Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia - Valleywag Comments

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

richa6 — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:48:02 PDT

As i read in an early post about it, I'm not sure that the captcha is a good defence against bots.

richa6

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

raincoaster — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:37:39 PDT

Wow. You didn't know that? What about the "Free porn for breaking captchas" thing? You knew that, right?

raincoaster

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

matto — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:31:22 PDT

As soon as captchas began to be used years ago, porn-for-solve schemes were immediately predicted. Heck, I could probably automate this all with that Amazon Magic Donkey or whatever they call their piecework micropayment dealie.

matto

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

grishick — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:03:46 PDT

BS. $3/day in Russia cannot afford living anymore. Take a look at prices and salaries there.

grishick

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

FiveStarEggRoll — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:55:43 PDT

Step 3 above should read "Submit the original webpage form with the "solution" in an automated and timely manner..."

FiveStarEggRoll

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

FiveStarEggRoll — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:54:37 PDT

This has been going on for quite some time now and you cannot really stop it via IP address restrictions.

For example:

1. Screenscrape (usually via cURL or such) an account creation webpage or other form submission webpage using a respectable IP address.

2. Capture the captcha image, and then immediatlely present the image for "solving" via another webpage (or a [third world country] employee "admin" front-end).

3. Submit the original webpage form with the "solution" in a timely manner (i.e. usually before session expiration...thusly why shorter sessions are a good thing).

Many have done it as such above - having unknowing end users solve their captchas for them (i.e. they think they are solving a captcha for site A but in reality they are solving it for site B as an added step to site A's registration or what now).

Many others have just farmed it out to third world folks as in the original article (using the employee "admin" front-end).

-Harry Wang

FiveStarEggRoll

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

SteveEisner — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:26:33 PDT

[ha.ckers.org]
(check out the bidding in the comments)

via waxy.org

SteveEisner

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

zabovo — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:29:26 PDT

Can't resist:

Top 10 Worst Captchas

johnmwillis.com/other/top-10-worst-captchas/

zabovo

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

straight_up — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:26:36 PDT

Technically, Russia isn't Third World. The US and the Soviets were, IIRC, the first two "Worlds."

straight_up

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

sample032 — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:54:37 PDT

This is the kind of innovation that only the third world can deliver. It'll be sad to see them advance.

sample032

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

matto — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:34:18 PDT

@MalcoveMagnesia: Actually, it is hard. Both organizationally as well as technically. Many people find the practice smacks of racist overtones, and belive that such exclusion is either unfair or more pragmatically interferes with business operations (Chinese manufacturing partners, etc). Technically, there is some tenuous correlation between IP allocations and geographic regions, but these can be incorrect for a huge number of regions.

I used to work at a company that operated one of the 'root' domain name servers, and our office IP space happened to be assigned from RIPE, the organization that usually oversaw allocations for the EU region. Countless websites who like you thought it was "not that hard" decided that I was obviously in England, when I was actually in Redwood City.

matto

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

MalcoveMagnesia — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:18:23 PDT

It should be a secret (shhhhh), but it is not that hard for sites to prohibit entire blocks of spam-spewing IP addresses which are registered and originate in spam-spewing countries such as China or Russia.

MalcoveMagnesia

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

rwe112 — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:42:16 PDT

Righteous bucks

rwe112

Captcha codes being broken by hand in Russia

ryanmerket — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:41:10 PDT

That's how I bought my Jag.

ryanmerket