Rant - the 'human' detector that Ticketmaster, et al, uses

[SanONeill]

Writing OCR software to pass captcha tests isn't exactly the most daunting task in the software world and it's not hard to buy ones to pass most of the more popular ones. I wrote a php script that handled the old overture/yahoo ones on a lunch break at work once.

There has been a lot of research on better ways to do this like the kitten test(3x3 matrix of images, 3 of them are kittens the rest aren't click on all the kittens to continue). The problem with that system is that all the person has to do is pay a team of third worlders $0.01/h to refresh and categorize every file that they see for a week and you'll have pretty much the whole "alphabet". So users would have to constantly add new images and categories to it. Then you run the risk of pissing off the illiterates who can't read "Pick out the 5 cans of soup".

Who knows, maybe there is money to be made starting a widget company the displays those then the individual users don't have to update their images all the time one company does. Of course this falls victim to the above problem faster since the people can be hitting 100 sites at once instead of just one and are able to build their database faster.

If you have any better ideas about keeping bots at bay the world would love to hear them. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Homer]

Just hit enter and it will give you another puzzle. Sometimes I hit enter 4-5 times before I get an easy one.

[icepick]

Hot Chick Captcha

[inlemur]

[ QUOTE ]
Hot Chick Captcha

[/ QUOTE ]

Apparently I have no idea what an attractive male looks like.

[XxGodJrxX]

None of those guys seem particularly unattractive. In the chicks mash up, there are three obvious right answers, and six fatties. On the guys one, they all look pretty much the same, save for one emo looking guy and one fat guy with side-burns.