Googles reCAPTCHA how it works

[Torniquet]

Came across this while bouncing about on youtube. Turns out the reCAPTCHA system is helping more than us as we prove we are human!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euRAfUGX8wY

[Jackolantern]

Wow, that is neat. I never knew I was helping to digitize old books every time I use a reCaptcha

My only problem is that they have really started getting into some weird text lately. I have seen some European characters that are not easy to type on American keyboards, as well as some characters that are not even ASCII. In those cases I have had to revert to the audio option lol.

[hallsofvallhalla]

I love this but I still stand firm that Captcha was a dumb idea out of the box. Why use letters and numbers that are easily red. I would much rather see a animated gif with a question. Proven to be 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999% effective.

[Jackolantern]

I guess the problem is, where would the questions come from? Combinations of words can be created by computers and have an infinite number of possibilities. But it would be much more work to keep coming up with fresh questions. If a database could be formed with all of the questions to date, then a bot script could possibly tell which question is being asked.

I don't know. reCaptcha seems to work pretty well, but pretty much any of these types of safe guards can be broken by an organized team of spammers and/or crackers who set up people who's sole responsibility is to look at and enter captcha after captcha and enter them.

[SpiritWebb]

On my page for OuterNet, check out the anti-spam there...

http://outernet.tlastudios.net/index.ph ... w=register

[Jackolantern]

On my page for OuterNet, check out the anti-spam there...

http://outernet.tlastudios.net/index.ph ... w=register

Pretty neat

[Torniquet]

@ spirit

Thats some awsome stuff. how does it work? goes by the reference position of the movable divs?


@jack

When it comes to text you cant accually type out, you dont have to type out what it says. Only one of the words is recognised as the captcha test. aslong as that word is correct, the captcha is passed.

[hallsofvallhalla]

captcha does not work. Look at all the bots on forums, youtube, craigslist, blogs, ect...

You don't need to come up with very many question, You have 50 pics with 20 questions. That is 1000 possibilities. You then layout 5 images but ask a question on only one of them. That now raises the possibility to 5,000. Give each person a 3 try limit.

The questions would be static across all images so all you have to do is have 20 questions total. Even if you stored all the answers the bot is still guessing and there would be a .0001% change of getting it right. You could easily up that by adding 100 pics and 100 questions and letting everyone share the images and questions much like captcha.

[SpiritWebb]

@ spirit

Thats some awsome stuff. how does it work? goes by the reference position of the movable divs?


@jack

When it comes to text you cant accually type out, you dont have to type out what it says. Only one of the words is recognised as the captcha test. aslong as that word is correct, the captcha is passed.

I am not exactly sure...it was a free module for Joomla to add to the register user. I did not want bots signing up for my games website, so found that neat little thing!! But I imagine that would be how it works...

[Jackolantern]

@Torniquet:

I saw that in the video, too, but I have had it where both words have Gaelic runes in them I don't even know where to start with that lol. And it seems it has only been in the last 4 or 5 months I have started seeing strange symbols in it. The book digitizing makes more sense now. I wonder if they are moving into some older books with strange type that is throwing the OCR way off.

@Halls:

Ahh, that makes sense. The interact of the images sounds like it would give it enough randomness to work.