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Only humans allowed

economist.com

13 pointsdavidw12 comments

> The human ability to recognise text as it becomes more and more distorted is remarkably resilient, says Gordon Legge at the University of Minnesota … But there is a limit. Just try reading small text in poor light, or flicking through an early issue of Wired.

I love when the Economist is feeling saucy.

>The ReCAPTCHA team has a member whose sole job is to break the system, says Dr von Ahn, and so far he has been unsuccessful.

Should he be fired?

The next sentence says: "Whenever the in-house attacker appears to be making progress, the team responds by adding new distortions to the puzzles."

So he is still apparently contributing to the difficulty of breaking Recaptcha, even if he never makes enough immediate progress to break it completely.

Should be the other way around... for each guy working on a captcha there should be a team trying to break it.

This is very apropos today's xkcd. http://xkcd.com/632/

This reminds me of an idea of using hotornot as a captcha. Should solve the problem for a while...

I'm not sure that would actually help. Assume a person guesses a 1-10 number, and there would realistically have to be a fudge factor to account for personal tastes, a bot could guess "7" and be correct enough of the time. A fairly large solution space would be needed for an effective captcha.

If you just used pictures of 1s and 10s then it should work reasonably. Of course, the bot would then be right 50% of the time, so you'd need to include, say, ten pictures to rate to get the false positive rate down to one in 1024.

This is, of course, starting to look like more trouble for the user than it's worth.

Just show 10 pics, nine over 8 and one under 3. Not only fast, but pleasant to the eye.

This has already been done (although the original site seems to have fallen offline).

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=hotornot+captcha

A lot of captcha uses always struck me as backward, like we want to prevent automation and make humans do work that programs could be doing.

For example why can't I have a script log in and print out my boarding pass for me? Or what if I want to make some elaborate program where one of the steps is to make a new email account (not for spam, just automating setting up an email account.)

Perhaps a big obstacle to the semantic web (where computerized agents schedule oil changes for you), are captchas and the general attitude that we only want humans using our websites.

I've never encountered a site I needed to solve a captcha to READ. They are used to prevent spamming comments by bots.

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