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Comment by omonra | Hacker News Reader

This may be very interesting to crack, but who is responsible for Google making their CAPTCHA almost impossible for human to decipher now? I seriously have to click 5 times before even seeing anything resembling letters I can parse

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I didn't go in depth of the article/method but from what I've read it takes advantages of the audio function not the images.

This simply means computers are getting really good at this game. And that Google, with all its power, hasn't found a better alternative to Captchas yet.

I find that pretty worrying for the future of the internet. An internet without working captchhas will probably be full of bots and spam.

Is this an argument that future web services may depend more heavily on identity/reputation services?

Naive Bayes spam classifiers are fast enough that I think they could be used as drop-in replacements, and they'd be well-trained too considering Google's existing success with spam in email. And Naive Bayes isn't the only solution, there are plenty of other heuristics. Even something as dumb as "first post from this user/IP/'identity' and full of links?" would catch a lot of common spam.

I really wish HN required a comment with a downvote on accounts with more than 100 karma (where one can reasonably assume the user isn't a newbie leaving empty comments like "I agree"). I'd ask that person to think it through: why doesn't gmail require a captcha every time you want to send an email? What about other mail providers? What about your own native client? An internet without working captchhas[sic] will probably be full of bots and spam. Is your inbox full of bots and spam? Mine isn't. Even my spam box is at less than 800 over the period of a month; before one of the big botnets was taken down a few years ago that was generating most of the world's spam I still had less than 4000 over a month.

You only have the type one word correct, and they make sure one word is readable so with some practice you can easily recognise which word is the key-word.

He isn't speaking of reCAPTCHA but google's nearly impossible to read captchas that take way too much time to decipher.

If you'd like to see it you can usually get it by putting in a bad password to a gmail account too many times (though I don't know if that has other consequences).

Edit: Here is an image example http://www.techian.com/wp-content/uploads/captcha.png

Strange they don't use reCAPTCHA for this.

Oh those, yeah they are very hard to decipher.

I wonder what they do for non-Latin locales?

After reading that previously on HN, I tried and sadly had to type both word.

With practice and decent eyes. Once your eyes go downhill, it is amazing how much changes.

Most software developers are under 40 and therefore have little to no appreciation for what happens to people's eyes after they are past 40.

For me, the key word is usually the unreadable one. I've never had success typing only the readable one.

Agreed. They are unbearable. But name a better alternative!

Anything that I can think of like adding to the CAPTCHA such as a half-line of letter above and below or adding noise would probably make cracking them programmatically even easier.

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