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Re: I hate captchas

for

From: tedd
Date: Mar 13, 2007 6:30AM

At 1:17 PM +0000 3/13/07, Gareth Dart wrote:
>There seems to be a belief common to designers of captchas that, as
>soon as their form goes live, a small red LED will start flashing at
>the board meeting of the World Evil Hacker Organisation. Shady
>figures will exchange nods and evil cackles, temporarily cease their
>endless stroking of long haired white cats whilst they direct their
>minions to do their worst, and then the combined resources of the
>world hacking community will be targeted solely upon the objective
>of cracking their form. If they have not made that image as hard to
>read as is humanly possible, then earthquakes will strike in Japan,
>lightning will flash down from the sky and ignite the world's
>rainforests, aliens will invade and Bob the website boss will be
>mildly peeved about all the spamming.
>
>I expect this doesn't happen every time.
>
>The character string just needs to be obfuscated enough so that a
>casual 'bot with limited intelligence will throw up it's figurative
>arms and skip off somewhere else (and therefore for anything really
>important, captchas are not sufficient). What they definitely
>shouldn't do is impair the user experience.
>
>G

I agree. If captchas are "needed", then simple ones can be employed
to throw off most casual bots. What I mean by simple is generating a
random string like:

"Please type in the number seven" -- and the answer is "7"

I don't think many would have problems with that, or am I wrong?

Cheers,

tedd
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