

Stop the Captcha madness - Isofarro
http://areyouahuman.com/

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camtarn
Aaaargh. Mouse dexterity testing is incredibly irritating when you're using a
TrackPoint (rubber nipple mouse) :P

On a slightly more serious note, this is _awful_ for anyone who has mouse
dexterity issues, like older or inexperienced computer users, those using
assistive devices, or even people with shaky hands. It also relies in some
places on culturally specific assumptions (for instance: put toppings on a
pizza... I see some squiggly reddish stuff which seems like it's meant to be
bacon, but in the UK bacon doesn't look anything like that!)

Good on them for trying to make the CAPTCHA experience more interesting, but
this isn't quite a complete solution...

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dlikhten
TrackPoint. Now I know the name. Thank you good sir, thank you. You just made
my day.

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emilv
Obligatory: <https://xkcd.com/243/>

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joshfraser
Quit trying to fix CAPTCHA and just stop using them altogether. Here's my rant
/ explanation why: [http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/07/02/why-you-should-
never-...](http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/07/02/why-you-should-never-use-a-
captcha/)

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Albuca
I can see where they are coming from in wanting to verify that a user is
Human, and getting them to play a game is a great idea.

However, that solution does not work for everyone. There are those who use
smartphones, tablets, or are stuck behind corperate networks that (cannot/will
not) allow you to even view or interact with the game.

I love the idea of not having to type in captcha's all the time, but the
solution will have to be a universal one; making it easier for the user to
verify they are human, while still keeping all the bots out.

In the meantime, at least recaptcha is doing something useful with the time we
spend figuring out the captcha's.

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bluetidepro
"In the meantime, at least recaptcha is doing something useful with the time
we spend figuring out the captcha's."

Can you elaborate? What do you mean they are doing something useful? I'm not
familiar with how recaptcha works but, I have used it on many sites before.

(Thanks!)

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corin_
" _reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that
cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to
decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is
placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR
programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly._ "

More at <http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore>

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Albuca
corin_ hit the hammer on the head with that.

Sory, I should have tossed a link in when I made that comment.

There are always two words that you will see. One that is known, and the other
is unknown.

Once enough users (lets use 10 for this example) type the same responce to the
unknown word (and correctly identify the known word), the unknown word will
move to a known status and be matched up with a new unknown word.

Thereby digitizing books! (ever wondered why one of the words is clearer than
the other? Now you know!)

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droithomme
Observations from usability testing:

* It's called a game but it's just not fun. (Tried about 6 of them.)

* It's annoying to have to use the mouse in 2 dimensions with dragging. This activates the "locate, identify, capture something and drag it someplace else that needs to be identified" part of my brain. Using that part of the brain breaks my train of thought from the message I was thinking of typing.

Captchas are not perfect, and this is a good idea to try and do user testing,
but I find it not be an improvement over captchas.

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geon
Wasn't this demonstrated as broken a while ago?

Most of the "games" seems to be "pick 2 out of 4", which gives you only 7
permutations. But it's worse that that, since you can just keep on trying
until you find a match.

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mp3geek
The issue I have with these (same with keycapcha also), is the role of
advertisers in captcha

<http://areyouahuman.com/advertisers>

After all, I don't want any form of advertising or tracking on my website due
to 3rd party captchas.

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djbender
"Increase Conversions: PlayThru increases form submissions by up to 40% versus
standard CAPTCHAs like reCaptcha. That twisted text annoys people so much that
they stop filling out your form. Make it easier with our short, simple games."

I would looooove to see the numbers behind this.

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rplnt
It's loading way too long - all the time benefit of not deciphering captcha
was lost. It's annoying at best, trying to click on a slightly moving object
and then dragging him away. Why can't I just click on a static picture? Also,
it looks like an ad.

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joeblau
Didn't someone just post an algoritm to crack these "games" with 99%
efficiency a few weeks ago?

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gizzlon
Yes! Thank you.. As a user I would love this, I hate CAPTCHAs with a passion.

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mrgreenfur
Doesn't CAPTCHA help transcribe old books? What does this do?

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mikeash
Reloading the demo a bunch of times, there appear to only be a handful of
different games. Maybe they have a reduced set for the demo, but it certainly
seems like each game would require human intervention to create. They don't
look that difficult to solve automatically once a human teaches the computer
what to do for the given game once. CAPTCHA relies on being able to create new
puzzles with zero human effort but which require some human effort to solve.
If each puzzle requires human effort to create, then attackers can simply take
advantage of the fact that their time is cheaper than yours.

These sort of clever/unusual human detectors can work great on a small scale,
when it isn't worth anyone's time to attack them, but fall apart once they get
popular. Maybe I'm missing some secret sauce here, but this one certainly
looks like one of those.

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capo
Solving CAPTCHAs teaches computers to read, what does this do?

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camtarn
This particular implementation wouldn't do much... but if you used real
images, you could ask the user to e.g. "Pick out the faces", then show six
images with two known faces, three known not-faces, and one maybe-face. Serve
the same maybe-face to enough users to get a significant face or not-face
vote, and use the results to train a facial recognition algorithm.

