WTF?! "Get paid for solving CAPTCHAs"
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Spamming taken to the next level: An "Automated CAPTCHA Solving Service", recruiting human captcha solvers. I wonder how this would work, technically...
Should I post the URL? Ah, dammit: http://www.captchasolver.com/
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Wow, a new job for us. Have you read the "Terms and Conditions"?
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Kafkaïan as hell. Just imagine a giant warehouse full of captcha-solving workers. Back from work they must see things much like a tetris player, even worse, seeing letters and numbers hidden in anything they see, mechanically typing wherever they see a license plate. Quite cyberpunk too, as these poor guy work for robots, really, as the purpose is to allow automated spam.
Now imagine the next step in antispam measures : the very same enterprise hiring human turing testers challenging real-world users, and on the other side, human taking interviews with the turing testers.
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@ammoQ said:
Wow, a new job for us. Have you read the "Terms and Conditions"?
In FireFox 1.8.0.10 on Win2k, the Terms and Conditions was completely empty when I clicked on the link from the 'I want to be a captcha solver' link. Odd. No terms and conditions at all, whee! Maybe they only show in IE, because they prefer that for your captcha solving work.
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It's because IE is so much more secure, and they wouldn't want anyone hacking into their CAPTCHA hacking operation...
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no terms of service in firefox 2.0 on linux :(
I really want to see what their website is like once you sign in, but I don't have any throw away emails right now.
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Nothing on IE6 neither ( okay, a little hacked, as you can have IE6 and IE7 on linux on wine without too much pain now ).
I had a little "wtf" when I read the whois record for captchasolver.com, as I just read another conversation about hungarian notation. Beware ! Hungarians ! They're everywhere ! ( I guess hungarians workers solve hungarian-notation captchas ).
I registered on the site, both as worker and customer. There's a useless profile page, then the worker lands on an empty work page, and the customer can buy "packages" via paypal and has an "API" section. Leaved void and unfinished, I guess. I doubt the site will continue, anyway.
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I liked the idea on Slashdot a couple years ago about setting up a fake "free pr0n" site where you had to enter a captcha to get in. Course the captcha didn't actually authenticate you on the porn server, but got sent to whatever server they were spamming.
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So what happens when you write software that takes a captcha image such as on Blogger, and attempts to "shapify" it, straightening diagonals and undeforming ellipses into circles -- then feeds that image into an OCR engine?
I'm fairly certain this isn't that hard, if you have some experience in software image recognition (though I should add that Blogger's deformations are sometimes so extreme that I, as a human, have trouble reading them).
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Yup, that's why some captcha are even hard to read for humans, to push farther the limitations of OCRs. As for any other security measure, all of this is only a matter of time and money : captcha make it not worth the pain.
By the way, I wonder if people would more likely want to be paid to solve this kind of CAPTCHA
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That particular example is pretty poorly implemented. I can program my bot to follow the "adopt me" link and parse out the species....
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Someone ought to write a bot that fills in the answers incorrectly and mess with their data. . . I wonder how long it would take them to notice and if they have some procedure for stopping that. I.e. two people look at every captcha.
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With a captcha that looks like the one on this thread:
http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/thread/116253.aspx
I'm starting to rethink this service. Heck, I'd pay someone to read that for me.
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@vt_mruhlin said:
That particular example is pretty poorly implemented. I can program my bot to follow the "adopt me" link and parse out the species....
/Or I'm stupid. It only lets you click one "adopt me" link per session.
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@dhromed said:
So what happens when you write software that takes a captcha image such as on Blogger, and attempts to "shapify" it, straightening diagonals and undeforming ellipses into circles -- then feeds that image into an OCR engine?
I'm fairly certain this isn't that hard, if you have some experience in software image recognition (though I should add that Blogger's deformations are sometimes so extreme that I, as a human, have trouble reading them).
OCR is easy - you can even pass it through neural net and get pretty fast answer for very non-standard fonts. If you've got bounding boxes for letters, then straightening them is also not that hard (but still tricky) - you just find the baseline curve. Worst part is searching for letters themselves - it's not hard to choose background / foreground combination with gradients and similarities in both RBG and HSL that are still easily readable to users (without color-blindness), but there's just too much colour noise to analyse it in soft.
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I always get strange sub-dream ideas when I almost fall asleep on my keyboard; just by reading the story about the picture-of-a-counter and the awful ticketmaster captcha, I think would could wrap it up pretty well by hiring painters to draw human-generated captcha.
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I wish I could draw comics, just imagine a picture where a robot takes a human in his hands and uses it as it was a bar code reader.
Okay, okay, going to sleep now.