Are GMail Going Overboard?

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Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 4:17 am

It appears that these captchas are becoming impossible even for humans to figure out. All I wanted was to open a new GMail account, and this is what I get:

Please tell me I'm not the only one who can't make sense of half of that.

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 4:31 am

One of my pet peeves lately. I understand why companies use captcha but they are getting so hard to make out that sometimes I have to try 6 or 7 times. And not just gmail.

That example is certainly the worst I've seen. It's ridiculous! Confused

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 4:32 am

The question is, are all of the ladhell modalities coming from this site going overboard enough with the captchas?
I'd hate to see us getting outdone by those snobs at gmail.

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 6:16 am

@Juan, I thought I was mentally deficient (that is yet to be determined) because I can't do it on the first time. At least there are two of us...

@argent, that is horrible. I tried to make out Karaoke, but I have no idea what it would look like in block letters.

As with most things, it is the innocent that suffer for the wrongs of others. Evil or Very Mad

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 7:22 am

Always have a problem with Gmail reading those damn things

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 7:50 am

I've experienced increasing frustration with this as well!

One of the free email services (Yahoo?) makes you type in a captcha every time you send a message that contains text from their spam filter, at least on new accounts. By hitting reply to everything in my spam box, I've typed in a lot of captchas, and re-typed, and re-re-typed on occasion.

If there's an update of S3CUR!7Y SH13ld, or similar project in the works, I'd suggest an utterly incomprehensible captcha generator that bumps the lad back to the first screen if they get it wrong.

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 8:11 am

Oh yeah. Agree with you 100%. Try the audio option and it has just as much clarity - NOT! The hotmail captcha is nowhere near as unintelligible but it repeatedly refuses to accept the correct entry.

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 4:14 pm

The hardest one I ever confronted was for a forum of history buffs. To prevent spammers from signing up they require that you answer a question. And you only get one, you can't opt to try a different one. Mine concerned the name of the Confederate general in an obscure Civil War battle. It wasn't hard to Google up the information: JEB Stuart. But my entry failed. I tried again, figuring I mistyped. No luck. I knew it was the right answer, but then I realized that although he was commonly known as Jeb, those were initials. So I tried J.E.B. Stuart. Nope. I went back to Jeb but this time upper and lower case. Nope. Finally I went with James Ewell Brown Stuart and they let me in. I was ready to give up by then, figuring this just isn't worth it.... Laughing

But there's no spam on that forum.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 12 Nov 2009 Posts: 2

I don't really understand the reasoning behind these things. I thought that there's no way for a spam program to read images at all. What's the point of making the words/numbers on the images harder to read/illegible for humans? Rolling Eyes

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 5:27 pm

^^ It's actually easier than you'd imagine. If the letters look "normal" - that is, they are in a recognizable font - then writing a program that can read the images is not a difficult task.

Sir Cumfrence wrote:

Try the audio option and it has just as much clarity

I actually did try that on that very occasion. It scared me so much I had to shower in holy water.

In hindsight, I should have recorded that and posted it to.

Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 7:37 pm

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 9:12 am

I think someone should make a web page for lads to enter a captcha to get their MCTN - think how hard those ones could be to read.... Twisted Evil

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 9:29 am

There was a thing on the Register last year where spammers had written a program that could crack gmail captchas and sign up multiple accounts.

If gmail go on at this rate, you'll need some kind of decryption software to create an account. Confused

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2009 10:20 am

Mr. Green wrote:

I think someone should make a web page for lads to enter a captcha to get their MCTN - think how hard those ones could be to read.... Twisted Evil

Someone here was supposed to be creating one a few months back. I haven't heard any more about it though. The idea was to make it impossible, not just hard.

Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 11:06 pm

Not hard to pull off, just make one letter in each unreadable, and give a new captcha each time. Of course, NOTHING would actually work.

Then for bonus points, you build in something to encourage them, and a timer for how long they sit there entering captchas.