{"id":7747,"date":"2005-08-23T11:14:25","date_gmt":"2005-08-23T18:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2005\/08\/23\/released-from-captcha.html"},"modified":"2005-08-23T11:14:25","modified_gmt":"2005-08-23T18:14:25","slug":"released_from_c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/08\/23\/released_from_c.html","title":{"rendered":"Released from CAPTCHA"},"content":{"rendered":"

CAPTCHAs are those little graphic boxes with distorted-but-visible number and letter combinations that you’re asked to retype in order to authenticate that you are a human being with eyeballs, not an software bot out to hack a site, spam a site, etc. The acronym stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”<\/p>\n

Some folks use CAPTCHAs on their<\/a> blogs<\/a> to block comment spammers, and it’s been pretty effective. I mean, you can do comment spam manually, but that’s awfully labor intensive vs. using spambots (and unprotected sites). While accessibility folks have argued that CAPTCHA is an awful<\/a> idea<\/a> in a world with visually-impaired people, etc. (and, in fact, some CAPTCHAs are difficult for the un<\/em>impaired to decipher), it’s been a fairly popular option. It’s even one I’ve toyed<\/a> with.<\/p>\n

But now comes “PWNtcha<\/a>” (Pretend We?\\’re Not a Turing Computer but a Human Antagonist), a software project to learn to read and decode CAPTCHAs — with published success rates of up to 100%. It’s not out in the wild yet, but believe it that if the Black Hats decide there’s value in breaking past CAPTCHAs, they’ll be able to do it.* That doesn’t mean it’s useless security — a determined burglar can get past your deadbolt, but it may deter a more casual one who moves on to easier pickings — but its value is likely to decrease over time.<\/p>\n

*Other than the documented approach of republishing them as admissions on pr0n sites and getting customers to unwittingly key them in.<\/small><\/p>\n

(via BoingBoing<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CAPTCHAs are those little graphic boxes with distorted-but-visible number and letter combinations that you’re asked to retype in order to authenticate that you are a human being with eyeballs, not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-hi-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7678,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/19\/more_on_the_goo.html","url_meta":{"origin":7747,"position":0},"title":"More on the Google nofollow tag","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 19-Jan-05 7:53am","format":false,"excerpt":"A bit of a backlash this morning on the announcement of the new rel=\"nofollow\" tag that Google et al. are going to be implementing. Most of the critiques are referenced...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging - Technical"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging - Technical","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/blogging-technical"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13013,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/08\/19\/putting_human_brain_cycle.html","url_meta":{"origin":7747,"position":1},"title":"Putting human brain cycles to work","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 19-Aug-08 5:09am","format":false,"excerpt":"CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are those little \"type the word\/letters\/numbers you see above\" tests on various web pages to prove you are...","rel":"","context":"In "Books"","block_context":{"text":"Books","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/media-books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13789,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/02\/18\/recaptcha.html","url_meta":{"origin":7747,"position":2},"title":"ReCAPTCHA","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 18-Feb-09 9:44pm","format":false,"excerpt":"I love it when a plan comes together ...\u00a0 Last August, I noted with glee the introduction of reCAPTCHA. Rather than a CAPTCHA schema that just grabs random words, reCAPTCHA actually serves a purpose other than \"just\" security.\u00a0 To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging - Technical"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging - Technical","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/blogging-technical"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5209,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/10\/15\/wysiwyg.html","url_meta":{"origin":7747,"position":3},"title":"WYSIWYG","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 15-Oct-03 8:53am","format":false,"excerpt":"Another possible alternative for blog spam is using a CAPTCHA method (where a human sees and types back in letters\/numbers in a graphic which a spambot is unable to read)....","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7260,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/04\/13\/the_comment_reg.html","url_meta":{"origin":7747,"position":4},"title":"The Comment Registration Act of 2005","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 13-Apr-05 11:19am","format":false,"excerpt":"Dammit. Another burst of comment spam today. Nothing that showed up on the front page, but because the URL was innocuous (which is a bad sign of spammers getting smarter),...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10430,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/16\/new_comment_spam_measures.html","url_meta":{"origin":7747,"position":5},"title":"New comment spam measures – TinyTuring vs TypeKey","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 16-Jan-07 1:47pm","format":false,"excerpt":"So back in April 2005 I implemented TypeKey user authentication on my various Movable Type blogs here to help combat comment spam -- folks (and bots) entering in comments...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"spam","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/spam.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}