Metal Captcha | Hacker News Reader

Metal Captcha

metalcaptcha.heavygifts.com

193 pointsv4n4d1s79 comments

See also: IKEA OR DEATH: http://ikeaordeath.com/

Can you tell the difference between a death metal band and IKEA furniture? It's harder than it sounds.

Warning: Loud sounds on that website.

I honestly didn't know --- never visited there on a machine with speakers (or with my headphones on).

I'm pretty sure that's a bug in Firefox, at least on Linux. They insist on setting volume at 100% for every new stream because "what if the user had muted youtube and is now wondering why the funny cat video on another site isn't playing". See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497164 . And of course, they open a new pulse audio stream for every browser stream. The entire situation is one bad solution after another.

The only reason I got "Lack" right was because of https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack

I guess this would be a good way to keep people that aren't hardcore enough out of my online metal community...

And people above a certain age! ;-)

Or people below a certain age.

Considering this is an artform that peaked in '83, I'd say you're keeping out people below a certain age.

edit: Really downvotes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_in_heavy_metal_music

The first thing I learned about metal fans is that, for metal fans, metal is serious business.

The only band I came across in this fun captcha project that dates back that far is Saint Vitus. So in conclusion, there is no way metal peaked in '83. I'd say '94 myself.

I'd say there is no way it peaked in 83 considering how vast it has become since then. 2004 is probably the high point for my personal favorite genre, power metal, for example (big releases from Nightwish, Sonata Arctica, Kamelot, Angra, and Edguy that year).

Thrash didn't even take off until a couple of years later though :P My personal favorite era was the late 80's/early 90's when the thrash bands started getting heavier and death metal was on the rise.

Whether it peaked in '83 or not, I'd still say that most metalheads are older. That is at least consistent with what I see at all of the shows I go to.

I would say 1990. Because Painkiller is the most metal album ever ...

I think that this is definitely contentious given that many of the best bands that formed that year didn't peak until much later. Death's best album, for example, is probably either Leprosy or Human, which are both from several years later.

Also, Stryper were formed that year, which is an automatic black mark for me (no offence to Stryper fans intended, it's definitely a matter of personal taste...). And why is Bon Jovi in a list of heavy metal?

From the list of albums released, I see a lot of cheese and a few classic albums, with some degree of overlap. It's not very impressive to me personally. Electric Wizard and Nile won't even form for another decade, Immolation won't start putting out their most important work until '96, Emperor until '91-ish. Actually, I find 1991 or 1993 way more convincing personally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_heavy_metal_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_in_heavy_metal_music

I still reject the idea that metal has peaked yet.

Are you maybe a NWOBHM/Speed metal fan? I could definitely agree with that style peaking in the early-mid '80s.

I beg to differ on Death's best album. I would say they realized their true style on Human and peaked with Individual Thought Patterns and Symbolic.

Noticed a bug. Murderdolls and The Black Dahlia Murder are included as 'metal'.

What else would you call BDM?

Wikipedia says:

Black Dahlia Murder is melodic death metal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Dahlia_Murder_%28ban...

and Murderdolls are horror punk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murderdolls

More accurately called Gothenburg metal to differentiate it from old school melodeath, which is a somewhat murkily defined and now lost genre.

I first read this as satire of the complexity of musical sub-genres ("How do I find things like this song I like? Is there a name for it? ... wait, it's really just five people posting things on youtube?"). Then I realized that it might not be satire. Brilliantly played, if the former, and also if the latter. ;)

I'm entirely serious. It's much like metalcore. People associate it with melodic stuff like Killswitch Engage, but in reality the first generation of metalcore bands were more like crossover thrash, bands like Cro-Mags and Agnostic Front. This subgenre has since been posthumously renamed to "metallic metalcore" (seriously) in order to differentiate it from the melodic metalcore everyone now associates with the term.

Same is with Gothenburg and melodeath, but that one is much less known.

Melodic death metal? WTF?

I'm actually more of an electronic music fan, but they both suffer from the same disease: hundreds of sub-genres with less than 10 producers/bands that can accurately represent them.

I hate sub-genres of music.

I actually like sub-genres, especially metal sub-genres.

Death metal, melodic death metal, math metal, black metal, doom metal, death suicidal black metal, funeral metal, funeral doom, drone, heavy metal, power metal, viking metal, pagan metal, folk metal, vampire metal, gothic metal, catholic metal, brutal death metal, technical death metal, trash metal, sludge metal, all of them have more than 10 bands, can you imagine? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_subgenres

I think there is a similar core issue (not problem) in both mega-genres, that they tend towards extremity - so anything that represents a particular extremity (e.g. slow despair - Doom, guttural aggression - Death, shrieking hatred - Black) is obviously going to be identifiable. But then since they are defined by extremity, anything less than the most extreme examples or with more competing influences than the purest examples has to be classified in a different way. Hence melodic death metal, DSBM, post-black metal, sludge, grindcore, etc...

Extremity also breeds community, so you get definitions influenced by the kinds of people who listen to them. Would you want a ton of people expecting gabber turning up to a generic hardcore night? It's a very different feel. Similarly you wouldn't want people who were expecting Depressive Suicidal Black Metal (DSBM) turning up to a second wave black metal gig.

Personally I like sub-genres, I think they're useful for people.

I've been a fan of metal for so long that I get such a kick out of seeing how non-fans react to it [0]. As far as metal sub-genres go, "melodic death metal" is about as standard as it gets. I could see why it seems ridiculous to outsiders, but in my brain it's processed just as normal as describing a sandwich as "peanut butter and jelly".

I don't hate sub-genres as much as some people. I think they're useful and it can be fun to debate the merits of why one band fits into one or the other. It's no longer interesting and fun when people get elitist, exclusionary or militant about it though.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYCiTx7TwEI

Wimps and posers. Leave the hall!

Metal has 1000 genres, blah blah blah, blah blah. blah.

Bug criteria: is the band awesome? do they have a brutal logo? not a bug.

// edit: sense of humour failure. I care too much about blocking spam :)

Sorry, but this is harder for humans than bots.

The logos are quite distinct and not randomly deformed, so it's easy for even a simple image recognition algorithms to tell them apart.

And the set is very small (for this problem anything smaller than millions is very small), so it's feasible to manually tag enough images for bots to brute force it.

I agree and thought the whole thing was a joke? A satire on the illegibility of metal band logos?

I think it was intended in good humor, not necessarily as a secure alternative to regular captcha.

This is the most Hacker News-possible response to what is clearly a fun project for somebody.

Actually, behind the scenes, they have a graphic designer madly making up new bands and band logos in real time. Just kidding. I wonder if something similar would be possible though? Maybe step 1 of a Captcha is to "write something sloppily" so that software can't read it (and they check). Step 2 is to read someone else's writing. Step 3 is to wait for someone else to read your Captcha from Step 1. Step 4 is to fume about the terrible user experience.

If you had just posted the comment without "Sorry, but" at the beginning it would have been a great additional insight rather than disparaging to the OP :)

In Chrome right click the CAPTCHA image, click "Search Google for this image", copy and paste the resulting text search back as the results.

exactly, this is the first thing that popped into my mind as well

Yeah, I was thinking, wouldn't this be really easy to bot?

I had this sort of idea years ago for a Captcha method, and someone had mentioned this exact scenario.

Yes, and impossible for people to fill in. Therefore, whoever manages to find the band correctly must be a bot. Mission accomplished.

If you scroll to the download section you can see that the captcha check is completly client side. The bot won't even notice there's a captcha unless they're executing js.

It's 2015, bots use headless browsers.

This makes me happy. Woe unto the person that receives a string of completely unreadable band logos, though.

Obligatory: http://www.metalsucks.net/category/completely-unreadable-ban...

The most recent one looks like "Wood Pestilence", haha. But I can't find a band with that name, so it must be wrong.

Is a good band name, though.

http://metalcaptcha.heavygifts.com/api/newCaptcha.php?rnd=0....

First one I got :)

Heh, they're not shareable :(

I love it, I'd never register for anything again as the 5 or so times I clicked refresh every band logo was unreadable

Some of these are so hard to read that I feel like this is better served as a puzzle rather than a CAPTCHA service. Having said that, I do think if you were to take one of these band logos and put one next to a picture of a cat and ask "WHICH ONE IS MORE METAL???", then you'd be on to something. ;)

Pick the one with the most black?

This could potentially be combated by greyscaling the cat image. Or filling the band logo with bright colors...

Most hard angles?

CRAPCHA, my little project from awhile back:

http://crapcha.com

I really can't solve any of these captchas, my robotic heart hurts :(

Relevant xkcd : https://xkcd.com/233/

Haha metal forums around the world are flocking to integrate to keep out 'falsies'.

I saw one that was like some curves and lines and it clearly spelled out "dip", but apparently that was wrong! I really want to know what that one was.

Sounds like the Devin Townsend Project (DTP) http://www.devintownsend.com/images/sprites/dtp_logo_links.j...

You see the d and the p kinda link together to cross the t, it's quite a neat logo when you think about it.

I recognized the Devin Townsend Project logo, but it won't accept "Devin Townsend Project", "Devin Townsend", "DTP", or "dtp".

Yep, that was it.

I tried to send a few images in google reverse image search and it works, so you can defeat the captcha by downloading the image and grabbing the best guess

Darkthrone captcha is broken.

Yup!

https://imgur.com/c0fPnNS

And I thought, there was another Band with quite a similiar Logo...

I just went through and got 5 in a row. w00t! This is hilarious, haha.

"buy a t-shirt!"

"I buy a t-shirt >>"

This is my new favorite web copy trope.

These are really hard for me to even read. I've looked at a couple samples and I can't figure out what they say.

Don't use this for anything practical.

There's a finite amount of band images.

It wouldn't take long for a Turing Farm to crack them all.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/captcha-effectiveness/

I genuinely can't read some of those. And I'm a bit of a metaller...

I own albums from just about every band I saw as I was scrolling through. Even knowing what they're supposed to say, I still can't read some of them.

The first three bands that I got were Nile, Municipal Waste and Morbid Angel so those ones were pretty easy to read. Lucky me!

Based on the name and URL, I initially thought this was a website where you could buy jewellery or maybe statuettes featuring random distorted characters. I was a bit disappointed.

This is great. I see it as more about the aesthetics than about airtight security, anyway. As an aesthetic project, it's perfect. Well done.

It took me a while to figure out that blocking cookies means I get the failure message for the CAPTCHAs even if I guess correctly.

The most br00tal captcha service out there

I think that "Dying Fetus" on a anti abortion website will be fun :)

Google Reverse image search is really good at solving these captchas

The title for the post went from descriptive to ambiguous post edit.

This should obviously be an audio captcha.

Isn't that like gazillion years old? But k cool anyway..

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