Posted by shimmyshack on 05/01/07 13:28

On May 1, 2:15 pm, Evil Otto <zburn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 30, 11:37 pm, shimmyshack <matt.fa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > i definately agree, captchas present significant difficulty to fully
> > sighted humans, let alone partially or unsighted people, or those with
> > difficulties recognising text patterns, to get round this you might
> > see reduced character spaces, or even the use of common words, such as
> > googles anti-script captchas.
>
> Am I the only one in the world who gets captchas right nearly all of
> the time? Seriously, maybe one in 20 gives me problems.
>
> I agree its bot-killing ability is probably overstated, but is it
> really that hard to get this stuff right?

you are the exception that proves the rule
the only captchas which actually /have/ bot-killing ability are the
ones which are so ambiguous that humans get them wrong a good
percentage of the time! see the link provided. The other 19 I would
say are probably from applications like phpBB and the like, which are
at time of writing 100% PWN'd.
And then theres the 30% with some kind of substantive reading
impairment, or colour blindness etc...
Effective captchas are so few and far between but do so much to hamper
the average user that the trade off isn't good enough - its the same
reason anyone can just walk into a hostpital - that security operates
internally.
In the limit, captchas are illegal unless another method is provided
which is probably easy to use from a bot's perspective

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