I was posting a couple of comments on Kaiser’s blog, and I’m finding the CAPTCHA’s there increasingly hard to read. I was thinking that some good software would be helpful.
Is there a browser attachment I could download that would automatically read CAPTCHA’s and translate them into letters and numbers? This would be very helpful. I’d appreciate any tips in this direction.
Wouldn't it defeat the purpose of CAPTCHA if such software existed? In fact, I'm pretty sure this is why they are getting harder to read – to outpace the ability of software to interpret the letters and numbers.
Or maybe this post is some sort of subtle joke…
If such a thing existed, CAPTCHAs would be completely pointless. Spammers would use it to post spam comments, automatically create millions of accounts with free email services, etc. Indeed, the process of developing such a tool is called "breaking" a CAPTCHA, analogously to breaking a lock. I'm sure that some CAPTCHAs have been broken, but I do not know the details.
generally people charge for captcha-breaking software, for the obvious reason.
I personally use the keyboard actuator interface…though it's more of a hardware solution.
Wow, way to completely miss the joke, commenters #1 and #2.
Well sometimes you can cheat on ReCaptcha (the one which shows you two words), only one word is known. Thus you can write the easier one among the two and any random letters for the other one, this guarantees 50% chance of passing the captcha.
Andrew the straight man strikes again. He even looks a little like Bud Abbott if you squint right.
Charles and Dave, this is a joke.
I thought his advice to use multilevel models for everything was funnier.
Plowshare actually uses standard OCR libraries quite successfully for the captchas on Megaupload and the like. Captchas aren't as hard as they might seem, for many sites.
bwahaha
I believe you can find someone to do it for you for a very low price using Mechanical Turk (mturk.com).
let me know when that happens 8)
I hear you can hire someone from India to do this sort of thing real cheap.
Now if only there were some way to have the browser remember all my passwords, so I didn't have to…