Breaking CAPTCHA [LWN.net]

Breaking CAPTCHA

Posted Mar 21, 2008 21:47 UTC (Fri) by job (subscriber, #670)
Parent article: Breaking CAPTCHA

I never understood the hype behind these. I mean, there are plenty of things that tells humans
and computers apart, but distinguishing twisted characters isn't one of them. Maybe that's
just me, but I frequently get them wrong and wish for a firefox plugin that could solve them
for me :/ .

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Breaking CAPTCHA

Posted Mar 22, 2008 2:25 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

One of the things that tells humans and computers apart /is/ distinguishing characters. Basic
vision is one of the issues that drives modern AI research. It was several years old, but one
test of OCR programs at UNLV showed that the best OCR program was inferior to a six year old
in correctly recognizing text. Currently in transcribing etexts, Distributed Proofreaders
(which transcribes for Project Gutenberg) does a opening level of OCR, but there's still a lot
of cleanup for random volunteers to do.

Breaking CAPTCHA

Posted Mar 25, 2008 5:56 UTC (Tue) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

Maybe that's just me, but I frequently get them wrong [....]

Nope, it's not just you. I just blew at least five (six? seven?) attempts at recognizing Yahoo CAPTCHAS. I was so bad that they locked me out for 24 hours, because they think I'm trying to break in. :-/