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He seems a bit ignorant on how reCaptcha works nowadays. You are presented with two strings - a potential word scanned from a book and a random mash of letters

He seems a bit ignorant on how reCaptcha works nowadays. You are presented with two strings - a potential word scanned from a book and a random mash of letters. You only need to enter the random letters correctly, you can write whatever you want for the word from the book. Meaning, if one of the two is obviously a bug in OCR software (or is non-latin characters you can't type), just write your favourite curse word -- I go with captcha -- and it will work. As for the "unreadable mash of letters" problem, I could read them in all his examples. Though I have seen some cases when they are really unintelligible. If you must use reCaptcha on your website, do it like 4chan -- when you mess up the captcha, you are automatically given a new image to try, without being sent away or having to enter what you just typed again. Which just means you'll only limit the rate at which bots register -- the article mentions something like 10% success rate of current-generation bots guessing reCaptcha.

nacs 14y ago
This is common knowledge for people like you and I (that only one of the two words only counts) but the vast majority of "average" visitors do not know this and will be unable to solve the captcha.
iaskwhy 14y ago
From the article: "t’s important to note the way reCAPTCHA works. Each user (or bot) is presented with a control word, and a word unrecognized by OCR. This control word is already known to Google (who runs reCAPTCHA). If you get this first word right, it is assumed that you get the second word correct as well. So, in reality, you only need to guess the key word correctly. I decided to just guess the first word and hope “secretary” was the control. It wasn’t." How is that being ignorant?
- morsch 14y ago
  It's ignorant because he then goes on to refresh recaptchas that are "impossible" to solve where the OCR word was gibberish (cut-off, etc.) but the key word was discernible.
0x09 14y ago
> If you must use reCaptcha on your website, do it like 4chan This is not how Yotsuba's captcha works. If you screw up, you're still taken to the post submitted page, with the error "You seem to have mistyped the CAPTCHA. Please try again." and you must return to the page you tried to post from. What you're talking about is a feature of 4chan X.

nacs 14y ago

This is common knowledge for people like you and I (that only one of the two words only counts) but the vast majority of "average" visitors do not know this and will be unable to solve the captcha.

iaskwhy 14y ago

From the article: "t’s important to note the way reCAPTCHA works. Each user (or bot) is presented with a control word, and a word unrecognized by OCR. This control word is already known to Google (who runs reCAPTCHA). If you get this first word right, it is assumed that you get the second word correct as well. So, in reality, you only need to guess the key word correctly. I decided to just guess the first word and hope “secretary” was the control. It wasn’t." How is that being ignorant?

morsch 14y ago
It's ignorant because he then goes on to refresh recaptchas that are "impossible" to solve where the OCR word was gibberish (cut-off, etc.) but the key word was discernible.

0x09 14y ago

> If you must use reCaptcha on your website, do it like 4chan This is not how Yotsuba's captcha works. If you screw up, you're still taken to the post submitted page, with the error "You seem to have mistyped the CAPTCHA. Please try again." and you must return to the page you tried to post from. What you're talking about is a feature of 4chan X.