If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
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=...MIPGpwjLMETir- &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 |
Ads |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
On 12/01/2014 05:03 AM, R.Wieser wrote:
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=...MIPGpwjLMETir- &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. |
#3
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
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. |
#4
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
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: philo schreef in berichtnieuws ... On 12/01/2014 05:03 AM, R.Wieser wrote: 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=...MIPGpwjLMETir- &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. |
#5
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
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: Mayayana schreef in berichtnieuws ... 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. |
#6
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
On 12/01/2014 08:31 AM, R.Wieser wrote:
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. It did not work in Firefox but I tried Chrome and it went through the capcha was not quite readable to me |
#7
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
"Mayayana" ha scritto nel messaggio
... I get an average 400+ visitors daily on my own site. May we know the address of your site? |
#8
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
On Monday, December 1, 2014 5:01:13 AM UTC-6, R.Wieser wrote:
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=...MIPGpwjLMETir- &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 |
#9
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
Andy wrote:
On Monday, December 1, 2014 5:01:13 AM UTC-6, R.Wieser wrote: 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=...MIPGpwjLMETir- &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 The fact that some of them are so difficult means (to me) one of three things: 1) the coder is unaware of it... 2) the coder has little control over it or little interest in simplifying it... 3) some "recognition" software has gotten sophisticated enough that the captchas have to be that difficult so as to exclude non-human responses or any combination above. :-) |
#10
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
| 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". |
#11
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
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 he 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: Bill in Co schreef in berichtnieuws ... Andy wrote: On Monday, December 1, 2014 5:01:13 AM UTC-6, R.Wieser wrote: 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=...MIPGpwjLMETir- &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 The fact that some of them are so difficult means (to me) one of three things: 1) the coder is unaware of it... 2) the coder has little control over it or little interest in simplifying it... 3) some "recognition" software has gotten sophisticated enough that the captchas have to be that difficult so as to exclude non-human responses or any combination above. :-) |
#12
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
On Mon, 1 Dec 2014 12:03:09 +0100, "R.Wieser"
wrote: 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 |
#13
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
Andy wrote:
On Monday, December 1, 2014 5:01:13 AM UTC-6, R.Wieser wrote: 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=...MIPGpwjLMETir- &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 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 |
#14
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
On Monday, December 1, 2014 6:47:14 PM UTC-6, Paul wrote:
Andy wrote: On Monday, December 1, 2014 5:01:13 AM UTC-6, R.Wieser wrote: 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=...MIPGpwjLMETir- &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 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 |
#15
|
|||
|
|||
Off-topic (fully) - You're not human !
On Mon, 01 Dec 2014 09:40:44 -0600, philo* wrote:
On 12/01/2014 08:31 AM, R.Wieser wrote: 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. 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. |
|
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|