Building a Better CAPTCHA

jcatcw writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that CAPTCHA cracking isn't that difficult these days. It has even become a business. For example, DeCaptcher.com will solve CAPTCHAs for your spamming needs at a rate of $2 per 1,000 successfully cracked CAPTCHAs. In response, newer systems are in development. Both Carnegie Mellon and Penn State (is there something about the water in PA?) are working on image-based systems. ESP-PIX and SQ-PIX both require the viewer to interpret pictures. Imagination CAPTCHA from Penn has the user find the center of an image. The idea is that humans are better at image recognition that computers, but humans can legitimately disagree on their interpretations and some humans are color blind. Problems remain. For now, sites would be well advised to look at reCAPTCHA — the system that works with Google Books and the Internet Archive to digitize printed texts — which comes with a wide variety of application and programming plug-ins and an open API."

Re:Indecipherable

[multisync]

I know _I_ often have trouble seeing those... Maybe some sort of an animated .gif would be better?

Me too. Wanna go halfers on 1000 CAPTCHAs?

Logical next step

[sakdoctor]

Instead of one little captcha at the end of a web form, the whole site will be a captcha.
All the form labels will be jumbled images, and there will be 9 form submit buttons, 8 with dogs and 1 with a cat.
All textual content can be a mangled image to stop scrapers as a bonus.

Oh and please don't actually build this.

Cylon Detector

[fathom108]

Will this detect Cylons?

Re:How to get around CAPTCHA for Porn?

[sexconker]

But you have to add captchas to your 3rd site to make sure a 4th site isn't spamming your (3rd) site with fake spam/legit answers in an effort to steal your porn (to make their own porn-fueled, captcha-solving farm).

Obligatory XKCD

[DeadPixels]

http://xkcd.com/233/ [xkcd.com] The real question is: What can humans do that computers cannot? The only problem with "which of these images is George W Bush?"-type tests is that spammers could easily use a database and just compare an image against a photo database. Granted, it wouldn't be as easy as regular CAPTCHAs, but it's still easy enough to crack.

Re:How to get around CAPTCHA for Porn?

[kohaku]

It's porn all the way down.

Re:Dying Technology

[arbitraryaardvark]

obligatory xkcd solution to captchas
http://xkcd.com/233/ [xkcd.com]

Re:Dying Technology

[NinthAgendaDotCom]

Computers and synthetic systems in general are ONLY going to get better at doing anything a human can do. I mean anything.

Robot sex slaves, here we come!!!