
Only humans allowed - davidw
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14299700
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karzeem
> The human ability to recognise text as it becomes more and more distorted is
> remarkably resilient, says Gordon Legge at the University of Minnesota … But
> there is a limit. Just try reading small text in poor light, or flicking
> through an early issue of _Wired_.

I love when the _Economist_ is feeling saucy.

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yannis
>The ReCAPTCHA team has a member whose sole job is to break the system, says
Dr von Ahn, and so far he has been unsuccessful.

Should he be fired?

~~~
jcl
The next sentence says: "Whenever the in-house attacker appears to be making
progress, the team responds by adding new distortions to the puzzles."

So he is still apparently contributing to the difficulty of breaking
Recaptcha, even if he never makes enough immediate progress to break it
completely.

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Mongoose
This is very apropos today's xkcd. <http://xkcd.com/632/>

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radu_floricica
This reminds me of an idea of using hotornot as a captcha. Should solve the
problem for a while...

~~~
imack
I'm not sure that would actually help. Assume a person guesses a 1-10 number,
and there would realistically have to be a fudge factor to account for
personal tastes, a bot could guess "7" and be correct enough of the time. A
fairly large solution space would be needed for an effective captcha.

~~~
radu_floricica
Just show 10 pics, nine over 8 and one under 3. Not only fast, but pleasant to
the eye.

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tocomment
A lot of captcha uses always struck me as backward, like we want to prevent
automation and make humans do work that programs could be doing.

For example why can't I have a script log in and print out my boarding pass
for me? Or what if I want to make some elaborate program where one of the
steps is to make a new email account (not for spam, just automating setting up
an email account.)

Perhaps a big obstacle to the semantic web (where computerized agents schedule
oil changes for you), are captchas and the general attitude that we only want
humans using our websites.

~~~
billswift
I've never encountered a site I needed to solve a captcha to READ. They are
used to prevent spamming comments by bots.

