# Stupid Captchas!...
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [April 20, 2009, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675 "2009-04-20T00:58:32Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Wheeljack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wheeljack)
#### Post date: [April 22, 2009, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/21 "2009-04-22T10:44:49Z")
That’s just so cool. I never would have thought to do it that way.
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### Author:  [@fifty-six](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fifty-six)
#### Post date: [April 22, 2009, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/22 "2009-04-22T15:39:36Z")
> [@EpicNonsense](#):
>
> [http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html](http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html)
Brilliant
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### Author:  [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)
#### Post date: [April 22, 2009, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/23 "2009-04-22T16:07:23Z")
> [@Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](#):
>
> Good news is, they’re working on something more bearable. The new Captcha would have, for example, a bunch of random animal pictures, and it would ask you which ones are cats. Not very hard for a human, but still impossible for a machine.
>
> The bad news is, I don’t think it’s going to be ready any time soon. At least, _I_ haven’t seen it.
>
> The worse news is, you just know that spammers are going to come up with a Kitty Identification Bot, and then we’ll be back to where we started.
>
> P.S. Gmail, oh Gmail! I was trying to change my password the other day, and -gahhh!!! It’s not only safe from spambots, it’s safe from people alltogether!
I saw one sort of like that except you were supposed to pick out which doodles looked like cats. Unfortunately the cats were so badly drawn that it was difficult to distinguish them from the doodles. I didn’t mind captchas when they were first introduced but it seems that lately they’ve been getting more and more elaborate until you can’t tell what the heck they say.
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### Author:  [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)
#### Post date: [April 23, 2009, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/24 "2009-04-23T13:12:56Z")
Wow, so Captcha breaking software is getting so sophisticated it now knows how to join discussion boards in order to complain about difficult Captchas!
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### Author:  [@Jamaika\_a\_jamaikaiake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jamaika_a_jamaikaiake)
#### Post date: [April 23, 2009, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/25 "2009-04-23T14:16:04Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#):
>
> They could at least give us a break. Why don’t they let the user pass if they get, say, 5 out of 6 characters right?
>
> Seems to me that would still fulfill the purpose as well as eliminate most of the frustration.
They should do something like this for passwords. If I type in an 11-character password with the caps-lock on, it should let me in. What is the possibility that I guessed correct, save the case?
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### Author:  [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)
#### Post date: [April 23, 2009, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/26 "2009-04-23T15:25:54Z")
You guys that are having trouble solving Captchas ever see Bladerunner?
Just asking…
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### Author:  [@Amblydoper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amblydoper)
#### Post date: [April 23, 2009, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/27 "2009-04-23T23:30:35Z")
> [@EpicNonsense](#):
>
> [http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html](http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html)
I got some wrong intentionally, and it still said they were correct. I typed in giberish, and It said I was wrong. How does it know if I was right or wrong?
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### Author:  [@lexi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lexi)
#### Post date: [April 24, 2009, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/28 "2009-04-24T15:49:18Z")
> [@Amblydoper](#):
>
> I got some wrong intentionally, and it still said they were correct. I typed in giberish, and It said I was wrong. How does it know if I was right or wrong?
The way they say it works, is one word is known, and one word is unknown, so for example if your recaptcha say “cabbage bellboy” - when they check the captcha they will check for only one of the words, and then put as a possible solution for the other word what you have typed. Say for instance cabbage is the known word, and you type “cabbage ballet”, you will pass the captcha, and “ballet” will be entered as a possible solution to the “bellboy” part of the question.
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### Author:  [@Sal\_Ammoniac](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sal_Ammoniac)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2009, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/29 "2009-04-25T01:54:37Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#):
>
> And a lot of times, it’s weird color combinations, with lines going through the letters and numbers.
Still, ain’t that the point? Let’s not blame the capchas, let’s blame the vermin who made them necessary.
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### Author:  [@Mighty\_Girl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Girl)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2009, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/30 "2009-04-25T05:38:10Z")
We use a \*very \*simple question in our website, no bot has gone through yet. The questions appear at random and can be changed any time, there are also multiple solutions accepted. Funny enough only humans get the answer. 🙂 Brilliant!
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### Author:  [@Red\_Skeezix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Red_Skeezix)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2009, 5:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stupid-captchas/493675/31 "2009-04-25T05:48:26Z")
> [@Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](#):
>
> Good news is, they’re working on something more bearable. The new Captcha would have, for example, a bunch of random animal pictures, and it would ask you which ones are cats. Not very hard for a human, but still impossible for a machine.
These ones are orders of magnitude less effective since they increase the odds of randomly guessing the correct answer by several orders of magnitude. For example for a ten letter phrase the odds of randomly guessing the correct phrase are 1 out of 52^10 or 1 out 26^10 where as a set of ten random animals correctly identifying the cat is 1 out of 10. With the alpha numeric Captchas you have to rely on smurfs or OCR to get anywhere near usable amount of successes per try.
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