Hardest captcha ever?
random.irb.hr
random.irb.hr
It's so hard to decipher, it almost comes across as a cruel joke at the expense of blind people.
These are much easier, in that I can actually understand them.
So maybe if you've been blind a while, the audio captcha isn't so hard to decipher. Keep in mind they have to make it hard for speech recognition software to decipher too.
He, and other blind computer scientists that were present at the talk, was so used to the screen reader that could crank its speed up to impossible speeds for non-blind users (that don't exercise their hearing sense that much).
The same applied to the tiny distortions in pitch and tone that he'd use as a replacement for syntax coloring.
Pretty amazing.
What I mean is, has somebody any insight if it would be worth it, from a productivity point of view, to use those tools for non-blind people?
JAWS, in particular, is quite powerful, but pretty daunting to learn. Compounding the clunkiness of JAWS is that many apps and sites aren't built with screen reader usability in mind – even if the developers made a good effort to ensure that it was possible to use their site in a screen reader, that all text was readable, etc, there's a huge difference between "possible" and "easy".
I thought it would be interesting, from an HCI perspective, to use a screen reader with something like a phone in your pocket, but sadly the learning curve is just too high, and there's not much motivation to improve it, either from the perspective of app/site developers (blind users are a rounding error) or even of the tool makers (blind users are highly motivated to learn their product, and will purchase it regardless of learning curve).
SEO, ironically, is the greatest thing to ever happen to blind users. All those people with tremendous financial incentive to make their sites spiderable to a text-only bot.
Seconded. I've done a bit of accessibility testing work with JAWS and was often frustrated by how unnecessarily difficult it was to use the software with a screen reader. You have to remember that it is probably uneconomical to make most software accessible and companies only do it because it is a requirement that software be accessible if you want to sell to certain governments (eg the USA). What this means is that development and testing is focussed on doing the bare minimum needed to pass a checklist, after which there isn't any need to do anything, regardless of whether the software is "easy" or merely "possible" to use.
When I was at MIT I had a lab partner who was blind for I think 6.002 or 6.003. I remember that one side-effect of using a screen reader was that he easily "recited" code, which I don't think most sighted programmers could do fluently.
Of course, in order to understand what he was reciting, my only hope was generally to try to type it into a text editor, format it and look at it. (And it's also hard to transcribe code being read to you.)
Technology and computers wasn't my mom's hobby or profession (she's actually a seamstress -- and I learned the basics of sewing from her) so it wasn't like she was introducing me to her interests; however, when my son gets older (out of diapers), I plan on spending time with him teaching about my major interests and learning new things with him that's he's interested in, independent of what that may be.
My mom likes to say "I was just having fun, typing in the games and playing them, but you were actually learning something."
Wow.
http://blog.wintercore.com/2008/03/05/breaking-gmails-audio-...
A CAPTCHA is supposed to be a task that is easy for humans, but difficult for computers. High-level mathematics is difficult for humans but easy for computers.
They do have some success of telling computers and humans apart, though.
Stops those pesky humans wasting precious robot bandwidth and is quite a bit harder than the Quantum Random Bit Generator captcha ;)
If you're thinking of either of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, you may be slightly mistaken about what they say. In general, a human operating by rigorous standards of proof is no more able to prove the completeness and consistency of certain formal systems—using the tools provided by those formal systems—than a machine can.
If, as a human, you somehow prove the consistency of these particular formal systems, you run smack into Gödel's second theorem: For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent. Thus, any proof of consistency is self-defeating, whether it's made by neurons or silicon.
Really, math doesn't care what parts of the periodic table you use to prove things. :-)
Calculus has been around for a pretty long time, there's plenty of good material out there to learn it and people who understand it to teach it, there's no real reason it shouldn't be required curriculum these days.
Even just removing one required semester (half a year) of PE and one required semester of English (which shouldn't be very controversial) frees up two semesters, which for a high school level accommodates Calculus just fine. I'd love to see mathematical analysis courses taught at the high school level too (especially since many grown adults are under the impression math in general is like the algebra they did in high school) but that might be getting ahead of ourselves.
I also don't see why you can't teach number theory et al. throughout all the math courses. I never had a formal trigonometry course because it was taught along the way.
(That sort of think has only shown up once over multiple refreshes though.)
-6 + 5 * 0 = ?
(I guess I just got lucky?)
If you try to be smart and just put in a known wrong answer in hopes that it'll keep the form data and give you a new question, you get dumped to a validation page which tells you you're wrong and then tells you to go back and reload the page, which is also retarded. You still come out ahead because when you hit the back button you should get a new captcha and the browser should have saved your form data, but man, this page belongs in the UX hall of shame regardless of how you feel about math in your captchas.
got the question right though.
It's a math problem - which computers are great at - in highly readable text; which they're pretty good at. I expect someone talented could break it in an automated fashion in a day or less.
I don't know why they don't just throw up an fairly large image of a bunch of animals, then say "Click the cutest kitten" or something that's purely subjective, and relies on human recognition abilities rather than computational ones. Maybe two of those in succession in case a computer gets lucky? Using the same method recaptcha does. Show two images, one with a known heat-map of clicks showing where people think the kitten is, to test them, and another one for them to develop the map on the new picture for future tests.
Spambots try to spew spam as quickly as possible, right? I wonder how effective it would be to flag those who fill out the signup forms too quickly as likely spammers and check up on them or impose extra limitations until they had been using their account for a while without spamming?
It is an example of "Denying the antecedent", or the inverse error: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent
Thats an interesting product to sell.
I doubt this personally. I didn't have any problems with the partial differential I was set. I mean on a general level that something once learnt can be relearned.
This can be automated with https://github.com/mathgladiator/tutor
I'd have to spend some time working on adding OCR support, but overall totally doable,
It seems to me, the answer is Yes. This is actually very powerful and useful for security. (Even if you can only count on the first time it's answered.)
Bots are user agents that don't have a human operator; browsers are user agents with a human operator. Both bots and browsers involve computers. However, as browsers can automate some tasks, and bots need human interaction at least to program them in the first place, there is a blurry line between bot and browser. CAPTCHAs try to force a certain amount of human interaction. The only reliable way to prevent human interaction between sending a request to and receiving a response from an unknown user agent is to require a response so fast as to preclude human intervention.
At least it will weed out the non-mathematicians easily...
You don’t even need to learn any fancy syntax, “derivative of” works great. (High school math homework would be so much easier with WolframAlpha.)
Still, it is cute.
My captcha was to find the least zero of this polynomial: http://random.irb.hr/latexrender/pictures/c46ad0f30d7575c609...
and all I had to do was to OCR the formula: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x^3+%2B+3x^2-4x+-12+%3D...
You can just pass the equation in Wolfram Alpha directly and you have your answer! The font is crystal clear and the equation is quite simple.
My scanned books can't tell VV and W apart...
- 2 + 1 - 0 + 0 * 0 + 3 - 3 = ?
http://random.irb.hr/latexrender/pictures/bba40bf17043b0ced7...
-- Marvin the Paranoid Android (with liberties taken)
And flip the terms and answers for each captcha.
Is it because a person can't solve 3+8?
All this does is simplify the captcha for machines to solve, whilst complicating it for humans (basic maths is easy for most but it's still one more logical step then 'type out the 5 letters you see'). Instead of 26 upper and lower-case characters, and often just a random string (so we can't make a best guess vs a dictionary), we now just have ten characters and maybe 2-4 mathematical operators and it must make sense (it can't be "42+-" for example).
I asked this because I was creating a reddit clone and wanted a captcha system. I detest the ones that exist right now.
For another website, I used to store the IP address and do checks but for a simple system that seem to be overkill.
All of the websites have no user accounts.
Is there another way to do this? Where you want some voting to happen but with no user accounts. And you want it to be dirt simple.
If you start with the assumption that no one will try to attack your site, then you don't need a captcha at all. You can give the user any annoying/time-consuming task (e.g. "click a square ten times"), or you can insert an inconvenient delay in vote submission. However, people may object less to the inconvenience of something that looks like a captcha, because they are used to them.
Needless to say, almost no one uses captchas for this purpose. Instead, they use captchas to make their sites more resistant to automated abuse -- as you almost certainly will need if your sites become popular.
The site dos not take in user generated content that is immediately displayed. The data is first curated and verified so the attack will be a bit harder. So there is fresh (delayed) content constantly.
That is exactly the reason of the captcha: to give a person something to do that wastes a bit of their time and that is familiar to them.
Yes, in other sites I have used captchas to prevent automated abuse.
A subsequent reload sent it back to a more complex formula.
I got "-6-7x7". Does it want proper order of operations applied, giving -6-49=-55? Or does it want it the silly way that most (I suspect) people are going to do it, left-to-right without respect to order of operations, -13x7=-91?
(oops, the asterisks give italics rather than multiplication!)