

A captcha I can actually read - kops
http://nlpcaptcha.in/en/index.html

======
unfunco
This is horrible, especially the quote "So why to waste these focussed
eyeballs" – these focused eyeballs were being used to digitise the world's
books, which to me is far more valuable than an attempt to replace something
good in the world with advertising.

------
dsl
A friend of mine worked at an ad network that did a trial on "sponsored
captchas" and they found that it created and overall negative brand
experience.

------
meowface
Not only is this extremely annoying, but it's usually trivial for bots to
crack these new "improved" types of captchas.

reCAPTCHA is the only solution that's so far proven itself invulnerable to
OCR.

~~~
Shank
I wouldn't consider it invulnerable to OCR, considering the fact that only
half of the captcha is actually doing validation -- the other half is
digitization.

Plus, statistically a few groups have worked to break it in the past[1]. Even
without breaking it programatically, buying human labor to solve them is
sometimes equal or less expensive[2].

[1]: [http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/google-recaptcha-
bro...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/google-recaptcha-brought-to-
its-knees/) [2]:
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1305940...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130594039)

~~~
meowface
You're right that captcha farms (human labor, usually close to slave labor)
allow spammers a fairly cheap method of bypassing them, but they're fairly
slow (unlike OCR), not necessarily that accurate themselves, and increases the
barrier required to spam. If a spammer expects to personally make $4 per 1000
advertisements posted, and if 1000 captchas costs $1, that's a massive profit
loss for them.

At least from my experience, setting up reCAPTCHA on personal sites reduces
spam to 0. They'll usually only spend money on captcha farms for sites that
garner huge amounts of traffic, leaving smaller sites in the clear.

------
Ihmahr
Lets combine two really annoying things to make sure nobody uses our service.

------
twiceaday
"Lets combine CAPTCHA with advertisement."

I _really_ hate this.

------
clin_
> Plagued by a sense of immense emptiness, intrigued by the plethora of
> possibilities, born was the idea of Simpli5d Technologies with a vision to
> decipher the entrails of seemingly endless mystics of the digital age. An
> age defined not by the action but the reaction, an age where constant
> innovation is not the need but the compulsion, an age where Quality and
> Excellence are the sin qua for existence.

>

> We at Simpli5d Technologies thrive hard every moment for the realization of
> this vision. Self motivated with funding from an angle, we are a bunch of
> professionals with multifarious expertise dedicated towards conquering the
> digital world. The words Techies, Entrepreneurs, don’t define us… We call
> ourselves Missionaries to En-(On)-lightenment.

oh my god

------
ta_thisisatrap
why is this on hn first page ?

It seems this website doesn't display as intended which is a bad starting
point, then it is ads everywhere and a collection of logos some of which are
amateurishly slapped there.

The "try it" is really a long and stupid signup form disguised as a trap to
collect your domain name to whois your name and email and probably spam you to
death.

I wonder how a captcha you can actually read would be useful and not
detrimental as in not blocking bots and still annoying users. Probably better
to add a hidden checkbox as a bot trap.

------
james33
This isn't anything new, a company called Solve Media
([http://solvemedia.com/](http://solvemedia.com/)) has been doing this for
years.

------
pyalot2
Using a captcha to annoy and drive away users. It was super effective.

Please, just stahp.

