Re: Integrated captcha?

I am well aware of what is going on.  They will attack some
where they payoff may be useful, but many others will get 
bypassed.

I've seen way to many captcha programs that are now useless
because of these big team undergrounds.  It wasn't that long
ago that some of the porn sites were being used to break
captcha.  Getting the pornadicts to break a captcha before
they can get their next video clip is making use of very cheap
labor market.  My thought is that captcha is probably easier
to break than the random question issue presented here.
The underground already has all the tools to deal with
the various captcha images.  The captchas used to be where
the big wins for them were located, so the tools got built
to defeat them.  It takes them more time/effort to wade through
the random questions one may put into something local.

Create several sets of Q/A.  Rotate the set every so often.
If the underground spends the time to incorperate one set
of Q/A, it won't be long and you'll rotate it out and they
need to go back to finding the new set.

I also have to deal with a community that use of captcha is 
impossible. They just don't work on a braille terminal.  Since
captcha also thwarts most OCR readers, you can't expect them
to deal with audio readers either.  Those with color-blindness
are hurt by many badly designed captcha systems.  There are some
where I've needed to cycle through several attempts before finding
one I could read.  Is that bent thing a P or an F, an A or R, c or e?
Did that other colored like obscure part of the letter or not?
The frustration level on some of these may drive real people to
alternatives that they can get onto without the hassles.

This isn't the place to debate the merits/pitfals of captcha.
I do think it interesting that captcha tends is thought to be
the solution to many of these problems.  It was several years
ago, but personally I think it's time has passed and we really
need something better that won't cut off a significant and
growing part of the population.  People are aging and as they
do so, more will be dealing with various vision problems that
many captcha's fail to take into account.

-_Gene


"Perry E. Metzger" made the following keystrokes:
 >
 >[email protected] writes:
 >>  >> The idea is to foil robots. Not people.
 >>  
 >>  >People program the robots. A person can feed the right program into
 >>  >the robot in a couple of minutes given a mechanism like that.
 >>
 >> Consider this like the car-alarm or the little brinks sign some houses
 >> have.  By implementing something like this, you have made it a less
 >> attactive target than the 100's of other sites that are out there.
 >
 >1) Not really, no. You clearly haven't been following the current
 >   situation in the "underground economy" here. Suffice it to say, at
 >   this point breaking captchas and similar things is a big business,
 >   and they'll attack even "small sites" with one offs. There are huge
 >   teams of people working in fairly professional offices in the
 >   former Soviet Union and India who do this all day long for a
 >   pitance.
 >
 >2) Using a better one off captcha that would require actual work for
 >   the opponent to break is not significantly harder.
 >
 >Perry
 >-- 
 >Perry E. Metzger		[email protected]