Did you think you could stop spammers with CAPTCHA?
October 13th, 2008 by Andreas from Xavier MediaDid you really think you could stopp spammers with CAPTCHA? Did you?
First of all CAPTCHA is a way of telling humans from machines (or at least it used to be) when filling out forms. By adding a small picture the machines can’t read, but the humans can and let them fill in the hidden answer on the pictures in a small text box you could stop machines from signing up for email accounts, send spam etc. But that was the good old days!!!
Today there are several softwares that can crack almost any CAPTCHA picture on the market 
and they do it way too fast. Did you know that the PayPal CAPTCHA can be cracked in about 2 seconds with a success rate of 100%. The phpBB CAPTCHA only takes 3 seconds to crack! Even the Google CAPTCHA can be solved, but it takes a little bit longer: one minute to crack 80% of the pictures.
I found a really interesting (and exstremelly scary) article at Advert Labs. Read it you too.
Popularity: 19% [?]
No related posts
October 14th, 2008 at 3:48 am
Visual image captchas are bad. They block out and discriminate against visually impaired users, punishing them as spammers.
Visual verification that requires you to enter characters in an image you see, or answer a question about what’s in an image you see, blocks out anyone with a visual impairment.
Clicking to get a larger image displayed does nothing at all for people with severe vision impairments who cannot even read large print.
Audio captchas are becoming available on a growing number of sites, but even they aren’t good enough. The deaf-blind use braille displays and cannot see a picture or hear a corresponding sound.
Captchas force the blind to surrendor what independence they once had on site registration and forms, reducing them to begging a sighted person or site admin for help in account creation, form submittal, group creation, anywhere there is a manditory visual verification code.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Many of these captcha-using sites add further insult to the visually impaired when they demand you to prove you are human by entering in a visual code. If you are blind and you cannot see an image, does that disqualify you as a member of the human race? According to captcha, yes!
This is not a tiny little inconvenience that occurs every once in a blue moon, but an ongoing, day to day problem. Trying to register, make comments, create groups, or fill out any form to completion is a crapshoot if you are visually impaired. If you are on your own, trying to make a submission on a site and you are pressed for time, you are completely out of hope when you run up against a captcha and there is no one you can get to help you.. Site administrators may or may not have time or the desire to help you.
When you find yourself running up against this cyber face-slapping half or more than half the time you try to make submissions to various sites, it is demoralizing. You are told again and again that you are not welcome, you are not human, forced to pester a site administrator or someone else for help with something you could do on your own before, and as far as the site administration goes, you do not exist and are not worth consideration.
It’s infuriating and a threat to the dignity of people who are at the mercy of visual verification captchas.
In addition to blind users having the door shut in their faces at sites that use visual captchas, It is evident that spam problems still occur as much as ever on sites that use captchas, proving captcha to be a cure that’s worse than the disease.
If a site administrator feels so strongly that they must employ a captcha, there is a newer, truly accessible variety that should be more effective. It prompts you with a question in text format and requires you to fill in the answer. the questions should not require a person to be able to see an image to answer.
Bad examples: Which number in the picture is red?” “Which animal in the picture above has four legs?” How is someone who can’t read print and has to rely on a screenreader supposed to know that?
Good examples: “How many legs does a cat have?” “What’s 2+2?” Math questions can be asked in a number of different ways to hault a bot and still be accessible to a user. “What’s 6 divided by 2?” What’s 5 added to 3?” Even “What color is an orange?” is still a good example, because everyone except the bots, sighted or not, knows the answer.