In a blog post by Pollstar, an interesting legal conjecture was made based upon the indictment of the Wiseguys who hacked reCAPTCHA’s CAPTCHA (see earlier news coverage). Namely, that there wasn’t really a crime committed so much as an exploitation of technology to gain a business advantage. I.e., Wiseguys merely used technology to rapidly answer Ticketmaster’s (easy-to-crack) CAPTCHAs to buy up tickets. In other words, Wiseguys followed the rules (”answer a CAPTCHA to buy a ticket”). Thus, say the pundits, there was no crime.
The real problem is the motive for such actions: acquiring an inventory of limited quantities (concert tickets) for resale on a gray market (i.e. Wiseguy’s ticket site) at a significant mark-up. The motive (suspicious pundits also say) for the indictment: Ticketmaster has undue competition for its subsidiary (TicketsNow). The end: Ticketmaster rids itself of a competitor. The corollary: consumers still end up paying too much for their tickets.
That’s a lot of ‘wrongs’ — are we really getting the ‘right’ out of this?
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I don’t, in my wildest dreams, beleive we’ll ever find the most definative example of the “worst CAPTCHA ever” — there are just too many to choose from(!). But I’ve got to believe this has to be considered a candidate:
The Worst CAPTCHA Ever?
What’s worse, it came on an announcement from the Baltimore Sun regarding the introduction of CAPTCHAs to protect one of their blogs from bot-initiated spam posts. That I found the CAPTCHA above is completely coincidental: I received a notification they were using a CAPTCHA and I went to check out whose they were using and was given the above CAPTCHA to answer. Methinks they need an easier-to-read, superior CAPTCHA! I mean really — that’s horrible!
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Our competitors’ CAPTCHAs, of which reCAPTCHA is probably the best known, are all static. That is, in comparison to our own animated CAPTCHAs, the codes you see do not move. And therein lies their weakness.
Bots use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to defeat CAPTCHAs. Our competitors fight this by distorting their CAPTCHAs, making it harder for you and I to read. And as bots evolve, our competitors have no choice but to distort their CAPTCHAs even further.
reCAPTCHA is no different — ever try to read their CAPTCHA while trying to buy a time-limited commodity (e.g. concert tickets)? Grrrr…don’t get me started!
It’s simply an unsustainable approach to CAPTCHAs.
But here’s what’s even more interesting: the opposite is also true. Google/reCAPTCHA just made changes so that their CAPTCHAs are easier to read (great for end users), but in doing so they instantly become less effective (bad for publishers and site admins).
To wit: as stated in an article entitled New Google CAPTCHAs Now Cracked, “Users now find the words easier to read – but so do machines.” In fact, security expert Jonathon Wilkins was able to increase the effectiveness of OCR on these easier-to-read CAPTCHAs by a full order of magnitude. Yikes.
Take a look at our animated CAPTCHAs: our approach does not sacrifice effectiveness for readability (and vice versa). And heck, with our AdEmbed service, we’ll even pay you to use it!
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