Minteye Wants to Put an End to the CAPTCHA

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
Have you ever filled out a form on the Internet, only to be reset for failing to read the CAPTCHA letters incorrectly? Everyone has at one time or another and Minteye wants to change all that into a simple one step system.

Minteye claims its product offers a higher conversion rate (94%, instead of a 76% industry standard) and may even increase your site’s security, while introducing a new revenue stream.
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This is probably easiest captcha to crack I have seen in my life. First off it's based on company logos and with a database of logos it would crack 90% of the cases. For the rest a simple OCR program would decipher the rest based on how many words on each frame it able to translate (OCR programs are notoriously bad on read text on slight slants). This with the combination of line analysis (the image with the most straight lines) would give the a near 100% crack rate.
 
The author of the article is a real dick:

If you’re still sold on text or image identification CAPTCHAs, then by all means stick with them, but please don’t ask me to submit a form on your site.
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The best captchas are text based questions that require real human input, such as "what is the product of 2 and the number six", written as such to prevent bot reads. This system is user friendly and accessible to those who have sight impairments.

This is just not so subtle advertising that now plays off the fear of web surfers. Googe's recaptcha system has pretty good fall back for users who can not see or do not support JavaScript.
 
I have a better idea, eliminate the retarded captcha system. It doesn't actually do anything useful. I have handled numerous high traffic sites with and without it. I notice little difference between well managed sites without captcha and those with it. The only group that gets affected are actual people. It doesn't deter the bots one bit.
 
JosiahBradley said:
The author of the article is a real dick:



The best captchas are text based questions that require real human input, such as "what is the product of 2 and the number six", written as such to prevent bot reads. This system is user friendly and accessible to those who have sight impairments.

This is just not so subtle advertising that now plays off the fear of web surfers. Googe's recaptcha system has pretty good fall back for users who can not see or do not support JavaScript.
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Those are awful if they include advanced math like that. :mad: I hate having to go online to search what junk like "product" means and then, once I finally find out, then I have to open calc.exe to do the actual calculations. :( It's stupid. They should at least ask questions that a normal human can answer.
 
SkribbelKat said:
Those are awful if they include advanced math like that. :mad: I hate having to go online to search what junk like "product" means and then, once I finally find out, then I have to open calc.exe to do the actual calculations. :( It's stupid. They should at least ask questions that a normal human can answer.
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I sincerely hope this is a troll post; if not, this is what's wrong with 'merica. Students in the 50's were learning calculus and Latin in high school, now most students can't even learn fucking algebra.
 
Sherk said:
I sincerely hope this is a troll post; if not, this is what's wrong with 'merica. Students in the 50's were learning calculus and Latin in high school, now most students can't even learn fucking algebra.
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Read his sig :D
 
The only thing captcha keeps out is legitimate users.
When I am on a site that requires it, I do not even bother trying anymore and just leave.
 
Sherk said:
I sincerely hope this is a troll post; if not, this is what's wrong with 'merica. Students in the 50's were learning calculus and Latin in high school, now most students can't even learn fucking algebra.
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Sheesh, don't get so upset. Most people don't do any math from one day to the next using invented "let's make mathematicians into an obscure, important field by making up dumb names for no duh concepts" terminology. Like I go around all day long thinking, "Alice has to drive six hundred miles to Chicago. She has a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and she's wearing sunglasses. If her ex police car gets 11 MPG on the highway and holds 20 gallons of fuel what is the product of the two numbers which compute to maximum distance between stops for gas?"

If you run around all day thinking like that, more power to you, but not many people make their lives into a word problem. They usually just say, "Hit it!" and run with the money to save the Penguin's orphanage.
 
The only problem is that this would be much easier to crack than captcha.
 
Fail captcha is fail. It requires Javascript to run.

A normal captcha has the advantage of running without the necessity of Javascript.

Fail decision is fail.
 
SkribbelKat said:
Those are awful if they include advanced math like that. :mad: I hate having to go online to search what junk like "product" means and then, once I finally find out, then I have to open calc.exe to do the actual calculations. :( It's stupid. They should at least ask questions that a normal human can answer.
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I hereby nominate you for [H] member of the year.

:cool:
 
Knil said:
This is probably easiest captcha to crack I have seen in my life. First off it's based on company logos and with a database of logos it would crack 90% of the cases. For the rest a simple OCR program would decipher the rest based on how many words on each frame it able to translate (OCR programs are notoriously bad on read text on slight slants). This with the combination of line analysis (the image with the most straight lines) would give the a near 100% crack rate.
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I think the easier think to crack about this system is the finite number of positions the slider can be in. If there are a thousand or million positions it's still only that many guesses for a tireless bot to pick from.
 
I find capcha annoying & is probably easier completed by bots then it is by real people anyway..
 
JosiahBradley said:
The best captchas are text based questions that require real human input, such as "what is the product of 2 and the number six", written as such to prevent bot reads. This system is user friendly and accessible to those who have sight impairments.
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I have used ones like this before, but if it becomes widespread, won't it be pretty simple to write a bot to crack it?

Afterall, Wolfram Alpha can tell you the answer automatically using the exact text you gave...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+product+of+2+and+the+number+six

Doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to write a program that could answer most simple general knowledge questions and also basic maths questions even if you word them funny, Wolfram Alpha already does the latter.

SkribbelKat said:
Those are awful if they include advanced math like that. :mad: I hate having to go online to search what junk like "product" means and then, once I finally find out, then I have to open calc.exe to do the actual calculations. :( It's stupid. They should at least ask questions that a normal human can answer.
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Sherk said:
I sincerely hope this is a troll post; if not, this is what's wrong with 'merica. Students in the 50's were learning calculus and Latin in high school, now most students can't even learn fucking algebra.
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You may laugh, but I have signed up for a forum that had some simple maths question you had to type the answer to in order to sign up and it took me half a dozen tries because I misread the damned question because of the way it was worded, and I have an Engineering degree with a high distinction average, so fuck you :p

Worded maths problems are easily misread, if you've ever tried to describe a maths problem over the phone you would realise it's very easy to get something wrong, and an inability to perform basic arithmetic does not preclude you from learning advanced calculus and Latin (don't kids in the US learn calculus in high school these days anyway? I was pretty sure they would).
 
Javascript required + ads I can't control = fail.

We all hate captchas, but they're a necessity. We always start sites out with a combination of a honeypot field + math question, but sometimes there's nothing to be done but replace the math question with a captcha.

Obviously, yeah, no solution is perfect. People in China get paid $1 for filling out 1,000 captchas, but they're definitely effective on the sites we've put them on.
 
i dont understand what captchas do. can someone explain? i just dont understand what you can do once you have a million different accounts on some forum. second, if they really want a million accounts so badly, cant they just tell the program to hang up at the captcha screen and wait for the human programmer to input it? i could probably do a few hundred, maybe a thousand, in an hour. if its that lucrative its worth writing a complicated program for, then its probably worth a couple hours putting in passwords right?
 
ekuest said:
i dont understand what captchas do. can someone explain? i just dont understand what you can do once you have a million different accounts on some forum. second, if they really want a million accounts so badly, cant they just tell the program to hang up at the captcha screen and wait for the human programmer to input it? i could probably do a few hundred, maybe a thousand, in an hour. if its that lucrative its worth writing a complicated program for, then its probably worth a couple hours putting in passwords right?
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There's many things, the most simple is obviously to register an account on thousands of forums to spam a website which increases the chances of users visiting it and search engines promoting it (SEO). Another reason could be to get access to a specific subforum after a certain number of posts like FS/T here. And, I could see some sort of advantage to registering on thousands of different forums 'just incase', as many forums use registration date as an initial form of trust between two people trying to trade, ie you're less likely to be scammed from someone who's been there for years compared to the guy who just joined yesterday.

As for your second question, spam programs already have the ability to stop at captcha screens they can't complete in order to have a human manually solve it, it's pretty scary.
 
I saw this just the other day.

Instead of a normal Captcha, there was an Advertisement and I had to read it to find the answer to the question being asked before I could proceed.
 
its interesting seeing how they further want advertising to intrude into things. When is our toilet paper going to be printed with ads?

I know best buy would make a great match there...
 
kattana said:
its interesting seeing how they further want advertising to intrude into things. When is our toilet paper going to be printed with ads?

I know best buy would make a great match there...
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You're too late. That Mel Brooks guy was already there:

Spaceballs_toilet_paper.jpg


but it took Sanrio to really make money from it:

hello-kitty-toilet-paper.jpg
 
I see potentials for abuse, like the fake "download" link you always see in open source sites.

Ads to another site using fake minteye Captchas look-alike will be everywhere.
 
Azhar said:
I see potentials for abuse, like the fake "download" link you always see in open source sites.

Ads to another site using fake minteye Captchas look-alike will be everywhere.
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Fake download links on open source sites? Just what sort of "open source" sites are you visting anyway? :D
 
Well, I hope their learning from all the programming feadback their getting telling them why this is so fail. I would love for their to be a better solution for CAPTCHA but in its current state Minteye isn't even close yet.
 
Sherk said:
I sincerely hope this is a troll post; if not, this is what's wrong with 'merica. Students in the 50's were learning calculus and Latin in high school, now most students can't even learn fucking algebra.
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He was joking around. I agree with your post though.
 
This idea may or may not catch on, but it is MUCH easier to crack than the unreadable crap we have now. All you need is an algorithm that changes the slider, runs OCR, and keeps track of how many letters the OCR recognizes. The slider position with the highest number of recognized characters should almost always be the correct answer. Yes, it's a pain in the ass, but the work has existed for a while. There's at least one captcha cracker that uses a simulated neural network that could easily be modified to do this. And since the image looks good when you get it right, you won't need the algorithm to handle as much "garbage" information.
 
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