CAPTCHA Busted? Company Claims To Have Broken Protection System 141
sciencehabit writes "A software company called Vicarious claims to have created a computer algorithm that can solve CAPTCHA with greater than 90% accuracy. If true, the advance would represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It would also mean that the internet will have to start looking for a new security system. The problem, however, is that Vicarious has provided little evidence for its claims, though some well-known scientists are behind the work."
90% (Score:5, Insightful)
New security system ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but I don't consider CAPTCHA a security system.
I would say it's an anti-spam system.
Re:90% (Score:5, Insightful)
"That's better than my success rate"
Same here, but some overdo it with the use. My phone company uses it on the payment page where you have to enter the invoice number and credit card.
Are they afraid some bot would pay my bills?
I broke it a long time ago (Score:3, Insightful)
CAPTCHA isn't one system... (Score:5, Insightful)
This headline makes no sense. CAPTCHA is just a concept, there are hundreds of implementations. I'm sure some of them are crap and only block bots that aren't even trying, some block 100% of bots (and half the humans, too), and most are somewhere in the middle. So what does it mean to "solve CAPTCHA with 90% accuracy?" Does that mean he's tested it on every system out there, and aggregated the results? That would actually be interesting if he has, but more likely he's just tested it on one kinda-crap system that I could probably write a bot in a week to do the same thing.
It does sound like it's built to be more robust, working with more different types of captchas than perhaps many captcha-busting algorithms, but I doubt it's the first of its kind (maybe it uses a new algorithm, but it's still a captcha-buster, that's not new.)
Re:Better than humans (Score:5, Insightful)
And what really pisses me off is when you get a captcha wrong, either through incorrect entry or because it's decided you took to long, and the damn thing wipes out all the fields forcing you to redo the entire page! Those sites I truly despise I hope their programmers/scripters get a horrible infestation of something nasty.
Re:90% (Score:5, Insightful)
More like: if solving is not attempted, it's human.
This does not mean advancements in AI (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary suggests this marks an advancement in AI, but it depends on what AI means. There are generally two areas of AI: 1) artificial "thinking" , and 2) Using advanced algorithms to get things done. Most people think about #1 when you say AI, however solving captcha is just an example of #2. I would argue that #2 really isn't "AI" at all. In fact, all advancements in "AI" are of type #2. Attempts at #1, thus far, have been absolute failures.
Re:Semantic capthas? (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you generate these captchas automatically? Otherwise it's too expensive as you are not able to reuse any of them, or the spammers build a database.