The squished-up word is the control word, and the straight one is the unknown one. You only need to get the wavy word right and just guess at all the cut-off examples.
^ This is the way to go. Don't waste any energy on the "unknown" word, just fill out the one that has been smeared out and fill in bogus for the rest.
If you want to post on 4chan and don't have a Pass, you need to solve a captcha for every single post. It becomes easier with practice, I fail maybe 1 in 10 captchas. And the more captchas you solve correctly, the easier the captchas for your IP get.
If enough people colluded to use the same unknown word, say "foobar", then couldn't they train recaptcha to believe that is the true value of the word? If I understand recaptcha correctly, and assuming they don't detect collusion well, then eventually the known word pool would get poisoned with a surplus of foobars.
>Checking for offensive words is only one of the filters we have. Even without that filter, it’s essentially impossible to get recaptcha to return a false result.
This has happened in google image labeler. Now offline, it was a game where two random people were matched and needed to find new tags for the same image - the scoring was cooperative so points were given when you both chose the same word in the same game. /b/ of course quickly organised the jesusporn metagame... Label the first image as jesus, second as porn, third with jesus, etc. This resulted highest scores for some time.
Probably the mankind will hate me, but I'm the kind of person who answers correctly the control word, and writes an incorrect, but similar word for the unknown one.
I've solved a lot of captcha's in my time, and really have never experienced the trouble the author is detailing. Not only am I relieved when I see a reCaptcha since they are some of the easiest and most forgiving challenges, but I don't recall ever having repeated bad/unsolvable challenges presented on the same page.
Sure, maybe sometimes you get a weird one and fail it. But typically the next challenge is easy to pass. Seems the author cherry-picked some of the worst reCaptcha examples for the article, but wrote it in a way that made it seem they were presented back-to-back.
Besides this -- the article makes no attempt to offer a better solution.
Captcha's are really the best way we have right now to "prove" someone is not a bot. Hidden Form fields, etc, don't work and are easily spoofed. Sure Captcha's can be beaten by bots sometimes -- but I trust Google's scale/volume with ReCaptcha to handle that for me (for the most part).
>Besides this -- the article makes no attempt to offer a better solution.
That's completely irrelevant. Criticism is not about solving the problem. It's about pointing out that the current solution is inadequate.
Most movie critics never wrote, directed, or acted in movies. It doesn't invalidate their criticism.
In fact, your criticism of the other poster's criticism doesn't offer a better solution than criticism either. You simply criticize that post. (And that's OK, if ironic.)
I hate with a passion the attitude of "Don't bring me problems. Bring me solutions". Sure, if you've got a solution as well, that's great. But I'd much rather know there's a problem that you don't have a solution to than be completely ignorant of it.
I go even a bit further: don't bring me solutions, just tell me what makes your life difficult.
As a tools developer, I observe that user-provided solutions almost never address anything outside their specific problem, which is potentially only one of many things the feature with the issue is designed to address.
Some of my colleagues tend to point to user feedback as gospel, including the ways suggested to "fix" the issue. But those fixes are often myopic and laden with technical debt.
But I will never disbelieve a claim that something is confusing, or hard to use (almost never, anyway; some people are idiots). Just don't be offended if I don't fix it in the way you came up with.
>That's completely irrelevant. Criticism is not about solving the problem. It's about pointing out that the current solution is inadequate.
Well it's a pointless criticism when everyone knows CAPTCHAs suck. People have spent a lot of time working on them trying to find better ones that work consistently at scale and have failed.
It's similar to someone now writing a criticism on the testing procedures at the Chernobyl nuclear power plan.
Its turning in to the new version of "3rd world outsourced phone support" A strong indicator the user simply doesn't care about the customer experience.
For some industries / companies, this is perfectly OK and BAU. For others it can be a company-killer.
I see a captcha and I know the company doesn't like me, doesn't like what I'm doing, and doesn't care if I know how they feel about me. And for some situations that's perfectly OK. Certainly not all.
In the past month the reCAPTCHA challenges I have encountered have been like the article. I just have to hit reload until I can get something remotely readable or I managed to guess the letters correctly.
I don't quite see why people assume recaptchas are real words, they haven't been for a really long time. The control is always a made-up word and almost always solvable. If you can't solve the other one, enter whatever.
Same reason 4chan reCaptcha is no longer used to digitize the other word. If they had their way the correct answer to all reCaptchas would eventually become "nigger nigger"[1].
Fun times.
[1] the idea was to always write the correct word and just enter "nigger" as the other word. This eventually led to reCaptcha disregarding 4chan answers from the pool of resolving weird words.
You aren't supposed to realize it or do it. Google uses the human's work on solving the unknown word to either get street numbers from photos or digitize books.
However, the whole point of them having the humans do that work is /they do not know the correct answer/. Since they do not know the correct answer they cannot be basing the test of the CAPTCHA on it. From there it is not a big leap to surmise that you are only actually being tested on the word that actually looks distorted on purpose.
Either you just know because internet or you get it from trial and error.
It's probably written on recaptcha website or wikipedia article, but basically you get presented one word that machine can't read (the distorted letters) and something out of a book that google had digitized and uses you to ocr it. You also get a lot of address numbers for google street view.
Just input the distorted word and type anything for the other, and it will work. Of course the instructions won't tell you that or else people would act accordingly and google would lose this free labor source for the tedious work of proofreading digitized version of books.
>I would expect people to know how reCaptcha works.
Why should you even expect that? Recaptcha was interesting in 2006, but anyone not following the news around that time or around the its acquisition by Google might not have learned this.
If most other people entered the same thing then the word gets into the database, and your guess may not pass muster. So the question is - what percentage of users should be able to get the captcha before the answer is set?
You're probably right. But the fact remains that captchas aren't good enough. They can be partially automated; blackhats can use captcha solving farms which will be at least as accurate as the average human (probably more accurate, I imagine).
A better solution might employ heuristics similar to DDoS mitigation techniques. I really don't know, but there is a need for something better here.
"I've solved a lot of captcha's in my time, and really have never experienced the trouble the author is detailing."
That might be the problem right here. Try browsing with Tor or passing through an anonymizing proxy. The more you solve correctly, the easier they get. The more unknown you are, the harder.
If you look farther down the page, you'll notice hashcash launched their proof-of-work captcha replacement thing today. I'm not saying it's related, but both of these are on the front page together.
