On: Breaking the Silk Road's Captcha

[malgorithms]

Agreed!

Also, given the successful character extraction, and the knowledge that (1) the font doesn't change, and (2) they're just translated and rotated, I think performing those operations on the individual characters could've yielded a pretty perfect success. Simply try a whole bunch of shifts and rotations on a given character until it matches a reference, almost exactly.

[mieko → malgorithms]

This is all true. The first thing I built was an awesome hammer, and I had a large amount of nails to deal with.

In retrospect, I'm sure there was a good deal of more focused, surgical solutions that'd save some overhead.