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112 Comments
- Samsong, on 10/11/2007, -4/+82.... Please do.
- dominasian, on 10/11/2007, -12/+50great idea...but please don't do erotic novels
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -13/+46http://athena.divshare.com/thumbs/2007/05/24/728961/728961-a29_display.jpg
This is rare. - PATSCRU, on 10/11/2007, -11/+41a new way to fight spam?
ronpaul's gonna be PISSED. - arcooke, on 10/11/2007, -8/+35Great idea, but it still hasn't solved the biggest problem: readability. That's my biggest complaint about these word verification systems is the font and image manipulation they use distorts the image so bad it's sometimes impossible to tell what it says. Especially with this example, there's a line through the letters. The first time I tried it, I think the word was "core" but I wasn't sure. The line made the whole word look like "eere".
- Spazkake, on 10/11/2007, -3/+22I like that idea where it says "which of these is a cat?" better.
- anthrt, on 10/11/2007, -1/+20Direct link: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
@strikezero
Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct. - egbert, on 10/11/2007, -8/+20"Great idea, but it still hasn't solved the biggest problem: readability."
And for people that are visually impared CAPTCHA are a huge problem. - macarpen, on 10/11/2007, -2/+13Seriously...RTFA. There are two words, one is known and is used like a typical CAPTCHA, the other is unknown and by answering the CAPTCHA you are helping to make it known. Whats more, to increase the probability that the unknown word has been correctly translated it uses a voting system. Pretty clever.
- arcooke, on 10/11/2007, -1/+12@coollettuce
RTFA :P
It says how it works. It gives you one word they know IS correct, and one word the OCR software couldn't interpret. They display them to the user in a random order, and the user only has to get ONE of them correct in order to validate. The system automatically assumes if they got one word right, the other word is probably right as well. I was wondering the same thing at first. Their methods aren't 100% accurate, but they're a hell of a lot better than what OCR software can do. - kufu91, on 10/11/2007, -1/+12one word is known, the other isn't
- Haplo, on 10/11/2007, -1/+10not if you put nine pictures in a 3 x 3 grid and only 3 are cats (and assuming you have enough cat pictures)
- gmprunner, on 10/11/2007, -1/+10Didn't understand this at first, but the demo helped and it's really a clever idea.
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9"Great idea, but why not show the second word undistorted, if OCR has failed for that word? At the moment it just makes reading more difficult."
I asked the reCAPTCHA people, and they said it's because it would reveal which word was known, and which was unknown. I didn't realize that they were mixing them up, and not just putting the known word first, and the unknown word second. - ChayD, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9Read the article and all shall become clear (or fuzzy and wavy)
- cyroxos, on 10/11/2007, -3/+10There is a slight fundamental problem though. One of my trial captchas was "1938 explore." I thought that 'explore' would be the 'known' word, and "1938" would be the book word. So i typed in "1999 explore" and it says my answer is correct. Thus, now, in this book it is deciphering, there is a date that is horribly wrong. I suppose they could run those book-words twice through the captcha system, to make sure that it matches what someone else puts down as well, otherwise you would have a bunch of incorrect words in your book.
flashman:
then punk kids would purposely decipher the words wrong and screw up the system. - HalFTW, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8It's an acronym:
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7This doesn't stop spammers, sorry. They'll just hot-link your reCaptcha on a pr0n site, and get other people to do the work for them.
- HalFTW, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5@cyroxos (#6859136)
"The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct." - dbxz, on 10/11/2007, -4/+9"I botch CAPTCHAs 50% of the time"
they say your brain fills in the details when u cant see the entire image. considering you say you can see 20/20 id say you should get a CAT scan... or maybe open your eyes. - XenophobicAlien, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6Fight spam.. Get Gmail.
- shakin, on 10/11/2007, -3/+7CAPTCHAS shouldn't be difficult to read. Every implementation I've ever seen is terrible. Computers are pretty good at OCR, so why are we providing humans with an OCR problem? The one thing we know humans are better than computers at is logic problems. A better CAPTCHA would be "type the second word from the end of this sentence", then you'd type "this" to pass the test. How about alternate the font color of each word and tell them to type the blue word? ("Don't type the red word or the green word, type the blue word"). Or alternate the size of font and ask the user to type the word with the smallest font? Or the word that has a smiley face instead of an 'O'? Or type the first letter of each word in the sentence? Humans are better suited than computers for all those problems.
- cdmarcus, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4@egbert: there's a little audio button that loads an audio captcha instead of an image one. This is one of the few I've seen that has that.
- sketchydave, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4@cdmarcus
"If you know which one they know and which one they don't, you could screw with their data"
True, and hopefully they're re-using the same captcha a few times to ensure that they are being entered in right. If OCR software can't recognize it there is a good chance that a human might have trouble as well. So maybe reuse it twice and if both answers match it must be correct. If there are any irregularities then toss it. - pyromithrandir, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5Well, it's no KittenAuth...
- coollettuce, on 10/11/2007, -5/+8Thanks for letting me know how it works. And I did read the article, that's why I asked.
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5@Alan
You've obviously never submitted a story.
http://athena.divshare.com/thumbs/2007/05/24/729052/729052-781_display.jpg - volatileacid, on 10/11/2007, -4/+6You guys are all dicks. ALL that this site owner is doing, is getting chumps like you lot to build up his database so he can go and spam a few sites with the captchas you have solved for him.....
WTF. - Nick22, on 10/11/2007, -3/+5You dont think fighting spam is important? I dont think you would think that way if suddenly all websites started to let spammers do their thing. Trust me, I run a fairly small/mid sized website, and before I put a bunch of anti spam measures up, hundreds of spam comments a day flooded dozens of articles on the site. Even if you still dont care much, as a user, us webmasters definatly care. Its bloody ***** annoying watching your website be bombarded by spam.
- HalFTW, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2@squegie (#6859202)
"There have been various attempts at creating CAPTCHAs that are more accessible. Attempts include the use of JavaScript[6], mathematical questions ("what is 1+1"), or "common sense" questions ("what color is the sky"). These attempts violate one or both of the principles of CAPTCHAs: either they can not be automatically generated or they can be easily cracked given the state of artificial intelligence. As such, the only security these CAPTCHAs provide is security through obscurity; an attacker is unlikely to have encountered the formulation of the CAPTCHA in question, and unlikely to find it worth the time spending resources to break the CAPTCHA of a small site."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capcha#Attempts_at_Accessible_CAPTCHAs - Diggingspoon, on 11/05/2007, -0/+2"This doesn't stop spammers, sorry. They'll just hot-link your reCaptcha on a pr0n site, and get other people to do the work for them."
No they won't. The CAPTCHA is limited to a domain. Before you open your mouth, stop for a second and consider that people smarter than you may have already had your mediocre thought and addressed it. - zeptobyte, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4Wow, a lot of these comments don't seem to understand this. o_O
ONE word is a standard CAPTCHA, to prove you are human. The other word is one that has been *scanned* from a book, but not digitized into an actual word. It won't be distorted, unless it was actually scanned distorted. They're just using the fact that you're already reading a word to make you read another one and, in doing so, digitize it for them. I guess they're assuming you'll get it right. Or maybe both would be obscured a bit just so you don't know which one is the real CAPTCHA and intentionally put something wrong. - sbgunn, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3@haplo:
If there is one thing that the internet has no shortage of, it's cat pictures. - neko6, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2There's something I really don't get about CAPTCHAs. The CAPTCHA was invented by Moni Naor (Professor at the Weizmann inst.) in 1996, then used by the industry starting 1998 (Yahoo! were the first).
Only 6 years later, a graduate student called Luis von-Ahn published a paper about CAPTCHA (and gave the excellent talk on google techtalk about human computation which I recommend everyone sees). But now I have to ask - if CAPTCHA was already invented in 1996 and used since 1998, what's the point of publishing another paper in 2004? I went over it, doesn't introduce anything new (except the term "CAPTCHA"), and even mentions the paper from 1996 as the origin of the idea. Worse, in the human computation talk he makes it sound like CAPTCHA is his own invention.
Weird. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -5/+6Great idea, but why not show the second word undistorted, if OCR has failed for that word? At the moment it just makes reading more difficult.
- Homunculiheaded, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2the one immediate problem with this idea that I can see, is why not have spammers implement these on a semi-legit site but instead of using the book word simply use someone else's captcha? A spambot could easily operate in real time as each user submitted data, I can't imagine that would even be remotely difficult to script.
- brundlefly76, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3The second word is actually a captcha their spamming script cant solve :)
- Aliarse, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5I HATE CAPTCHAS.
Surely there must be a better way to stop spam? - robomancer, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2This is great for visually impaired people. reCAPTCHA is the first free CAPTCHA service I know of that offers an audio CAPTCHA as well as the image CAPTCHA. So if you use this, your site won't be keeping out blind people.
- Beerduck, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Great! Just what I wanted. Instead of typing in 5 blurry letters I get to type in 2 blurry words! :D
Whats next? "Please figure out what this section from the Bible says." - meatmcguffin, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3What you've come up with there is the concept of username and password authentication.
Zombie computers don't use proper mail clients like outlook to send their mail so it wouldn't make sense for the spammer to ask you for confirmation before the spam is sent. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3Doesn't need to be. You can simply forward captchas to other sites that get massive traffic and have other people do the dirty work for you.
- greatgregg, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1It seems von Ahn actually did the original one for Yahoo -- they just took a while to publish.
- leetdood, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2You're a moron... do you think any home computer user will willingly let Outlook force them to do a captcha every time they send mail?
- fripple, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2This is cool
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2dugg for being a clever idea, but you aint getting my free time! :p
- OrangeTide, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2That's a pretty clever idea. I think I will seriously consider using it in the future.
- jellystones, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5@readme
your eye doctor obviously lied to you - Nadare, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Great idea but doesn't the distortion seem really simple and weak ?
- cdmarcus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2@flashman: If you know which one they know and which one they don't, you could screw with their data
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