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NuCaptcha offers video-based CAPTCHA prompts, easier for humans
Like spam filters, Captcha is one of the necessary evils of the Internet. Google's Captcha is consistently irritating for me. I routinely fail it at least once, sometimes twice in a row, and I'm not a robot (to the best of my knowledge). Google bought reCAPTCHA a while back, and it's nicer (and helps a good cause), but they still seem to be using their older, super-irritating Captcha in many places.
The problem with Captcha is that it's irritating to users, and it can also be quite easy to break. Many programs and spambots contain built-in Captcha-defeating mechanisms that use sophisticated OCR to figure out what the image says, and they're often quite good. So, everyone loses; the users get an irritating interface, and the sites still get automated "visitors." And the harder the sites fight the bots, the more irritating it gets for the users.
NuCaptcha offers a completely different take on the issue: use video! You get a nice, customizable Flash video window with a bunch of text scrolling from right to left. The letters wiggle a little bit but are quite legible otherwise. You only need the last three letters of the string, which show up in red, and are (apparently) random.
It is much harder to apply OCR to video, so NuCaptcha can afford to be very legible, at least for now. I think it's a brilliant solution, and I can't wait to see it on more websites.
[via Switched]
Comments
9
Subscribe to commentsJdRAug 9th 2010 8:44PM
This captcha is defeatable, a video "only" is a secuence of images, extract one (the central frame in example videos) and find the zone of the image with the color that contains the letters, when you get this you have a captcha easyly defeatable like the megaupload one
ChrisGAug 9th 2010 8:50PM
It's FLASH video, meaning it could be rendered in a variety of ways. It's not a video stream.
But this does nothing to fix the problem. Captcha farms in India defeat the whole "verify human" part when you pay someone pennies an hour to do it for you.
codeman38Aug 9th 2010 9:06PM
Even though it's Flash, they still have to provide a GIF fallback for anyone using a non-Flash-capable device. (And they do; I actually tested from an iPhone.)
This, of course, is much easier to crack than the Flash version-- particularly since they only use one design for the GIF version-- which basically renders the security moot.
JdRAug 9th 2010 9:17PM
It can be captured directly from the screen and also like you says you can contract an Indian...
isotrexAug 9th 2010 9:39PM
I'm sensing ads on Captcha soon. lol.
DrakkenfyreAug 9th 2010 10:57PM
Some Captcha's are downright a pain in rhe ass. I have seen some so twisted you couldn't even tell they were english to begin with. And some, despite the letters clearly being what they were, repeatedly told me "Incorrect validation."
I know a site I run I still occasionally get spam from a bot getting passed the Captcha. I wonder what the bandwidth requirements for this video one would be.
pristy.siteAug 10th 2010 4:18AM
The someone will make OCR for videos, what then...?
Atanas BoevAug 10th 2010 4:30AM
It not just easy, it is EASIER to break. One gets to have multiple observations of the same text, with different rotations. I should give this as a signal processing project work to the students.
NickAug 10th 2010 10:31AM
Maybe these websites should pay Indians to call users to verify that the users is a not a machine.