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With both of your examples (and many others I've come across) those question type captchas can be done with a quick ping to Google and a sanity check on the answer

"what popular figure comes through your chimney in December" -> "Santa Claus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"

"what's 1+1" -> "2"

They only really work if maybe the question is in the market of the site you're registering for "What's <some popular guy on site>'s last name" etc

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Well the Santa Claus question will defeat bots for now at least... http://imgur.com/qX8pWrQ

That didn't take very long.

dammit you beat me to it.

And that's why Google can make you answer a captcha if it thinks you're a bot doing searches.

Perform the search from a different IP appearing as a different browser! This captcha arms race is already making me knackered

~$1.30 for 100 capachas, $50 for 10000 google searches per day, along with other search engines filling the same role.

probably the most damning thing is they are questions and answers from a database, unless you bother to make your DB unique (so no using openly available Q/A databases), everyone is going to have access to the right answers.

also, similar to paying people to answer capachas, you can pay people to answer questions

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