I wouldn't consider it invulnerable to OCR, considering the fact that only half of the captcha is actually doing validation -- the other half is digitization.
Plus, statistically a few groups have worked to break it in the past[1]. Even without breaking it programatically, buying human labor to solve them is sometimes equal or less expensive[2].
You're right that captcha farms (human labor, usually close to slave labor) allow spammers a fairly cheap method of bypassing them, but they're fairly slow (unlike OCR), not necessarily that accurate themselves, and increases the barrier required to spam. If a spammer expects to personally make $4 per 1000 advertisements posted, and if 1000 captchas costs $1, that's a massive profit loss for them.
At least from my experience, setting up reCAPTCHA on personal sites reduces spam to 0. They'll usually only spend money on captcha farms for sites that garner huge amounts of traffic, leaving smaller sites in the clear.
I think the beauty of reCAPTCHA is that if there's stronger OCR, those algorithms can be integrated into Google's book digitization system, resulting in a new version of reCAPTCHA that will only show words not recognized by this new algorithm. As a result, the captchas will get harder if there's better OCR.
Of course eventually, OCR systems will become as good as a significant fraction of the population, and then the idea breaks down.
Judging by the CAPTCHAs I've been getting lately, OCR is pretty much as good as humans. I used to always be able to solve them, but reCAPTCHAs have recently become ridiculous, requiring four or five tries to solve.
This is horrible, especially the quote "So why to waste these focussed eyeballs" – these focused eyeballs were being used to digitise the world's books, which to me is far more valuable than an attempt to replace something good in the world with advertising.
A friend of mine worked at an ad network that did a trial on "sponsored captchas" and they found that it created and overall negative brand experience.
It seems this website doesn't display as intended which is a bad starting point, then it is ads everywhere and a collection of logos some of which are amateurishly slapped there.
The "try it" is really a long and stupid signup form disguised as a trap to collect your domain name to whois your name and email and probably spam you to death.
I wonder how a captcha you can actually read would be useful and not detrimental as in not blocking bots and still annoying users. Probably better to add a hidden checkbox as a bot trap.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 36.1 ms ] threadI _really_ hate this.
reCAPTCHA is the only solution that's so far proven itself invulnerable to OCR.
Plus, statistically a few groups have worked to break it in the past[1]. Even without breaking it programatically, buying human labor to solve them is sometimes equal or less expensive[2].
[1]: http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/google-recaptcha-bro... [2]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1305940...
At least from my experience, setting up reCAPTCHA on personal sites reduces spam to 0. They'll usually only spend money on captcha farms for sites that garner huge amounts of traffic, leaving smaller sites in the clear.
Of course eventually, OCR systems will become as good as a significant fraction of the population, and then the idea breaks down.
It seems this website doesn't display as intended which is a bad starting point, then it is ads everywhere and a collection of logos some of which are amateurishly slapped there.
The "try it" is really a long and stupid signup form disguised as a trap to collect your domain name to whois your name and email and probably spam you to death.
I wonder how a captcha you can actually read would be useful and not detrimental as in not blocking bots and still annoying users. Probably better to add a hidden checkbox as a bot trap.
Please, just stahp.
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> We at Simpli5d Technologies thrive hard every moment for the realization of this vision. Self motivated with funding from an angle, we are a bunch of professionals with multifarious expertise dedicated towards conquering the digital world. The words Techies, Entrepreneurs, don’t define us… We call ourselves Missionaries to En-(On)-lightenment.
oh my god