Hacker News Reader

Comment by _ikke_ | Hacker News Reader

Well, it is a good way to tell computers and humans apart. Computers can read it, while humans can't.

They should reject corectly filled in captchas.

Well maybe they are really good and this is a honeypot.

You'd think, but what's so dumb about this captcha is that it's both easy to guess for a computer, but for a human too. If you look at it, the random parts are outside the readable text (which is just white on a gray background). I'd love to know what led to the "decision" of implementing something so dumb.

The text has been selected, hence the single-colour backhround.

You're missing the point bud, it's not that it's easy to guess, it's that the answer is in the bloody HTML as plaintext.

No guessing required.

That's a great idea. If i was ever to create a product for colorblinds only i'd use that.

It's not an uncommon strategy (eg: fill up a comment form with hidden but obviously named form fields) and since people won't be filling in those hidden fields then bots will have revealed themselves.

This isn't by any means a complete solution however it does catch 90% of drive-by spam.

Careful! There are legitimate toolbars that will helpfully prefill forms, sometimes even hidden fields. I've been bitten by this in production.

Yup, this is also known as the Honeypot Captcha technique: http://haacked.com/archive/2007/09/11/honeypot-captcha.aspx

That's an interesting approach, but I guess as soon as it would become mainstream, the bots would adapt without many problems.

Depending on how the fields were hidden, they may need to render and reflow html, css and dom changes by javascript.

None of which is all that difficult for a full size browser, but it may be prohibitively resource intensive for a high-volume spam bot.

Lynx. :-(

I still loathe reCAPTCHA more than any other captcha out there. I've given up hopes of logging in on many occasions simply because of it.

Looks like it's designed for not to be deciphered either by humans or computers.

Fun tip: reCAPTCHA is actually two things, the "re" and the "CAPTCHA". In other words, one half is about testing that you're not a human, while the other half is a legitimately unknown word from a source of failed optical character recognition.

You actually don't have to get the latter one anything close to right; and I think you're given the option of at least one typo in the actual CAPTCHA test.

So when a CAPTCHA looks impossible, try doing the possible half and typing in "balls" for the other half. It actually works with pretty reasonable accuracy.

> try doing the possible half and typing in "balls" for the other half

That doesn't help with the digitization of books. :)

Who gives a crap about helping Google digitize books that they scanned without publisher or author permission and that we won't be able to to read afterwards because we have to respect copyright where they didn't?

Capchas are a pox on the web, and reCaptcha a sleazy immoral one, too.

Plus you can guess (with absolute certainty since they changed the domain to read the google.com cookie) they use it as an unblockable tracker to build a database of sites you're registered on.

But it helps us! :P

This explains what happened when I tried to read "28 balls later"

Depends on the book.

Thanks to this we will now be plagued with ebooks using the word "balls" instead of correct words.

Hilarity ensues.

The more immature part of 4chan has for quite literally years tried to do that with the word "nigger"[1], with no real apparent success (not that I've checked myself, though). One of the easiest things done to counter malicious input is to simply validate any unknown words with multiple people before marking them as "recognized".

[1] http://i.eprci.net/op-renigger

So your the smart aleck whose been inserting the word 'balls' into all my ebooks. Damn you, drostie!

Random words from books? What a herecy! Clearly they come from the Lord Inglip.

http://churchofinglip.com/

at 4chan, it's almost a rule to write male-anatomy-part-that-starts-with-P for the easy to read word.

Penis. It's called a penis.

No! Not _that_ part!

It started so well, as a tool to harness collective 'intelligence' to digitize text while preventing spam. Now you're right, even the bloody accessible (audio) versions are useless. It's as if a dozen poltergeists are whispering in your ear, and you have to pick out the one that matters.

Technically somewhat true. Their source material is fragments of books being OCR'd that their program had issues on, some of which are literally impossible (I've seen math equations that require non-unicode characters). On top of this, they add extra distortions.

BUT! These are actually easy to solve. reCAPTCHA will give you two words, only one of which it knows the ground truth on (it's using you to solve the other). It will accept any gibberish for the one word it doesn't know. I've made a point of trying to guess which one is the 'real' captcha (usually the more-distorted one), but next time you see Cyrillic or an integral, just mash the keyboard.

I totally agree, see this recaptcha which is upside down, how are we supposed to read it

http://postimg.org/image/7xgovvhij/

I've had ones in this form a couple of time, where the image is clearly from a photo of someone's house number. Not sure if they are checking house number positions from google street view with it to. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2461478/Images/captcha.jpg

This is a joke, right? Everbody should be able to read upside down text. In any way, only the distorted word counts, so it doesn't matter.

I saw a mirror image d once.

NSFW ads on this link...

And at the same time, most captcha solving services I've tried break recaptcha with no problem! And they aren't even expensive. Now, I dunno if they use fancy ML techniques or sweatshops with little African children receiving electroshocks when they get one wrong, but they do work to the point that nowadays captchas only repel legit users and very badly engineered spam bots, the good bots are already ahead of the game... I even thought of writing a browser extension that would use a captcha solving service to save legit users from the pain of captchas, but I'm too lazy to do it...

I think all CAPTCHA solving "services" that offer reCAPTCHA solving rely on human work, and thus work on a delay (which obviously is just a minor inconvenience for any mass spamming operation). Here's a pretty nice article about it.[1] ReCAPTCHA itself remains unbroken to date (and it sure has gotten harder over the years too).

[1] http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/01/breaking-captcha-with-automa...

reCAPTCHA was broken a couple times by these guys: http://www.dc949.org/projects/stiltwalker/

There are some services like "Captcha Brotherhood" were you get points for solving captchas of other users, which you then can use to let other users solve your captchas.

...that kind of defeats the point of it, you know :)

I actually think reCAPTCHA has gotten quite good actually after they switched one of the words to a street address. Just look at the examples in this post, most are pretty easy to decode right away.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-...

http://i.imgur.com/YmNjN.png - best I've gotten from them recently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com