UtterlyBoring.com: Useless Image Captcha

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Useless Image Captcha

You've probably seen those image captchas that make it so that you have to type in a code from an image before you can submit information on a form. For example, some people have implemented this MovableType plugin to block bots from submitting comment forms. It's effective against comment spam, but screws with accessibility.

Anyhow, I generally don't have a problem with them, but this one I saw on Register.com's Whois Page (you have to put a URL in the field before you can see it) is nearly impossible to translate:

Am I the only one that has a hard time reading that? I couldn't actually get through that one, so I had to cancel and try it again with a more readable captcha. The rest of them looked a bit better (and the only reason I was using Register.com's Whois is because the domain was registered there and I wanted to get as much info as I could), but they're still much harder to read than the typical captcha.

Posted by Jake on 01/11/05 @ 03:21 PM
Posted in Geekdom, Stupid | 9 Comments | Permalink
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Too advanced Captchas? from Anders Jacobsen's blog on 01/21/05 @ 10:26 AM:
I got served the below Captcha when registering for a Yahoo! Group the other day. [...] is that a 6? a non-capital b? Is that an e, ẹ or an ę? [...] When captchas get so funky that humans with 20/20 vision start struggling; accessibility is ... (Read More)

9 Comments

Jalpuna! said on 01/11/05 @ 03:36 PM:
I'm glad I'm not the only one having a problem with those things lately. I can't remember on which sites, but I've had trouble reading those things several times... Sheesh!

monkeyinabox said on 01/11/05 @ 03:36 PM:
It helps when you use the secret decoder from the Captain Crunch cereal box.

Jake said on 01/11/05 @ 03:41 PM:
finding a box of captain crunch and taping the decoder to my laptop

Val said on 01/11/05 @ 04:18 PM:
That is hard to read.

Chris Burkhardt said on 01/12/05 @ 01:00 PM:
TBAYC I think? The third letter is strange. It may be Cyrillic.

RedBarchetta said on 01/13/05 @ 08:51 PM:
Jake,

If you were running Linux, you would be able to open up a shell terminal window and type in:

whois utterlyboring.com > ubinfo.txt

You'd get all the domain information stored in a text file!

Consider moving off of Windows to a more useful OS.

Cheers,

RedB.

Chris Burkhardt said on 01/13/05 @ 10:51 PM:
Red, I'm quite sure there are whois querying tools available for Windows and DOS. It isn't anything unique to Linux which makes it more "useful".

Amasto said on 01/14/05 @ 08:52 PM:
It's TB9YC, I'm quite sure.

Noah said on 10/17/06 @ 01:14 PM:
And with some simple image processing (which can be totaly automateD) yet another captcha is readily defeated by off the shelf OCR in a matter of seconds.

For the most part these things are so useless, someone smart enough to make an application that automaticaly abuses your system is smart enough to use simple free tools to defeat your captcha.

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