9 ms·
$1.39 for 1000 decoded CAPTCHAs
- ck2 15y agoLet's see them solve the "pick out the cats" (from dogs) captcha. Or simple math problems at random.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kennethologist 15y agoThis is a great service. Haven't used it on a large scale but for a few small projects worked very well.
- Zakuzaa 15y agoSpamming projects?
- kennethologist 15y agoNopes. But I used service for automating data scraping.
- julesbravo 15y agoThis is despicable. People have CATCHAs to keep you idiots out, can't you respect this?
- daeken 15y agoWe probably shouldn't talk about viruses or security flaws, either -- might give someone the idea that it's ok to break into a machine. We ought to respect it by not discussing such things.
- blocke 15y ago"We probably shouldn't talk about viruses or security flaws, either -- might give someone the idea that it's ok to break into a machine. We ought to respect it by not discussing such things." I interpreted the OP to be more disgusted at someone making a business out of actively circumventing a control then we discussing that it exists. That is a bit different than discussing the existence of flaws. In this case it's making money off actively exploiting the flaws.
- antimatter15 15y agoThis sort of thing is inevitable whenever you have a flawed system which incentivizes this type of activity. If anything it only raises awareness to how we should stop using captchas because they simply don't work.
- headShrinker 15y agoThat's like saying 'guns don't work because sometimes when you shoot someone they survive.' Guns and captchas work, you just don't like being shoot at, or having to guess at obfuscated letters.
- silencio 15y agocaptchas also keep out some legitimate users[1]. I have to screenshare/visit my father fairly often because he runs into trouble deciphering non-recaptcha captchas for the most part (he's low vision with some other vision problems). The only saving grace of recaptcha and a very select few alternatives (google comes to mind) is the audio captcha he can at least listen to. I would gladly consider working on a browser extension that implements this service for his sake. It's a double edged sword, and really, if your spam prevention relies heavily on captchas, it's not feasible in the long term anyway. This is not the first or last or cheapest service to break them. I haven't even gotten started on my own personal gripes about captcha abuses. Top on my list right now is one I'm going to encounter again on my flight later today: gogo inflight wifi asking me to fill out a captcha after payment...on wifi on a plane 35000 feet up in the air in the middle of California. Talk about pointless. 1. http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/ http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/ lists some interesting alternatives to captchas that may work for lower traffic sites.
- ivank 15y agoHave you seen http://www.webvisum.com/ http://www.webvisum.com/? It's a Firefox addon that sends CAPTCHAs for remote solving. I haven't tried it because registration requires human approval.
- ignifero 15y agothat's what i said to my flu virus!
- vaksel 15y agostuff like this is exactly why captchas are outdated...they don't stop the real spammers, and just annoy your users. With most captchas I have to try 3-4 times before I can actually spell out what the image is showing. The only exception is ReCaptcha, those tend to be easy to decipher. I wonder if 3-4 years down the line, everyone will continue using captchas...even when they stop working as a method to fight spam
- JamieSiminoff 15y agoThey do stop real spammers, as a real spammer works on extremely high volume and the cost of doing the captcha is way too expensive to do at the numbers they are at. I do agree that they are outdated.
- kposehn 15y agoAgreed, "spammers" are not the people who use CAPTCHA breaking. The people that use it have very specific purposes in mind. Spamming through CAPTCHA'd systems makes little sense as it costs too much. That said, there are many businesses, large and small, that use breakers to engage in commerce.
- edcrfv 15y agoSpammers are the ones who use it extensively and that's why such a service was born. The percentage of people using it for other purposes would be infinitesimally small. You can't directly attach value to the money they spend on this. They create accounts on many services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc for email spamming and they need to use these services for the tools that they purchased to work. These tools basically automate everything except the captcha solving part.
- zorked 15y agoActually, I managed a reasonably large scale free email operation and spammers DO spend money solving captchas. We had this issue with spammers where after sending 50 emails a day we would ask users to solve a captcha after each email sent. That didn't work. Upon further investigation and adding some code to track keypresses, we discovered the reason: it had been humans all along, sending spam semi-manually from a cybercafe/sweatshop in Nigeria using an add-on like Roboform as an aid. And yes, these were the usual H3rb4l V14gr4 spammers as well as some Nigerian Princes. While there is poverty, Captchas are necessarily broken.
- antimatter15 15y agoAn interesting idea would be a browser extension which users can pay or subscribe a nominal fee (eg $2 a year) which hooks up to this service so the user would never need to manually enter a captcha. It would detect a captcha on a page the moment the browser renders the field and it would be completed in ~15 seconds by the time the user scrolls down to the form and completes the other parts.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- thirdusername 15y agoFunny you should say that.. We (my former classmate and I) built a prototype for that a year ago, but life happened and I never got around to making it into a product. If anyone entrepreneurial is interested in solving that problem (especially for blind people!), I'd love to make it happen. :)
- ddemchuk 15y agoI've burned through thousands of credits at deathbycaptcha on some "darker" projects of mine, they have a nice service. Depending on the kinds of links you're building, they can be extremely cost effective. If you're going for high volume crappy links, they aren't worth it. here's a good ruby library for using this service: http://rubygems.org/gems/deathbycaptcha http://rubygems.org/gems/deathbycaptcha
- pavel_lishin 15y agoCan you give an example of some of the "darker" projects?
- edcrfv 15y agoAutomated forum account creation/posting, blog comment spamming, craigslist account creation/posting to name a few. Some other famous sites that are doing this since the mid 2000s - http://decaptcher.com http://decaptcher.com They integrate with just about every famous spam tool. UPDATE: Automated Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail account creation, etc. They create accounts in bulk and then spam through the gmail, yahoo, and hotmail accounts by tools that are being sold.
- ddemchuk 15y agoforum spamming is far too expensive if you're paying for captchas. There is an extremely famous/popular forum spamming software on the market (made by russians) that internally solves captchas. If you're going to forum profile spam, you'll go broke paying for captchas.
- edcrfv 15y agoOk I stand corrected, the economics of paying for forum spamming does not make sense and the software you mentioned (I don't want to name it here) does solve many captchas automatically (It is even rumored to solve Google's captchas) But for other stuff that I mentioned in my previous comment, it does make sense for them economically and they do use it.
- Urgo 15y agoOkay, so bad guys can bypass captchas really easily now for pretty cheap. Anyone want to make a GM script or something so normal people can use this as well to answer youtube and other captchas? I'd pay $1.39 to not have to type captchas in for a month or so of just normal internet use. I'm not trying to spam, just communicate.. Death TO captchas.
- plainOldText 15y agoWow. These guys even know customer support. They are here to help you spam other people. Taken from their website: Contact We’re here to help you! Please send us a message to any of the emails below: Technical Support Payment Support System Admin
- rebelde 15y agoFrom Cyprus, I see. Does this service break any EU directives or "laws"? There should be a law for that (even if similar services pop up elsewhere in the world).
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ddemchuk 15y agoI dont see why it would, they just accept an image and respond with the letters in the image. You could presumably OCR a book with a service like this (though it would be stupidly expensive)
- tdfx 15y agoTo prevent what? Data entry? I've also noticed that quite a few shady companies I've seen register their companies and bank accounts in Cyprus and live/operate elsewhere. I'm assuming it provides some kind of legal benefit but I don't know what. edit: note about Cyprus
- guelo 15y agoThe difference between a real user and these type of services is mainly the latency, an effective counter would rely on this fact. One idea would be some kind of game that would be easy for users with low latency to play for a few seconds and win but would be impossible for the proxy'd filipinos.
- shubber 15y agoThe obvious next step is to use comments as CAPTCHAs: "which of these 3 comments is spam?" Then, use the CAPTHCA-breaker that results to filter spam.
- ElbertF 15y agoThat could actually work if you did it the reCAPTCHA way, i.e. "which two of these three comments are spam?" Where one of the three is already known to be spam. Of course the chance of getting it right by guessing is pretty high but there may be ways around that (by showing more confirmed non-spam comments perhaps). A cool start-up idea right there!
- daimyoyo 15y agoI wonder what the rate of return on something like this is. I don't know about anyone else, but I NEVER click on, yet alone but from people spamming links in comment threads. Do you?