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  Bob V, 22 Apr 2009 @ 4:35am

  
  

  You know I'd almost pay for software that could effectively do this. I'm not colorblind, my vision is good, I have a good monitor but somehow about 25% of the time when i type them in I get it wrong.

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  Xanthir, FCD, 22 Apr 2009 @ 4:42am

  
  

  Awesome

  For those of you who don't know, reCAPTCHA is a very popular captcha program that uses images of words that couldn't be read properly by the OCR software used by various book digitizing programs. The fact that the OCR software failed means that it's unlikely any other similar software will succeed, which is what makes it such a great captcha.
  
  The neat thing is that it forces you to decipher *two* words, one of which is already known and one which is not. If you get the known word right, you pass. Once enough people give the same answer for a particular unknown word, though, that information is passed back upstream to the book digitizers.
  
  If the spammers can solve this reliably, it means that they've made a great advancement in the field of OCR which can be passed back to the book digitizers for great benefits. And it still won't defeat reCAPTCHA unless the new software is *perfect* - there will still be words that can't be read by the new software.

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  Anonymous Coward, 22 Apr 2009 @ 5:00am

  
  

  Re: Awesome

  however, if you were to write a program and seed it with correct answers and have it consistently send the wrong answers back to recaptcha you may be able to trick their servers into accepting wrong answers and then build up your set of solved captchas simply by using a reasonably small set of seeds. ... but then again Im not working on the recaptcha so they may already have things in place to prevent this, but there are a ton of sites using it, and i feel like it is almost entirely automated, so this type of hack could potentially ruin their model.

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  WarOtter (profile), 22 Apr 2009 @ 6:04am

  
  

  Re: Awesome

  Any links to where this is in use?

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  Anonymous Coward, 22 Apr 2009 @ 5:55am

  
  

  wait till someone does it, patents it, then gets upset when nonspammers use it and starts suing

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  Anonymous Coward, 22 Apr 2009 @ 5:57am

  
  

  DRM effect

  Capcha's may end up having a DRM-like effect as they get harder and harder for humans to to read. They will be keeping out legitimate users, but they may end up allowing easy access to the illicit visitors using CapchaBots.

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  TX CHL Instructor (profile), 22 Apr 2009 @ 6:05am

  
  

  CAPCHA

  I thought CAPCHA had been handily defeated already by offering free porn, and serving up an image capture of the capcha.
  --
  www.chl-tx.com (Thanks, BHO, for the wonderful stimulus you have given *MY* business)

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  Wesha, 22 Apr 2009 @ 8:38am

  
  

  Solved! Gimme $500,000!

  http://mturk.amazon.com :-b

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  Adam, 22 Apr 2009 @ 8:53am

  
  

  We can *totally* trust them to give the award!

  No doubt these same honorable folks who manage botnets and such will be men and women of honor. In a worst case scenario, they'll offer one MILLION dollars in Free V1agra to the winner instead of cash :P

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  Matt Bennett, 22 Apr 2009 @ 11:43am

  
  

  I'm not sure I'd trust whoever was offering the reward to actually pay me.

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