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/

Wow, a new job for us. Have you read the "Terms and Conditions"?

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. 

ammoQ:

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. 

It's because IE is so much more secure, and they wouldn't want anyone hacking into their CAPTCHA hacking operation...

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.
 

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.

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.

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).

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 

That particular example is pretty poorly implemented.  I can program my bot to follow the "adopt me" link and parse out the species....

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.

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.

vt_mruhlin:

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. 

dhromed:

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.

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.

 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.