Hi Chris and all,
Just to put my contribution in on this trhead. Sites that have put in
audio captchas have definitely provided a good method for us to handle
this. owever, I heard of a site that had one of these set up, and
actually removed it asof late, so they justh ave a visual captcha.
that being livejournal.com.
DOn't know why they removed their audio captcha, but unfortunately
they did.
Dan Eickmeier, Brantford, ONtario Canada. Amateur radio station: va3ets
EchoLink node number: 6165
MSN and email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Skype: va3ets
On 26-Mar-08, at 10:49 PM, Chris Blouch wrote:
A 'simple' solution is to just supply an audio equivalent. Usually
these are made from several different voices reading the letters
over top of background noise to try and spoil the spammers.
Unfortunatley most web sites assume sighted mouse clickers and fail
to provide this alternative. If you would like to hear an example,
give AOL's a try here:
https://new.aol.com/freeaolweb/
Go to the link chooser (VO-U) and follow the link that says "Can't
see this image?" which will pop a new window. In that window
activate the button that says "Play Audio". This will play an audio
version of the same captcha and drop you into the entry form field
so you can type it in. You don't have to actually fill anything else
out just to hear how this works.
That said, the general purpose is to keep automated systems from
creating bogus accounts and using them to send piles of spam or
other bad behavior. The idea is to present some media that is hard
to visually or audibly decipher in hopes that only real humans could
get it right. Of course this is an arms race where the captcha
(audio or image) are trying to keep ahead of the OCR or voice
recognition algorithms. Ultimately this path will end in failure but
for the moment it seems to keep the wolves at bay.
As to how to get other companies to do it right, I dunno. It takes a
lot of work to try and keep ahead of the race so I'm sure AOL,
Google and the like are not going to just give away their secret
systems for generating these things. By definition, if they open
sourced it that would give the spammers insight into how to crack
the system. So with no real sharing in order to support security by
obscurity companies are left trying to create their own systems or
buying them from somebody else, and those are the companies that
care. All the others are either ignorant or just hope the problem
will magically fix itself. Not gonna happen.
Longer term I'm hoping for some of the Open ID stuff to get popular
so I can use an authentication system that works for me and not just
the system built into a particular web site. That still a bit off
into the future though. See
http://openid.net/
CB
UCLA Bruins Fan wrote:
Can anyone tell me what the function of CAPTCHAS is supposed to
be? Why are they needed on so many sites? Do they really perform
any function other than making it difficult for blind users to
access sites?
Olivia
