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I still loathe reCAPTCHA more than any other captcha out there. I've given up hopes of logging in on many occasions simply because of it. Looks like it's desig
by fakeer 14y ago
I still loathe reCAPTCHA more than any other captcha out there. I've given up hopes of logging in on many occasions simply because of it.
Looks like it's designed for not to be deciphered either by humans or computers.
- reeses 14y agoIt started so well, as a tool to harness collective 'intelligence' to digitize text while preventing spam. Now you're right, even the bloody accessible (audio) versions are useless. It's as if a dozen poltergeists are whispering in your ear, and you have to pick out the one that matters.
- kristofferR 14y agoI actually think reCAPTCHA has gotten quite good actually after they switched one of the words to a street address. Just look at the examples in this post, most are pretty easy to decode right away. http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-to-decode-street-view-addresses/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-...
- senthilnayagam 14y agoI totally agree, see this recaptcha which is upside down, how are we supposed to read it http://postimg.org/image/7xgovvhij/ http://postimg.org/image/7xgovvhij/
- dEnigma 14y agoThis is a joke, right? Everbody should be able to read upside down text. In any way, only the distorted word counts, so it doesn't matter.
- dhughes 14y agoI saw a mirror image d once.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Robadob 14y agoI've had ones in this form a couple of time, where the image is clearly from a photo of someone's house number. Not sure if they are checking house number positions from google street view with it to. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2461478/Images/captcha.jpg https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2461478/Images/captcha.jpg
- mh- 14y agoNSFW ads on this link...
- lmkg 14y agoTechnically somewhat true. Their source material is fragments of books being OCR'd that their program had issues on, some of which are literally impossible (I've seen math equations that require non-unicode characters). On top of this, they add extra distortions. BUT! These are actually easy to solve. reCAPTCHA will give you two words, only one of which it knows the ground truth on (it's using you to solve the other). It will accept any gibberish for the one word it doesn't know. I've made a point of trying to guess which one is the 'real' captcha (usually the more-distorted one), but next time you see Cyrillic or an integral, just mash the keyboard.
- nnq 14y agoAnd at the same time, most captcha solving services I've tried break recaptcha with no problem! And they aren't even expensive. Now, I dunno if they use fancy ML techniques or sweatshops with little African children receiving electroshocks when they get one wrong, but they do work to the point that nowadays captchas only repel legit users and very badly engineered spam bots, the good bots are already ahead of the game... I even thought of writing a browser extension that would use a captcha solving service to save legit users from the pain of captchas, but I'm too lazy to do it...
- Daiz 14y agoI think all CAPTCHA solving "services" that offer reCAPTCHA solving rely on human work, and thus work on a delay (which obviously is just a minor inconvenience for any mass spamming operation). Here's a pretty nice article about it.[1] ReCAPTCHA itself remains unbroken to date (and it sure has gotten harder over the years too). [1] http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/01/breaking-captcha-with-automated-humans.html http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/01/breaking-captcha-with-automa...
- starnixgod 14y agoreCAPTCHA was broken a couple times by these guys: http://www.dc949.org/projects/stiltwalker/ http://www.dc949.org/projects/stiltwalker/
- Genmutant 14y agoThere are some services like "Captcha Brotherhood" were you get points for solving captchas of other users, which you then can use to let other users solve your captchas.
- nnq 14y ago...that kind of defeats the point of it, you know :)
- drostie 14y agoFun tip: reCAPTCHA is actually two things, the "re" and the "CAPTCHA". In other words, one half is about testing that you're not a human, while the other half is a legitimately unknown word from a source of failed optical character recognition. You actually don't have to get the latter one anything close to right; and I think you're given the option of at least one typo in the actual CAPTCHA test. So when a CAPTCHA looks impossible, try doing the possible half and typing in "balls" for the other half. It actually works with pretty reasonable accuracy.
- anoncow 14y ago> try doing the possible half and typing in "balls" for the other half That doesn't help with the digitization of books. :)
- spoiler 14y agoBut it helps us! :P
- ivix 14y agoDepends on the book.
- jodrellblank 14y agoWho gives a crap about helping Google digitize books that they scanned without publisher or author permission and that we won't be able to to read afterwards because we have to respect copyright where they didn't? Capchas are a pox on the web, and reCaptcha a sleazy immoral one, too.
- htm 14y agoPlus you can guess (with absolute certainty since they changed the domain to read the google.com cookie) they use it as an unblockable tracker to build a database of sites you're registered on.
- redact207 14y agoThis explains what happened when I tried to read "28 balls later"
- chanced 14y agohttp://i.imgur.com/YmNjN.png http://i.imgur.com/YmNjN.png - best I've gotten from them recently.