According to Alan Turing’s theorem, Cylon technology is one cracked CAPTCHA algorithm away from genocidal positronic sentience… and Rapidshare’s doing its part. Over at Crunch Gear, John Biggs — secret brother, secret lover — spotted this CAPTCHA in which Rapidshare expected him to identify only the letters with hidden kitty cats in them. Curiously, this prompted Biggs to lament: “Basically, you need a doctorate to understand captchas now.” As we showed such a preternatural acumen for the study in our kindergartener years, we wish we’d have heard of Biggs’ alma mater before now: a transgressive liberal arts post-grad school where philosophy doctorates in fontocryptographical kitty cat identification are so willy-nilly handed out.
Basically, you need a doctorate to understand captchas now [Crunch Gear]
I first encountered these a couple weeks ago. Initially I couldn’t understand why entering the words as displayed wasn’t getting me results. When I realized the game, it then became an issue of squinting right to figure out which of those cats was exactly perfect. Frakkin’ toasters.
The first time I saw one of these, it took me a good eight tries to get in. The same with the second time. The third time, I actually stopped to look at it past a “thing plus cat equals good” standpoint.
It’s letters and numbers, and either of those plus a dog is not good.
– at least, I think that’s a dog. Maybe I’m wrong, and it’s just a cat that’s misshapen in an unacceptable way.
It’s a pretty cute idea, but (the idea + misshapen letters + misshapen pictures + the pictures obscured by the letters) makes the whole thing rather too difficult for real use.
If I had to do this once when I first signed up for a site, I might not mind tooo much. If I had to keep doing it at all other captcha-generating events (external links in comments, etc), I’d leave the site PDQ.
The only good thing about this everybody verses spammers/trolls “arms” race is that computer science is being advanced by it.
If some day I can send Google a picture of a nameless object, and in .001 seconds find out who makes it and how much that little bit that broke off costs, this will all be worth it.
Now I know they are working on it, but not fast enough…
The CAPTCHA with the cats/dogs/eff-knows-what is the work of the devil. That is all.
more like CRAPTCHA
I wish more sites used RECAPTCHA. At least then I feel like I’m doing a tiny bit of good.
I really can’t tell which ones are cats and which ones aren’t.
This is one of those stories that I just don’t have an answer too, I just know I’ll hate trying to decipher kitty litte…er letters for the next 5 years. I already use the “Hear these letters” option 50% of the time now anyway.
I really can’t tell which ones are cats and which ones aren’t.
Yeah – it’s like the “Human/Bear Security Trade-Off”
( http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html )
in which it is observed that “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
Make a CAPTCHA that a bot can’t crack, and you’ve made a CAPTCHA that many humans can’t solve either . Or, at least, a CAPTCHA that many humans won’t bother trying to solve, on account of how they just wanted to use your Web site, not test their intelligence.
#9 LOL Did you just call me a dumb tourist? I get your point though.
The worst bit is that RapidShare requires you too wait 2 minutes for a download and will make you wait again if your fail the CAPTCHA…
I figured RapidShare’s kitty-CAPTCHAs were as much a marketing tool as a cost-savings tool. (Cost-savings and not security, because the captcha is shown when you try to download a file — they’re mainly for stopping auto-downloading.) Between the wait period and annoying captcha, I think they hope that people just say “screw it” and pay for a month of their “premium” download service, where there are no waits and no captchas.
I’d suspect far more people are to just use MegaUpload or other similiar services instead, however.
because they provide the pic of the cat, this is still not as impossible to beat given the software that beats these things have image matching algorithms.
the best system is still what I saw in boingboing a while back. provide real pics of animals (e.g. 4 pics : LOL cat , Eight Belles, Snoppy,a real cat, tony the tiger) and in text ask user to identify position(s) of cat(s) , 1 and 4.
the requirement to translate image to symbol (text) would require more than image matching.