I absolutely loathe Capchas, those stupid type-in-the-distorted-word puzzles that so many blogs challenge you with before they deign to accept your comment. My feeling is that if the site owner feels that strongly about keeping me out, then they can just manage without my wit and wisdom, thank you.
But this one, which I was challenged with just now, really took the cake:
Not acceptable, world!
The Reinvigorated Programmer 
I like the anti-spam part. Except according to the wikipedia page on CAPTCHAs many of them are poorly implemented such that they can be easily circumvented.
So that’s a point for your argument there.
But I still like reCAPTCHA because it can help in digitizing text:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
The thing I (really, really) don’t like is having to login to comment *everywhere*.
Yes, I understand: it cuts down on spam a lot. And that’s important. But the end result is almost always that I comment on things a lot less than I would have otherwise. It tends to act as a deterrent to speech.
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Furry cows moo and decompress.
At least you have kind-of-sorta-words in the captcha – look here what I got https://twitter.com/vijaykiran/status/210026210829414403
I’ve been surprised a few times with blolgs that challenge you with images of arithmetic challenges .. images to weed out basic text scraping robots, and arithmetic to throw them off since usualyl they’re just clicky-bots, or tryign to read the words.. not act on them. Stuff like “What is 2*(3)”, or even a little harder.
.. I almost thought this was a fun little game .. give me more challengnig problems! :)
To post your reply, tell us in 30 words or less, how the earlier philsophists knew the earth was round? –> shadow from an eclipse!
I agree with your assertion that speach is limited, or at least less casual; I put up a blog a few years ago and abouta month later, a robot went to all tis old posts (not the current one .. clever!) and put a few hundred spam responses on each.A right mess to clean up —
Captcha stinks but its a reasonable precaution against those who ruin everything, those who say we can’t have nice things.
What works in real life? A sense of shame and embarasment and decency prevents most peopel from benig a-holes to each other, but a few peopel do Bad Things all the same.. but of limited impact (stealing from a person here or there, not from Everyone.) The Bad Guy gets something, and doesn’t cause enoguh of an impact to make it really bite him back.
Online they can mass prey .. but they must get something abd be low risk; being from another country and a robot piece of perl code, no risk; but still, they mst get value.
How do spammers get $$ is what I always wonder.. ultiamtely, follow the money, there msut be a phone number to buy that penis enlargement; destroy that guy, tjen.. enough times, maybe it’ll stop being worth it?
Blog spammers are astroturfing — making enough posts with links back to their sites, so their sites rank higher in Google search results, but Goggle is smart enough to ignore most blog responses, or when a site suddenly get a lot of instant fame .. Google values older references more than newer/spammier ones. Clever.
Still, astroturfing has some value, I suppose.. but raw email spam?
Or invading peopels Facebook accoutns.. why? What value is there, besides mischief? Begging your ‘friends’ for money?!
I dont’ get spammers motives, mostly.
(But I’m also a decent person.. I don’t get why people try old peopel out of their savings either. Theres a special place in hell for these guys.. The 9th plane of debugging COBOL/CICS applications using only a Commodore PET 4032.)
Now, below.. will it captcha me? ;)
Looks like the word on the left is Hebrew, so I’m guessing that’s *not* the one of the two they expect you to get correct.
reCaptcha isn’t really about stopping spam, but in using people as mechanical Turks to solve OCR scans that didn’t work out for a variety of clients including the New York Times. I figure the Hebrew characters are from old ads. The good news is that only the validation keyword counts, so you can pretty much type in anything. My favorite word is “scrotum”.
I spent the past couple of years creating a new kind of Turing tests to replace CAPTCHAs, that I call “VouchSafe”, (http://www.vouchsafe.com). It’s a two-factor system that requires you to make associations between objects.
It has an interesting side-effect in that the mere juxtaposition of objects can stimulate a powerful emotional response. We are careful to keep the emotional content of the challenges as neutral as possible in production, but we’ve done some research that has produced some very interesting results.
I totally agree. Captcha’s are a usability nightmare.
Jeshua’s right, that’s a Hebrew word – and with vowel points, no less! the distortion is minimal, but typing this with the vowel points would be a nightmare even on a Hebrew keyboard. This CAPTCHA you got makes me wonder, because I’m in the only Hebrew-speaking country in the world and I’ve never seen a Hebrew CAPTCHA such as this :-)
The algorithm probably picked it from a mostly-English book and no one noticed…
I think that there are dozen of people who share the same opinion on CAPTCHAs. They neither protect from spammers nor are accessible for users. Since spammers have their tools to bypass CAPTCHAs, a few tools for ordinary users have been developed as well. For example: Webvisum, Captcha Monster or Rumola. These work as browser add-ons which complete CAPTCHA tests instead of user.
As some one with dyslexia (the real kind where you need years of tutoring to learn to read and you never really get great comprehension. Not just messing up some orders sometimes.) and also some hearing difficulty I find theses things awful. I rarely get them on my first try. It usually takes me 5 or more.
The worst is when they are on a form and they reset some fields to blank when I fail.