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."

Comments

Re:This is a very hard problem

[Zmobie]

I think you're missing the idea of what type of logic puzzles they mean. Simple things like image processing (someone in the comments below brought the example up of using company logos and you type the name, pizza toppings matched to the correct pizza) or natural language processing could be used to WRECK a bot. Imagine this, I pose the question as a human verification, "What color was George Washington's favorite white horse?" A human (with half a brain) easily sees how stupid simple it is to find the answer which is white, but a bot would have hell with that type of question because it involves language processing to determine the appropriate response. That is a pretty simplified example, but you can find these all over the place and they are fairly easy to create.

Some of these could be defeated easily with something like a call to Wolfram Alpha, but you could quite easily find and create things that are not going to be simple to automate the logic processing, but would be completely trivial for a human to process, even stupid ones. Language and image processing are RIDICULOUSLY difficult to automate efficiently which would defeat the purpose of the bots, while making things a lot easier on the people that do have to deal with this sort of thing. I personally hate the current version of CAPTCHAS (hell, I can't read some of the more difficult ones and I write some of the software that USES them), but I do recognize the need for them. No reason they can't be improved upon though.

Re:This is a very hard problem

[Qzukk]

Wolphram Alpha had no idea about the color of Washington's favorite white horse (it looked up the distance between some town named George, WA and White Horse,NJ), but if you put it into google, you discover that Washington had no white horses, the closest being a gray named Blueskin.

Re:stupid

[Thry]

I was about to tell you to take advantage of the audio alternative offered by many services, then I went and tried a reCAPTCHA audio test to make sure I knew what I was talking about.

I apologise for even considering telling you to use those.

Re:stupid

[icebike]

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.

This!

More and more, captchas take two or three attempts.
(Disclaimer: IMHO, I'm not senile, dyslexic, a horrible typist. blind. Your opinion may vary).

I suspect some sites are intentionally forcing a fail once or twice, at least occasionally, especially when you enter the word
in a timely interval. Bots probably give up after two failures, and they probably answer quickly.

So implementers make it more and more restrictive and throw in bogus failures.