If you poke through the history on this thread you can find some of my
previous background on captchas but I can give you a short summary of
their purpose here. Basically companies need a way to figure out if you
a person or a computer to ensure you're not some bad actor trying to
create a bunch of bogus accounts for spamming and the like. This is
usually done via a puzzle that is 'easy' for people and 'hard' for
computers to solve. There are two flaws with this. One is that as the
algorithms have become more sophisticated the definition of 'easy' has
moved to 'hard' while only becoming 'harder' for algorithms. This is an
arms race and eventually the puzzles will become too difficult and/or
the algorithms will have too high a success rate to make it useful
anymore. We're starting to reach that point. The second flaw is that you
can hire a mechanical turk service that will farm out whatever tasks you
need done to real people for little money. So the accessible captcha
plugins/services do this for a legitimate reason but that also means bad
actors can do the same thing. In other words, any captcha solution that
costs more than a few cents won't be worth it since the bad guys can
just hire real people to solve them, especially if they protect valuable
content/data. I've actually evaluated a number of captcha solutions and
so far none have worked any better than the garbled audio or swirly
images. Either the puzzle was too hard for people or it was easy for the
algorithm/script. I can elaborate more but suffice it to say, this is a
tough nut to crack.
CB
On 12/1/12 10:01 PM, Christopher-Mark Gilland wrote:
Adrienne,
I could not have said things better myself.
I'm sure many disagree with us, but it's nice to know I'm not the only
one who feels this way.
have a great day.
Thank you kindly,
Christopher-Mark Gilland.
Founder of CLG Productions
----- Original Message ----- From: "Adrienne Sinclair Chalmers"
<chalmer...@googlemail.com>
To: <macvisionaries@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2012 5:35 PM
Subject: captcha solving service for the mac.
Hi guys
Isn't the real question here not about whether captcha solving
services should be free, but why people are allowed to use
inaccessible captchas on their sites in the first place? Personally, I
am sick of the rotten things and don't know how people get away with
using them and their unintelligible so-called audio equivalents.
Perhaps if the cost of captcha solving fell on the heads of those who
included these barriers to accessibility and not to people who can't
see or hear them, they would pretty soon find other solutions that
everyone could use on an equal basis.
I have never had the "need" to use captchas sufficiently explained to
me. There always seem to be other ways of achieving whatever result
the proprietor of the site thinks captchas supply.
Regards
Adrienne
--
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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