Hacker News Reader

Comment by smkelly | Hacker News Reader

I am visually impaired and can attest to both visual captchas being a pain and audio captchas being hard to understand. this change is nothing but an improvement as far as accessibility and usability goes. This is only a plus for people who implement these, as I have actually left sites that had insurmountable captchas for me.

Thank you.

View on HN

Check out webvisum.com - from their website:

"WebVisum is a unique browser add on which greatly enhances web accessibility and empowers the blind and visually impaired community by putting the control in your hands!"

"Automated and instant CAPTCHA image solving, sign up to web sites and make forum posts and blog comments without asking for help!"

I was curious about the CAPTCHA solving, too, so I tested WebVivum out on ~8 reCAPTCHAs.[1] It solved all except 2 of them, taking 20-60 seconds each time. In 2 cases it reported failing to solve the CAPTCHA, but it never gave an incorrect result. That is, whenever it gave a solution the solution was correct (in my brief test).

So, while it's some way off their claim of "instant" CAPTCHA solving, this is definitely a very useful addon, especially for those people who cannot solve CAPTCHAs at all. Thank you for pointing it out.

[1]https://www.webscript.io/examples/recaptcha

> Automated and instant CAPTCHA image solving

How do they do that? This sounds like whitehat use of blackhat tools. Are they using captcha-solving farms?

There are ways to solve captchas somewhat reliably programatically. I suspect this plugin only works on certain computer generated captchas, not the street sign ones.

http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/introduction-to-automa...

They send the captcha to their servers and how they solve them is a secret.

http://www.webvisum.com/en/main/faq#q15

Is there a web service where one could purchase AI recognition of fuzzy text, e.g. a street sign or book cover in a photo?

http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/

http://www.captchasniper.com/

http://captcha-breaker.gsa-online.de/

http://textcaptcha.com/

Very helpful, thank you! I have a difficult OCR problem to solve, rather than identity. Interesting to see that the market price for "being human" is $0.00139.

For non-captcha OCR also consider Mechanical Turk. And there are a variety of services built on Turk too.

The fact that this works shows that distorted-text captchas are no longer effective.

From the Google's blog post:

> our research recently showed that today’s Artificial Intelligence technology can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at 99.8% accuracy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com