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Sunday, January 18 2009

When CAPTCHA fails...

Some time ago, I was amazed by the difficulty of a CAPTCHA implemented by rapidshare. Well, today I came across one which is even worse. We all know that using a CAPTCHA is very bad on a usability point of view, but without them, spammers would easily add junk in your database. But it's even worse when the CAPTCHA software is not working properly...


Sure you won't get any spammers here... nor regular users.

Just to avoid confusion or misinterpretation, even if you refresh/clear cache/etc. you will get this message. And no, 'ERROR' is not the solution of the CAPTCHA. Hope that phishtank will fix that soon...

We see many different CAPTCHA on the web, some are good, some not. I do not know why people keep developing their own simplistic CAPTCHA when there is a good services line the one provided by reCAPTCHA. This CAPTCHA is pretty solid and also adds audio version (way better for accessibility).

Saturday, May 10 2008

Oh please stop it with these ridiculous CAPTCHAs!

Marcin just told me about that stupid CAPTCHA from the rapidshare website. Even if I think this is made explicitly to annoy people (this CAPTCHA is used only for free accounts) this is just stupid.

Can you really tell which letter has cat or not? I'm sorry but I can't!

Wednesday, April 11 2007

Pretty good CAPTCHA: Against the current OCR

Today, it reminds me a study from Cmabrigde (http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/). The idea is that a human needs only few letters in order in a word to understand that word (this is not okay for every word, but it should not be hard to find them).
So the idea is basically to create a captcha as an image with a word, but the word would be disordered in a way that human can read it such as:

CNOTNENT
MANAEGR
KITHCEN
etc.


Okay, based on a current OCR based attack bot, it's doable if you have a dictionary then use something like the levenstein distance and try to minimize the distance with the current word in the dictionary and the word you found with your OCR.
But well, the captcha has not necessary one word...
The only problem I can see with this method is that the dictionary you use to generate the captcha should be in the language of the targeted human. But well, for most of the websites, you know what readers/users you have...

If I have time I'd try to create a lib for this...

I <3 Bots!