Hacker News Reader

Speaking of, has anyone else noticed that captchas (especially recaptcha) have gotten a lot harder over the last year?

I have indeed. Anyone have more details? At one point I recall (re)CAPTCHAs being about helping OCR slightly less-readable words from book scans. But they were actual words. They seem to be gibberish words now.

Maybe they ran out of non-gibberish readable things to OCR?

I've noticed that they occasionally have characters that are available in unicode, but are not part of the characters that are available on a 105-key keyboard with or without the shift key.

THe most common one I see is the integral symbol that used to be used as an S. On very rare occasions I see characters like:

Those are the ones googles OCR couldn't decipher. Only one word (the random characters with a asymmetric background and maybe a line through them) matter. Once you know that you stop typing the part that doesn't matter. I usually just type asd (actual captcha)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com