Standing around our cubicles during an informal meeting, my team discussed how to circumvent captchas.
Alipé: You set up a porn site and write a program to copy the captcha directly onto it. People who visit your porn site will end up filling out the captcha.
Hugh: Way to harness the power of porn seekers!
Alipé: There is no greater power on this earth.
Ah the great VCR battle. Manny people believe that the Video 2000 system of Philips and Grundig lost to VHS because Philips didn't want to do business with the porn industry.
ReplyDeleteThis story reminds me of your figlet / unfiglet story. (One of your best!)
ReplyDeleteBoth solutions seam to harness the powers of computers but in reality the power of humans is harnessed.
Anyway, I have built a little porn site to circumvent your captchas and if you can read this comment Alipé's idea is working.
Thanks Alipé!!
alternatively, have people leave comments on your blog. the captcha is ptxpyliu
ReplyDelete"Alipe's" idea is approximately as old as CAPTCHAs themselves. I very much doubt he even invented it independently.
ReplyDeletehttp://google.com/search?q=porn+captcha
This technique has been frequently reported (often in the mainstream media) as being actively used, but never with a convincing reference that I've seen.
In reality, I doubt that it's ever been used, and I suspect it might not even work.
Recent news about google.cn
ReplyDeletehttp://www.google.com/search?hl=en&newwindow=1&q=google.cn+%E5%84%BF%E5%AD%90&btnG=Search
(%E5%84%BF%E5%AD%90＝儿子/son)
Is http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=123&category=Technology&catID=4 the truth?
Alipé did not claim that he invented the method. He was sharing an already-known method with the rest of us.
ReplyDelete-Niniane
The simplest way I can think of to break captchas is to have an online game called "Can you identify the word?"
ReplyDelete(And we know where the image/captcha would come from).
Give users points for every sucessfully broken captcha.
Put in a ranklist and monthly prizes and see people trying to beat each other in the ranklist and breaking the captchas for you.
Someone once told me about captcha sweatshops...wow.
ReplyDeleteThat's funny -- that tactic has come up before in conversations with folks about the level of protection offered by CAPTCHAs.
ReplyDeleteI suggested it here as a means for expanding the search for missing computer scientist Jim Gray. People are using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to search satellite images for evidence of his yacht.
>>>>Someone once told me about captcha sweatshops...wow.
ReplyDeleteThey exist, I know it as fact.