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This Machine Kills Captchas (vice.com)

Posted by msmash on from the catch-me-if-you-can dept.

New submitter dmoberhaus writes: It is with a heavy heart that I must tell you that an artificial intelligence has finally cracked a widely used tool that was literally made to differentiate humans from robots: the CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs are the annoying puzzles that might ask you to rewrite a piece of distorted text or click on all the automobiles in a photograph to log on to sites like PayPal. According to research published today in Science, a new type of AI was able to solve certain types of CAPTCHA with up to 66.6 percent accuracy. To put this in perspective, humans can solve the same type of CAPTCHA with about 87 percent accuracy due to multiple interpretations of some examples and a CAPTCHA is considered broken if a bot can pass it 1 percent of the time.

1 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. A long time by SumDog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Captchas have been broken for a long time, for both machines and humans. That's why Google is constantly working and changing their reCaptcah implementation. My thesis was on Captcha, and even back then, several companies had white papers on breaking various forms of Captcha. It's a cat and mouse game and it will never really end.

    http://penguindreams.org/thesis/