> Try solving these actual examples:
First one: a rhaval Second one: a onsupsel
You need to realize that only one word needs to be entered. For the other word just enter any string (or even no string works in some/all cases).
First one: a rhaval Second one: a onsupsel
You need to realize that only one word needs to be entered. For the other word just enter any string (or even no string works in some/all cases).
Fun times.
[1] the idea was to always write the correct word and just enter "nigger" as the other word. This eventually led to reCaptcha disregarding 4chan answers from the pool of resolving weird words.
However, the whole point of them having the humans do that work is /they do not know the correct answer/. Since they do not know the correct answer they cannot be basing the test of the CAPTCHA on it. From there it is not a big leap to surmise that you are only actually being tested on the word that actually looks distorted on purpose.
It's probably written on recaptcha website or wikipedia article, but basically you get presented one word that machine can't read (the distorted letters) and something out of a book that google had digitized and uses you to ocr it. You also get a lot of address numbers for google street view.
Just input the distorted word and type anything for the other, and it will work. Of course the instructions won't tell you that or else people would act accordingly and google would lose this free labor source for the tedious work of proofreading digitized version of books.
I can totally understand why those would frustrate non-technical users, but on a site like HN I would expect people to know how reCaptcha works.
That said I think reCaptcha has been getting much harder recently due to the arms race with bots. I now sometimes fail 3-4 times in a row.
Why should you even expect that? Recaptcha was interesting in 2006, but anyone not following the news around that time or around the its acquisition by Google might not have learned this.