Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !

[R.Wieser]

Hello all,

I was reading a site and wanted to send a response to the site-owner(s).
For that I had to "just type in" what the capcha says to proove I'm human.

I've requested a slew of them, but never have been able to decode the
displayed material. Can you ? Or does it turn out you're not human either
?

http://api.recaptcha.net/noscript?k=6Le__AoAAAAAAARse0Vtv5cWDaMIPGpwjLMETir-
&is_audio=false

Somehow I get the feeling they won't get much (if any) responses. Which
makes me wonder if the captcha was maybe made unreadable on purpose ...

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

 

[philo]

Hello all,

I was reading a site and wanted to send a response to the site-owner(s).
For that I had to "just type in" what the capcha says to proove I'm human.

I've requested a slew of them, but never have been able to decode the
displayed material. Can you ? Or does it turn out you're not human either
?

http://api.recaptcha.net/noscript?k=6Le__AoAAAAAAARse0Vtv5cWDaMIPGpwjLMETir-
&is_audio=false

Somehow I get the feeling they won't get much (if any) responses. Which
makes me wonder if the captcha was maybe made unreadable on purpose ...

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

Your link was no good, but yes, on one occasion I saw a site offering
free software but the capcha was absolutely undecipherable, it was
obviously done as a bad joke.



The funniest one I saw though was when I was working on an old Mac and
someone had deleted Stuff-it expander (the built in compression/
decompression utility)


After doing an extensive web search I finally found a source, but the
file was compressed and no way to open it unless you already had Stuff-it.

The only way I could fix the machine was to re-load the entire operating
system.

 

[Mayayana]

I see what you mean. But I clicked the link for
"Try another challenge" twice and in both cases
it was readable. It's confusing, though, because this
is one of the uncommon ones that may not use
actual words. The 3rd and 4th ones I got:

lsaysc 362
combined AvatedB

At least I can see them. These tests are often used
by people just jumping on the bandwagon, even though
they may not really need to do it. They paste in a little
code and figure they're caught up with "current"
technology. Google or some other company is doing
the actual work. Unfortunately in those cases, the image
is often coming from a 3rd party and/or is displayed
in an IFRAME, so that I don't see it at all because I
normally block both of those things.

I get an average 400+ visitors daily on my own site.
I estimate probably about 300 are real people. About
once every two days I get an email with a nonsense
subject that I can see was sent by a bot on my
contact page. I don't know why they do it. The content
is always, also, just random characters. But it's not a big
hassle. The best test of whether the sender is human is
in the email itself -- the subject and content are always
easily recognizable as junk. I'd have to be getting a lot
more junk before a captcha test would be justified.

 

[R.Wieser]

Philo,

Your link was no good,

Odd. I can click it here (from the newsgroup message I posted) and get the
contents I expected. Though I do not know whats encoded in the part
beween the "?" and "&" symbols though, maybe it has my IP encoded in there.

After doing an extensive web search I finally found a source, but
the file was compressed and no way to open it unless you already
had Stuff-it.

Ye olde "We left the key to your new house on the table" - "how do I get
that key ?" - "you take it and open the front door ofcourse!" joke.

And as much as that was a joke, I'm not so sure about the transcription of a
conversation of someone who lost the password to his email, and the helpdesk
saw no problem whatsoever when they said they would send them a new one --
by email ofcourse. :-|

The only way I could fix the machine was to re-load the entire
operating system.

Bummer!

Regards,
Rudy Wieser


-- Origional message:

 

[R.Wieser]

Mayayana,

But I clicked the link for "Try another challenge" twice and
in both cases it was readable.

Well, that probably means you're human, while I'm not.

But seriously, with a random jumble of letter/digits symbols I have very
little chance to decipher it. One I really tried on one which, among other
hard-to read stuff, contained a set of blurred symbols that could have been
something like "ni", "m", "n1", or even "nI". With that kind of guessing
I'm not amused.

It's confusing, though, because this is one of the uncommon
ones that may not use actual words.

Yep, as using words (common or not) would be too easy for a computer to
"guess" what the whole word is supposed to be. Oh wait, thats how I can
decipher most of them too :-\

Unfortunately in those cases, the image is often coming
from a 3rd party and/or is displayed in an IFRAME,

This one too. My 'puter just shows them as a seperate, specially marked
link, so I keep aware of the junk some sites dare to put into their
webpages.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser


-- Origional message:

 

[philo]

Philo,


Odd. I can click it here (from the newsgroup message I posted) and get the
contents I expected. Though I do not know whats encoded in the part
beween the "?" and "&" symbols though, maybe it has my IP encoded in there.

It did not work in Firefox but I tried Chrome and it went through


the capcha was not quite readable to me

 

[Andy]

Hello all,

I was reading a site and wanted to send a response to the site-owner(s).
For that I had to "just type in" what the capcha says to proove I'm human.

I've requested a slew of them, but never have been able to decode the
displayed material. Can you ? Or does it turn out you're not human either
?

http://api.recaptcha.net/noscript?k=6Le__AoAAAAAAARse0Vtv5cWDaMIPGpwjLMETir-
&is_audio=false

Somehow I get the feeling they won't get much (if any) responses. Which
makes me wonder if the captcha was maybe made unreadable on purpose ...

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

I hate those captchas.

I think whoever employs the "hard ones" is close to being cruel.

Andy

 

[Mayayana]

| > I get an average 400+ visitors daily on my own site.
|
| May we know the address of your site?
|
jsware.net

Interestingly, I used to get 600+ visitors, until
March 20, 2012. I don't know what happened that
day. My best guess is that it was that day that
Google changed their method to heavily favor
frequently updating sites. (I still get almost all
search traffic from Google. On a busy day it's likely
to be Google-100, Yahoo-1, Bing-1, other search-
5-10 [baidu, duckduckgo, private search engines,
etc])

The site is mostly tech-related: Windows software,
information, script and components for IT people,
etc. Sort of a Windows do-it-yourselfer website.
The most popular single item these days is an
unpacker I make for MSI installer files.

I like to process my own server logs, allowing
me to see where people come from. There are
visitors from just about everywhere. Most come
by just to get one specific thing. Few people
have the patience to just look around. In fact,
most people who come looking for a specific thing
find it and download in 6-10 seconds! I don't know
how they even find it on the webpage that fast.
I do know that they're not reading anything they
don't have to.

It used to be that virtually all visitors were real
people. These days I get a lot of search engine
bots and several hacking attempts daily. (There
are apparently-infected computers that just go
around trying out various vulnerablities, such as
Wordpress bugs, in an attempt to get into websites.)
I also get lots of dummy GETs, where a computer
requests one or two files for no apparent reason.
Then a few minutes later another computer in another
part of the world makes the same request. Same two
files. Sometimes that goes on all day. I have no idea
why. A more recent source of noise is overzealous
AV software. In some cases lately, when someone
downloads my ZIP files an AV company will download
a copy at the same time. The AV company for the
AV software that person has installed is tracking
every move online and running scans *while* files
are being downloaded.

The bot visitors who activate my contact form
are always "scrapers" -- computers that for
unknown reasons are copying each file on the site.
They may be auto-clicking the contact form in order
to check for download links. But they always fill in the
form and subject with some random characters. I don't
know why.

I've never actually calculated every visitor on a given
day, but from reading my logs my rough guess is that
if I get 425 unique visitors then probably about 300 of
those are real people. Junk contact emails are just not
a problem. But maybe it's more of a problem for websites
that are totally automated. If a bot goes to hotmail
and signs up as "mnmznc kwihehh" with the email address
"zkjhchhqkarhhe", the hotmail form processor may not
be able to recognize that as nonsense. Maybe that's
where captchas are needed. But what I see is captchas
*everywhere*, at sites of every size. And usually the
webmaster doen't even know what they're doing. They
just linked to Google. Actually, that's becoming a big problem
all around. People who don't know how to code webpages
are pasting together script snippets, jquery bloat and various
other things they don't understand and may not even be
using, but which they've heard is "cutting edge".

 

[R.Wieser]

Bill,

3) some "recognition" software has gotten sophisticated enough
that the captchas have to be that difficult so as to exclude non-
human responses

There is a saying about email filters:

-- Do you know what a good email filter is ? Thats the one that lets as
few as possible spams thru.

-- Do you know what a *bad* email filter is ? Thats the one which throws
*just a single* human message away.

I think you can apply the same here: when a websites captcha filter gets
difficult enough that it keeps humans away the filter has become bad, and
needs to be replaced.

The problem is that the website owner does not actually need those human
reponses to its site, and by that feat isn't really waiting for such
messages. Imagine how fast it would get changed when the method is used
for donations (or better yet, payments).

Regards,
Rudy Wieser


-- Origional message:

 

[Gene Wirchenko]

I was reading a site and wanted to send a response to the site-owner(s).
For that I had to "just type in" what the capcha says to proove I'm human.

I've requested a slew of them, but never have been able to decode the
displayed material. Can you ? Or does it turn out you're not human either
?

Well, I suppose that makes me more human than you, but how much
more? I, too, have had trouble with CAPTCHAs, but I do manage to
decode a few of them.

[snip]

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

 

[Paul]

I hate those captchas.

I think whoever employs the "hard ones" is close to being cruel.

Andy

But there are two reasons for captchas.

1) A site is legitimately trying to protect some resource that
keeps getting abused (by bots).

2) The bad guys run a site, trying to get humans to crack the hard
ones. In other words, you solve a hard one on (2) and the bad guys
immediately feed your "guess", into the site in (1). So while you think
you're on a (1) site, you may actually be on a (2) site, helping the
bad guys.

HTH,
Paul

 

[Andy]

But there are two reasons for captchas.

1) A site is legitimately trying to protect some resource that
keeps getting abused (by bots).

2) The bad guys run a site, trying to get humans to crack the hard
ones. In other words, you solve a hard one on (2) and the bad guys
immediately feed your "guess", into the site in (1). So while you think
you're on a (1) site, you may actually be on a (2) site, helping the
bad guys.

HTH,
Paul

All a site has to do, as I have seen, is to ask a question instead of the captcha.

Like "Spell the (4 -1)rd word backwards."

It would take a pretty sophisticated algorithm to solve that.

Andy

 

[micky]

It did not work in Firefox but I tried Chrome and it went through


the capcha was not quite readable to me

It worked for me in Firefox, winxpsp3, after I started to reply to RW's
post, and then removed the linefeed and > sign that was between the two
lines in the reply, using Agent 1.93.

I couldn't read well the first two images but I got the third one right
copy estyna .

But then it said "Your answer was correct. Please copy and paste the
text in this text box into the box below."

But there was only one box. I took a chance and typed copy estyna
into the box below, deleting what all was there, and pressed enter, but
nothing happened. That's where I am now.

 

[R.Wieser]

Micky,

But then it said "Your answer was correct. Please copy and
paste the text in this text box into the box below."

What I posted was just the link to the capcha provider, which I took from an
IFRAME in a webpage presented by the site I wanted to contact. The textbox
was placed just below the IFRAME.

In other words: you where asked to copy the result from their site
(displayed in an iframe) into the webpage of the site that uses their capcha
authentication (just outside the iframe).

Regards,
Rudy Wieser


-- Origional message:

 

[micky]

Micky,


What I posted was just the link to the capcha provider, which I took from an
IFRAME in a webpage presented by the site I wanted to contact. The textbox
was placed just below the IFRAME.

Well one problem is that I don't know what an IFRAME is. ;-)

In other words: you where asked to copy the result from their site
(displayed in an iframe) into the webpage of the site that uses their capcha
authentication (just outside the iframe).

And the other is that there was only one box, and the mesage refers to
two of them. If the Iframe is the box with a bunch of characters in
it, there was no place outside of it to copy anything into. I tried.
The only place I could click on that left a blinking character insertion
mark was in the box, and if I put copy estyna or "Your
answer was correct. Please copy and paste the text in this text box into
the box below." or just left what was in there, and pressed Enter,
nothing happened. I certainly didn't get free software, or see any
reference to that. ;-)

I did it again earlier today with another capcha and again nothing
happened when I pressed Enter.

 

[R.Wieser]

micky,

Well one problem is that I don't know what an IFRAME is. ;-)

Due to the emoticon thgere I'm not really sure if you're joking or not. But
for the chance that you're not: An IFRAME is a way to put one webpage into
another, without any borders being visible between them. The methode is
known as "embedding".

In this case the captcha website was put into another.

And the other is that there was only one box, and the mesage
refers to two of them.

Yep. One in the captcha webisite, and another one in the website the
captcha website was embedded in.

I did it again earlier today with another capcha and again
nothing happened when I pressed Enter.

And nothing will ever happen that way. The captcha only generates that
answer so the other website (that it was embedded in) knows the user has
pased the "are you human?" test.

Think of it this way: you're late to class because you are sick. The
teacher wants to make sure and sends you to the schools nurse. She checks
you out and gives you a piece of paper which says that you are indeed sick.
You bring that to your teacher and he accepts it and lets you into class.

Thats about how it goes with those two websites.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser


-- Origional message:

 

[micky]

micky,


Due to the emoticon thgere I'm not really sure if you're joking or not. But

Yeah, they are ambiguous. I was serious. The smiley was there to
show light-heartedness in order not to antagonize you.

Come to think of it, when people do that to me ,I wish they'd used words
instead.

for the chance that you're not: An IFRAME is a way to put one webpage into
another, without any borders being visible between them. The methode is
known as "embedding".

What a great idea.