CAPTCHA Blindness

I played Half Life Episode 2 and Portal over the weekend. EP2 was good, Portal was brilliant (and many props to Coulton for the awesome credits song).

Anyway I was trying to search the Steam forums and you have to prove you’re human by entering a CAPTCHA. I got so many wrong I gave up. Here’s a small sampling:

captcha-04 captcha-01 captcha-03 captcha-02 captcha-06 captcha-05 captcha-07 captcha-08

Can you guys read any of these? I had to check with friends to make sure I hadn’t suddenly become colorblind or something.

Early data points to Valve’s CAPTCHA algorithm sucking and my vision being fine.

Posted to misc, tech by Brad on 10/16/07 @ 6:32 pm |

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13 Responses to “CAPTCHA Blindness”

1
Buildingonfire
October 16th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Daaaaaaaamn!

I’ve noticed captchas getting harder to read lately, but seriously, I can’t read a one of these.
2
Brad
October 16th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
For a while I was thinking maybe they were those magic eye things, which I can never do.
3
fieryprophet
October 16th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Umm, maybe I’m wrong, but only a _computer_ could read these.
4
kaddar
October 17th, 2007 at 12:25 am
a)Magic eye catchpas would be brilliant.
2) I hate catchpas, we need a new system, here’s my idea: rotating 3d letters
gamma) You play any tf2 brad? if so let me know, I’ll add ya to my steam list.
5
bjrn
October 17th, 2007 at 3:22 am
Those are pretty crazy. I remember a while back Introversion (the guy who made Uplink, Darwinia and Defcon) had captchas when signing up to their forums that were crazy as well.

To make things worse, if you failed the captcha three times, you had to wait 15 minutes before you could try again. I think I managed to get in after eight or nine tries.
6
Heuristics Inc.
October 17th, 2007 at 9:54 am
Holy cow, those are the worst I’ve ever seen. On a happier note I finished Episode 2 last night, but I haven’t tried Portal yet - looking forward to it, maybe tonight!
-bill
7
Gabriel
October 20th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
If on mac hit command+option+ctrl+8 and the letters will pop out..kinda.
8
Ryan
October 21st, 2007 at 9:29 am
no see, it’s a scam to get you to pay more money. not only do you have to be human, but you also have to buy special red and blue glasses to read it. kind of like the back of a cereal box with a “special message”.
9
Nate
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:00 am
I don’t understand why they put all the crap in there anyway. It is an image that is the whole point, a bot can’t read text in an image, unless they have so super sophisticated bot that can do character recognition. The could do black text on a white background. Not only do they back it impossible for bots, but humans also, guess they don’t want any users to sign up.
10
Tom
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Bots can read captchas, and they’ve gotten good at it. Some distortion is necessary, but this is definitely overkill.
11
Jason Miller
November 12th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Simply having a CAPTCHA image implemented on a site is deterrent enough. Those are pathetic!
12
Fester Couples
November 13th, 2007 at 12:33 am
I tried 7 time to register on their forum tonight and I thought I was losing my eyesight!!!

I wasn’t successful.
13
QED
November 21st, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Some spam companies outsource CAPTCHAs to third-world countries or porn websites, where real humans solve them. This could have mistakenly pushed Valve to use these more and more convoluted CAPTCHAs, which are more vision tests than anything.

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CAPTCHA Blindness

13 Responses to “CAPTCHA Blindness”

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