Is it just me or have Captchas gotten insanely freaking impossible these days? I mean, I can’t even make out if I’m supposed to type in a letter, a number or a hieroglyphic. Annoying! We need a new Captcha method. What about drawing a shape?
MotionCAPTCHA, designed by Joss Crowcroft, is a clever little jQuery plugin based on HTML5 Canvas drawing tool. It’s only proof of concept right now (you don’t have to be exact, at all) but MotionCAPTCHA kind of injects some fun in security, drawing simple shapes is a lot better than trying to figure out if it’s an a, o ,e, 8, b or an @ symbol. You can test it out for yourself here. [MotionCAPTCHA via TNW]
Ogre
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 10:11 AMI dare say that it’s easier to write an algorithm that can draw an image it sees, rather than actually trying to recognise characters.
light487
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 10:13 AMWell considering that the image and the drawing box doesn’t even display on my screen, it has a little way to go yet.
Caesar Wong
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 12:20 PMConsidering this will probably take more time to draw than to type a few messy words, I’d say there’s no usability improvement at all – delaying me even longer from getting to the thing I’m trying to get to is not a good thing.
Candy
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 1:38 PMWhat will happen for the visually impaired? How is this accessible?
Brendan
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 2:37 PMCharacter CAPTCHAs don’t stop anything anyway. There’s plenty of services out there that have teams of low paid workers to solve CAPTCHAs submitted by clients. They’re only basic protection on their own, no matter how complicated they are.
TSH
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 2:55 PMreCAPTCHA’s two words are always in the form of a nonsense word in the same, wavy font and either an undecipherable symbol/glyph or an unusually warped regular word.
The nonsense word is the actual CAPTCHA. Get that right and you can type in anything as the second word (or first word, if it’s placed before the CAPTCHA word). Once this was pointed out to me it seemed reasonable that reCAPTCHA is crowdsourcing OCR to digitise books.
TheTom
Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 5:53 PMCaptchas are IMPORTANT. Wish more people realised this. It’s helping to digitise books:
http://techcrunch.com/2007/09/16/recaptcha-using-captchas-to-digitize-books/