Comments on: Ideas to Toss: Alternative Captcha?

By: yurikolovsky

yurikolovsky — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:12:42 +0000

using pictures as identification can be easily cracked by spammers, spammers will automatically download each picture you have, then use humans to reference them to the correct answer in a database, (a million images would be referenced pretty easily by a team of people working for a month) and then each time a dog pops out the computer will compare the image to the images in the databse and identify the answer
obviously the spammers database of victims images needs to be updated and worked through, which costs money, but spammers will get a way around that too.
and use pure css instead of text to send messages and ads to the victims, so that anti-spam machines do not see any inapropriate text
reference: http://twinturbo.org/microsoft/will-asirra-replace-captcha/
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/cssfont.html

2+2 can be read by a bot and added together, unless its a very-stupid bot…
there are even screen reading bots that identify any symbol necessary

googles, yahoo, hotmail capthcas have been broken.
for now the spammers programs are expensive, so normal users can use captcha but soon the programs will be cheap, what will we do then?
we need a stable replacement

how about we have animals with names on their collars, names would be random and the images would be plenty?
this can be cracked too, but its like a combination of “captcha” and “pick out the odd one”

By: Suresh

Suresh — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:38:36 +0000

I have seen another beautiful hack as a replacement for CAPTCHAs. The idea is to have a hidden form with a CAPTCHA like question. If the form is submitted, then you know it is a BOT. Of course this is easy to break, but i like the idea of making BOT do something extra instead of a human.

By: rishabh

rishabh — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:59:03 +0000

I have already seen the 2+2 idea being implemented (I think it was Ipatrix.com)

Pretty decent.

By: Prashanth

Prashanth — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:16:17 +0000

I agree with you guys too! Captchas are ultra boring now-a-days! especially when you sit at nights and try to download a movie from Rapidshare!

By: Vinodh Nandakumar

Vinodh Nandakumar — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:06:53 +0000

Why not have something simple like

2 + 2 = ?

After all, you just want to check if it’s a human or not!

By: erinshizuewilliams

erinshizuewilliams — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:50:32 +0000

I’m glad that I’m not the only one that has trouble. I often get sent back to try again.

p.s. I’m glad we can tell humans and computers apart.

By: Ramanujam

Ramanujam — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:21:24 +0000

True….Captcha will soon die off….

There are few sites who are already using such alternatives.
Thoof.com a user news aggregation site gives a picture with animals and asks to click on the cats.
And another site from Izea.com uses stuff like..
Jack and Jill went up the ____
what comes after June …..
Spell God backwards….

Indeed It’s fun and a good alternative to the random numbers and flying alphabets!