Internet Advertisers Kill Text-Based CAPTCHA

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The best way to eliminate CAPTCHA? Get rid of the garbled text and replace it with mini-ads that require you to recite the company's slogan. :rolleyes:

Rather than demanding that you decipher a completely pointless combination of fuzzy words, you could simply be asked to recite a well-known company slogan. The security pop-up might even ask you to view an ad image and then type the company's name.
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I always, somehow, mess up the CAPTHCHA phrases. Even when I take a minute to look at the darn thing. Saying [insert slogan] is heck of a lot less annoying than trying to typing the gibberish, and failing 3 times and resorting to the "Audio" part.
 
Still way to easy to break. Solution is to get rid of CAPTCHAs altogether, and replace it with system heuristics that analyze user posts and trends. Anyone with bad post structure or perfect post structure should be removed. Gets rid of spammers, bots, people who can't type and grammar nazis all in one go.
 
I watch little old fashioned commercial-filled TV, browse with adblock/noscript (disabled on [H] of course), and usually listen to the local classical station or NPR in the car. I'm only exposed to maybe 3-5% of the advertising your average TV watching/IE browsing/Pop station listener encounters, I would probably fail an advertisement quiz captcha.

It's kind of cool though, when I go to the bar or some other place with old fashioned TV on, all the commercials are new to me!
 
I hate Captcha, especially now. Most times I can't even make out the letters
 
Kueller said:
I'm only exposed to maybe 3-5% of the advertising your average TV watching/IE browsing/Pop station listener encounters, I would probably fail an advertisement quiz captcha.
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The ones that I've seen require you to listen to about 5 seconds of the ad before telling you what to put in the little box. It's honestly less annoying than having to figure out if that's an L, an I, or a 9 on a regular Captcha.

Of course, I'm a bigger fan of things like "How many letters are in the site's name?" or "What do you get if you add 34 and 8?" type questions.
 
OK, you work in a cubicle farm and you have to play sounds? We'll see who has headphones all the time now
 
And I thought they couldn't make it any worse than CAPTCHA
 
TeeJayHoward said:
The ones that I've seen require you to listen to about 5 seconds of the ad before telling you what to put in the little box. It's honestly less annoying than having to figure out if that's an L, an I, or a 9 on a regular Captcha.

Of course, I'm a bigger fan of things like "How many letters are in the site's name?" or "What do you get if you add 34 and 8?" type questions.
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^This. I'd like to see the incorrect answers to the math.
 
i had one yesterday that had 5 symbols and told me to drag the scissors into the designated circle to continue.
 
sometimes i get so frustrated with Laugh@ya, it seems like they don't
want me to get it and they are at the office watching the people keep missing, and beetting on what comes up next....
 
Just block the server that delivers the ads and you get captcha back (all of these applets still use it as a fallback). I prefer seeing captcha than some bullshit ad.
 
Has anyone ever done a thorough study of how the massive bombardment of advertising affects the psychology of the average Westerner?

I mean, you wake up to the radio listening to adds, hit snooze, get in the shower and see a bunch of logos for various brands from your shampoo, to soap, to toothbrush, grab a box of cereal with another slogan and character, turn on the TV to check the weather and see commercials, drive to work and get more radio commercials while passing by numerous billboards with flashing ads on you with an advertisment coming up on your GPS's free traffic subscription, get to work and browse the net with more advertisements everywhere, get home and watch some funny vids on youtube with an add on the top right and popup add in the video you click away, then go check your personal email and see more advertisements.

The brain just has to be so overloaded.
 
I hate Captcha, I HATE IT. I would rather chew glass whist taking an arrow to my gonads.
 
Tinypic has been doing this for a little while now, and they're even more obnoxious than captcha's.
 
Here is how you fix this thing:

Offer micro-payments, for every submit, as an alternative.

Give the poster (or whatever the form is for) the choice between solving the CAPTCHA or whatever, OR allowing a tiny sum to be transferred from their account (pay-pal or whatever).

Make the payment so tiny that it wont matter to most people who only post something now and then, but large enough so it would kill the economy for any spammer that tries to spray the web with meeelions of posts.

There are many ways to tweak the concept, and its thresholds.
For example, you could probably get away with requiring a somewhat larger payment, if the money goes straight to some charity.

You're welcome.

(And of course 0.00001 % on every amount, to me :D )
 
love it, we pay for TV to see 25% of the air time as advertising, maybe they should have free tv with adds or paid tv with no ads, same with the net... lol
 
Johnny_Utah said:
I hate Captcha, I HATE IT. I would rather chew glass whist taking an arrow to my gonads.
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Yeah, me too.
I never get it right the first time and frequently give up after 3-4 attempts.

I tried listening to the phrase a couple times and it was the creepiest thing I ever heard. Never do that again.
 
ggplay said:
What if, I'm not wearing headphones?
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I just had one today at work. No volume. It just played a commerical and then near the end it said "Type: whatever it told me to type".

So the volume thing is pointless.
 
PornoSatan said:
Just another garbage advertising excuse. Text captchas can still be useful, look at the reCaptcha service.

http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore
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Better than nothing, but still a real waste of time, I've used recaptcha on a blog site I ran and it would STILL get spam posts many times day. The cost to solve a recaptcha is ridiculously low since they are just words, and due to scale it's been targeted by many.

You realize there are services in india and several poorer parts of the world where people that have access to companies solve captchas for literally pennies or less each. It's pretty sad really that spam is still profitable enough to pay for that.
 
Not going to work. How do I know? Because I beat the Logo Quiz game by using Google Goggles. If Google Goggles can do a decent job figuring out partial logo images, I'm sure some smart hacker will figure out mini-ad CAPTCHA replacement.
 
tazeat said:
Better than nothing, but still a real waste of time, I've used recaptcha on a blog site I ran and it would STILL get spam posts many times day. The cost to solve a recaptcha is ridiculously low since they are just words, and due to scale it's been targeted by many.

You realize there are services in india and several poorer parts of the world where people that have access to companies solve captchas for literally pennies or less each. It's pretty sad really that spam is still profitable enough to pay for that.
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It's really not those companies you have to worry about, it's the automated programs that are VERY good at streamlining the spamming process. Some will notify the user when they can't solve a captcha in a little window for you to conveniently solve at your leisure. My point is though that reCaptcha isn't a completely pointless endeavor, everyone is being productive when they solve one. These ad based captchas are just another nook in humanity being infested by advertisers.
 
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