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posted by LaminatorX on Thursday December 04 2014, @06:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the How-were-the-meteors-on-the-way-to-work-this-morning? dept.

Techcrunch http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/03/googles-recaptcha-mostly-does-away-with-those-annoying-captchas/ reports that Google is doing away with the old fuzzy, warped re-CAPTCHA in favor of a cleaner, more effective CAPTCHA with options for picture matching or un-distorted text. The old re-CAPTCHAs were found to be nearly useless, as current algorithms can decipher them with almost 100% accuracy.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @07:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @07:41AM (#122486)

    "The old re-CAPTCHAs were found to be nearly useless"

    Meet the new CAPTCHA, same as the old CAPTCHA.

    • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday December 04 2014, @07:54AM

      by shortscreen (2252) on Thursday December 04 2014, @07:54AM (#122489) Journal

      as an added bonus the new ones will probably require javascript

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @05:08PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @05:08PM (#122614)

        and third party cookies, otherwise it falls back to the old one.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @07:49PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @07:49PM (#122687)

          Hell, the old ones don't work without cookies and javascript anymore anyway. Sure, in the begining you would type the captcha, copy a block of text and hit a button. But now, everybody embeds the damned thing incorrectly or just sends you right back to the captcha page because you didn't take their "captcha passed" cookie! (I'm looking squarely at you cloud flare!)

          I haven't run into recaptcha page that works without cookie and/or javascript in years now! In fact, I only know of one non-recaptcha page that currently works with no cookies and javascript!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:21AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:21AM (#123159)

      "No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA" is as annoying as reCAPTCHA if... [linuxbsdos.com]

      visiting the same demo website from browsers that I’ve never used to log into a Google property, the system was not able to identify me. And that’s true whether the browsers were configured to accept Cookies or not.

      -- gewg_

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @08:22AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @08:22AM (#122493)

    About fscking time. I've wanted a captcha decoder program for a couple of years now, because those things aren't human readable anymore.

    Perhaps the alternative could be something that humans are good at and machines aren't, unlike something that looks pretty much like the images we used as input in "introduction to neural networks" 18 years ago.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday December 04 2014, @09:14AM

      by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday December 04 2014, @09:14AM (#122498) Homepage
      The problem is that humans aren't, on the whole, particularly good at anything. Build an idiot-proof human distinguisher, and the internet will breed a "better" idiot.

      I like the idea of sneakily-worded domain-specific questions, specific to your site. Occasionally changed. Which requires a little effort, of course, and one might actually say it requires the website owners to actually give a damn. And it means that they website owners must be prepared to reject humans that fail the test - i.e. they must be happier with less-than-maximal human readership. Which means that they mustn't be ad/page-view driven. My god - it'll be the early 90's again - hooray!
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 1) by Pino P on Saturday December 06 2014, @04:44AM

        by Pino P (4721) on Saturday December 06 2014, @04:44AM (#123104) Journal

        I like the idea of sneakily-worded domain-specific questions, specific to your site.

        That's what I use, through the QuestyCaptcha plug-in for MediaWiki [mediawiki.org]. (A Q&A CAPTCHA also ships with phpBB.) Each question has enough information for someone to search the site for its answer. When I switched from reCAPTCHA to QuestyCaptcha, registrations by generic drive-by MediaWiki spambots plummeted. But it won't scale to a site big enough for vandals to target by itself, something on the scale of Slashdot or Wikipedia or TV Tropes.

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday December 04 2014, @06:03PM

      by sjames (2882) on Thursday December 04 2014, @06:03PM (#122637) Journal

      Hear! Hear!

      Some of them are definitely to the point where a human is just guessing. Some take 4 or 5 tries just to get one you might be able to guess more than 50% of the time. Meanwhile, the worst of the spammers are using free-porn junkies as mechanical turks to get right past the captchas.

  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday December 04 2014, @08:30AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday December 04 2014, @08:30AM (#122495) Journal

    Yes, Obligatory XKCD, it's right here, somewhere, something about an online girlfriend and getting tested, captcha, relationship over. Ethanol de-Fueled. Something like that.

    Could be this.

    Or maybe this: Nope, it must have been that. Manti Teo's got nothing on us! I prefer the method from the Terminator movie, only a dog can tell if it really is human. Sad, no>

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @09:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @09:42AM (#122503)

      You were obviously thinking of this one. [xkcd.com]

      I actually was reminded of that one. [xkcd.com]

      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday December 04 2014, @11:01AM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday December 04 2014, @11:01AM (#122523) Journal

        This is what I like about SN! I totally fail in linking, and the next post not only remedies that, but adds an even better obligatory XKCD! Thank you! Beaucoup Merci!

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @02:51PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2014, @02:51PM (#122564)

          Beaucoup Merci!

          What's with you today? Better stick with that old Greek of yours [soylentnews.org], stop mutilating other languages.

  • (Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday December 04 2014, @12:00PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Thursday December 04 2014, @12:00PM (#122528)

    I run into these things when I download files from file lockers, and I don't understand why the Internet needs to be crippled. Why should a human have to type in a code every few hours to download files when a program can do it automatically? This artificial crippling of the Internet is holding it back. Entire networks of automatic file downloading and sharing could have evolved by now, but we have to type these codes.

    Look at all the effort that has been expended in crippling the Internet - walled gardens that don't interoperate, proprietary file formats, these codes people have to type, paywalls, and so on. What could we have right now if all the effort and ingenuity of all the software developers of the past decade or two had been put into building something open and usable? Something seems to be lacking in our vision when we build something as fantastic as the Internet and then expend so much effort to cripple it.

    --
    (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Sir Garlon on Thursday December 04 2014, @01:37PM

      by Sir Garlon (1264) on Thursday December 04 2014, @01:37PM (#122543)

      I don't understand why the Internet needs to be crippled

      Because people are assholes. If a forum like this one were on the public Internet and allowed anyone to post without logging in and without passing any kind of automated gatekeeper, in about an hour the entire site would be swamped with spam. Utterly swamped.

      This non-crippled Internet of which you dream used to exist. Back in 1994 when I started using HTML, it was safe to have a guest book on your HTML 2 web site and strangers would write in it and say nice things. In fact the Internet was designed around the collegial attitude of network users from the early 90s, who were mostly university students and staff, plus some hobbyists and professionals. That is why everything is such a train wreck when it comes to security: all the systems and protocols were built in the ivory tower, where no one could imagine people would abuse the wonderful Internet to the breaking point just because they can.

      We are long past the point where over 90% of all email traffic is spam. An unpatched Windows box connected to the net will get attacked in less time than it takes to download the latest service pack over the crappy link that cable companies call "broadband."

      Unfortunately, the Internet needs gates and walled gardens because without them, it would be like a beautiful public park with no police, and ten thousand maximum-security prison inmates suddenly released into it.

      I miss the days when you could spend an hour on the Internet and stroll through the garden without encountering the smell of piss or a trampled flower bed or a gang of muggers or a giant flashing billboard blocking the view of the reflecting pool, but those days are gone and they are not coming back.

      --
      [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
      • (Score: 2) by tempest on Thursday December 04 2014, @02:29PM

        by tempest (3050) on Thursday December 04 2014, @02:29PM (#122554)

        My guestbook still gets about 4 spam posts (attempts) a day. I think this has been the same spam bot network hitting it for like 7 years now.

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday December 04 2014, @03:09PM

        by c0lo (156) on Thursday December 04 2014, @03:09PM (#122569) Journal

        This non-crippled Internet of which you dream used to exist. Back in 1994 when I started using HTML, it was safe to have a guest book on your HTML 2 web site and strangers would write in it and say nice things...
        ...
        An unpatched Windows box connected to the net will get attacked in less time than it takes to download the latest service pack over the crappy link that cable companies call "broadband."

        Ah, the good ol' times, when men were men and wrote their own [thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com] device drivers. Can you remember those years' sound? [youtube.com]
        However... hmmm... how to put it... do you remember that date for the HTML 2.0 specification was Nov 1995 [ietf.org]?

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
        • (Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Thursday December 04 2014, @06:27PM

          by Sir Garlon (1264) on Thursday December 04 2014, @06:27PM (#122646)

          I think the appropriate response is, "get off my lawn!" :-)

          --
          [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday December 04 2014, @02:46PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 04 2014, @02:46PM (#122562) Journal
      Welcome to tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org]. The economic lesson is that if you have a public good which can be overconsumed (which is virtually everything), then you need a means by which consumption of that good can be constrained below the supply of that good.