Category Archives: captchas

Bots Are Better than Humans at Solving CAPTCHAs

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Interesting research: “An Empirical Study & Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs“:

Abstract: For nearly two decades, CAPTCHAS have been widely used as a means of protection against bots. Throughout the years, as their use grew, techniques to defeat or bypass CAPTCHAS have continued to improve. Meanwhile, CAPTCHAS have also evolved in terms of sophistication and diversity, becoming increasingly difficult to solve for both bots (machines) and humans. Given this long-standing and still-ongoing arms race, it is critical to investigate how long it takes legitimate users to solve modern CAPTCHAS, and how they are perceived by those users…

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CAPTCHA

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This is an actual CAPTCHA I was shown when trying to log into PayPal.

As an actual human and not a bot, I had no idea how to answer. Is this a joke? (Seems not.) Is it a Magritte-like existential question? (It’s not a bicycle. It’s a drawing of a bicycle. Actually, it’s a photograph of a drawing of a bicycle. No, it’s really a computer image of a photograph of a drawing of a bicycle.) Am I overthinking this? (Definitely.) I stared at the screen, paralyzed, for way too long.

It’s probably the best CAPTCHA I have ever encountered; a computer would have just answered…

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Why Isn’t CAPTCHA Dead Yet?

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The team at AltaVista (RIP) invented the CAPTCHA in 1997. At the time, it was a groundbreaking solution to a niche problem: preventing bots from entering URLs into the web search engine. Fast forward to 2021, and there are more than 20 different CAPTCH… Continue reading Why Isn’t CAPTCHA Dead Yet?→

Why Isn’t CAPTCHA Dead Yet?

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The team at AltaVista (RIP) invented the CAPTCHA in 1997. At the time, it was a groundbreaking solution to a niche problem: preventing bots from entering URLs into the web search engine. Fast forward to 2021, and there are more than 20 different CAPTCH… Continue reading Why Isn’t CAPTCHA Dead Yet?→

Breaking Semantic Image CAPTCHAs

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Interesting research: Suphannee Sivakorn, Iasonas Polakis and Angelos D. Keromytis, "I Am Robot: (Deep) Learning to Break Semantic Image CAPTCHAs": Abstract: Since their inception, captchas have been widely used for preventing fraudsters from performing illicit actions. Nevertheless, economic incentives have resulted in an armsrace, where fraudsters develop automated solvers and, in turn, captcha services tweak their design to break the… Continue reading Breaking Semantic Image CAPTCHAs→