Captcha (I'm trying to make this 15 characters long)

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/captcha.html

This is an actual CAPTCHA I was shown when trying to log into PayPal.

As an actual human and not a bot, I had no idea how to answer. Is this a joke? (Seems not.) Is it a Magritte-like existential question? (It’s not a bicycle. It’s a drawing of a bicycle. Actually, it’s a photograph of a drawing of a bicycle. No, it’s really a computer image of a photograph of a drawing of a bicycle.) Am I overthinking this? (Definitely.) I stared at the screen, paralyzed, for way too long.

It’s probably the best CAPTCHA I have ever encountered; a computer would have just answered.

(In the end, I treated the drawing as a real bicycle and selected the appropriate squares…and it seemed to like that.)

Jeff
(From the link :slight_smile: )

4 Likes

I hope captcha goes the way of dinosaurs. I would not even put it in a museum.

What a time waster!
'38Packard

1 Like

It’s not wasting time, it’s free labor.

AIs need data. Lots of data. WIth labels. This is a cat, that’s a horse, these letters are XYBOR, there’s a yield sign and this is a stop sign. Every captcha you do adds to the training data.

4 Likes

Captcha is a way of making life difficult for the innocent majority to foil a minority of miscreants. One of the worst human interfaces ever invented.

I have been using a user friendly interface of my own design that not a single bot has ever broken in over two decades. it’s user friendly, all it does is to ask the poster to read and verify his post before accepting it.

The Captain

2 Likes