Captcha – are you smart enough?

I read a Norwegian news article earlier today regarding that spammers had overcome the current version of CAPTCHA that Microsoft uses at their services. And I can’t but help thinking that why are we fooling ourself? If it can be programmed then it can be reversed – end of discussion. Does it help? Not really, it only slow down the spammers, and make life miserable for the end-user of your webpage. Soon you need a doctor degree in typography in order to actually understand what the CAPTCHA is trying to tell you. Sure, it’s impressive to see what new ways they are coming up with to try to keep the robots out; but when I need to take out a dictionary to form words or look up on Wikipedia to figure out what kind of animal they just asked me to describe – then in my eyes its gone way too far.

It gets even worse, as I were browsing around the internet following various newspapers that had picked up this so-called-story; I found numerous services where they claim that they can beat quite a few of the CAPTCHAs out there; though there is one that really stood out; an Ukranian company – OCR Research Team. These guys have broken services like:

• Friendster
• MySpace
• Rapidshare
• Paypal

And thats just a few of the services where they have automated the CAPTCHA responses. We can only hope that someone soon finds a better way to tell man from computer; since CAPTCHAs really have outlived their role.

• The OCR Research Team