 while registrations have actually picked up.
Such a system would obviously not work for Google or someone that large, since a spammer would just train the bot to know all of the answers, but for smaller sites, there are plenty of solutions that work just fine, and I'm sure we can find more systems that are simple for a human but complicated for a computer. No need to make something that's so complicated for a human to solve.
Alternatively, go with xkcd's approach to solving the problem of spam.
Because we all know computers are terrible at doing arithmetic and solving simple equations
But they are. It's out of context, and it's much harder to make programs that are flexible like that. They're bringing a regular expression to an arithmetic party.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Bad guys run some pretty high traffic sites that oddly enough, require captchas. Their client bots forward the real site captcha to the bad-guy site, which delivers it to a human who wants access to the bad-guy site and answers it - which answer is passed back to the bot and submitted to the legitimate site in real time. They also compromise legitimate captcha-secured sites for the same method. It's the Mechanical Turk method of defeating CAPTCHA. Machine learning of text recognition is not required.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Show me the captcha before I enter any data please.
Yes! God yes! I've walked away from a few sites that expected me to re-enter a whack of data because the CAPTCHA borfed. Including some where I had intended to spend money.
It always seemed stunningly obvious that you carry over the form contents in situations like this.
Three Squirrels
You cannot stop a social problem with a technological measure.
Maybe you can't stop it but you can often reduce it to more manageable levels.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register