Researchers Break Video CAPTCHAs 109
Orome1 writes "After creating the 'Decaptcha' software to solve audio CAPTCHAs, Stanford University's researchers modified it and turned it against text and, quite recently, video CAPTCHAs with considerable success. Video CAPTCHAs have been touted by their developer, NuCaptcha, as the best and most secure method of spotting bots trying to pass themselves off as human users. Unfortunately for the company, researchers have managed to prove that over 90 percent of the company's video CAPTCHAs can be decoded by using their Decaptcha software in conjunction with optical flow algorithms created by researchers in the computer vision field of study."
Aren't all CAPTCHAs doomed to fail eventually? (Score:5, Informative)
"Anything a computer can generate it can understand."
This is why chat bots still suck. Computers cannot generate context.
ReCAPTCHA needs to be retired (Score:5, Informative)
The CAPTCHA industry is not doing well.
ReCAPTCHA needs to be retired. OCR is getting too good. ReCAPTCHA, remember, is using images from book scanning, ones that the OCR system couldn't recognize. When ReCAPTCHA started, the text presented was usually an English word. Now, if the book scanning OCR system can't figure out something, it's probably not an English word. You're lucky if it's a sequence of characters found on an A-Z keyboard. People have reported ink blots, mathematical formulas, and Cyrillic.
Worse, ReCAPTCHA's idea of the "right" answer is crowdsourced. It's possible for bots to pollute the ReCAPTCHA database, by providing the same wrong answer more than once. You only have to get one of the words right, so if you can read one, a junk response for the other works. This goes into the database as a vote for the "right answer", to be presented to someone else later. I sometimes type "whatever" when one of the images is unreadable.