Thanks Goodness, Google's Gmail Captcha was getting beyond a joke.

".....socially adjust the CAPTCHA"
Are they trying to say "Rotate the image so it looks normal?"

Marketing shmarketing speak...

man, they're going to make it harder? on some log in's i have got to type a captcha in after examining it with a loop; you need a handwriting expert to find out what to punch in sometimes.

It's an interesting idea, which could eventually move CAPTCHA-breaking from something done mainly by bots to something that's wholly outsourced to third world sweatshops or the gullible.

If you know of the double act from the late 50s Pinky and Perky, you'll get a reminder of their voices if you've ever clicked on that button next to the Captcha, in the exasperated hope that it would inform you exactly what letters are in the Captcha.

2clean, lol, I can NEVER understand the spoken letters for CAPTCHAs!

With the whole Captcha thing I've always thought that there'll be a "eureka moment" where suddenly someone will come up with something really clever from left field and it will be easy for humans and impossible for bots - and we'll be right, for another few years at least.

I can NEVER understand the spoken letters for CAPTCHAs!

No of course not - you have to be handicapped and in a wheelchair to understand them - that's what the symbol indicates. *_*

It is just an old approach in new clothes. With this new captcha system Google still forgets the most important thing in stopping spambots. Human shouldn't proof that they are not a bot, but bots should proof that they qualify as a human.

I have reversed my approach on bot catching several months ago on my forums which have an average of 5000 spambot attacks per day. There was not one succeeding attempt in the last six months, even though no captchas or other human-intelligence checks were in place and all these forums allow posting without registration.

It shouldn't be difficult for Google to reverse their approach in the same way with only annoying the bots, rather than annoying the legitimate users.

I Agree with lammert, reversing the approach to "I am Human" works pretty good

-- at an angle --

On my sites, IIF X times = Boot, See you tomorrow.

Added:
<rant>

-- you have to be handicapped and in a wheelchair to understand them--

I hope that would actualy be tentitive to the developer who implemented the CAPTCHA system. The whole point is "Don't make me think" for the end user. One can't just go slaping CAPTCHAs on pages if one has not have clue what it is.

Taken from recent Friday Word Game: Unctuous zooplanktons. I think that is where the problem lays. People try to implement it and letting zooplanktons bread in their neghbourhood without understanding why.

<end rant />

Blend27

Compared to the achievements in other areas, that idea sucks, honestly.

I know of contest where users have to bring down a server, mostly remember one of NT vs Linux. Is there anything alike for captchas? wouldn't be a bad idea to set up something like that.

I have to go through several attempts to get them right most of the time. Or I just give up and go away from some sites that have them.

I write my own captchas. I usually make around 10 different ones and have them pulled dynamically. Most of the time I just draw a colored shape and ask simple type-in questions about it.

I figure if my users can't figure it out there's no way they're going to be able to decipher the other craptchas

DMOZ, apart from taking far too long and all its other problems has the worst captcha ever!

I track what criminals do on the net and how they do it and not long ago I found this ...

found this on digg:
[news.bbc.co.uk...]

And there is a site that will solve the captcha's with humans for as little as $6 per thousand.

From what I have read, they simply pass the captcha image to some unsuspecting person to solve and then pass the solution back to whatever form. Although the bbc article mentions using infected users, there are an unlimited number of ways to trick people into solving captcha's for another site.

So any captcha method that relies on Humans to solve can simply be defeated with this solution ... using Humans to solve it.

[edited by: phranque at 9:09 pm (utc) on April 24, 2009]
[edit reason] No urls, please. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

I thought I would comment on one statement from Google's blog:
We show people several images, one of which is a "candidate" and we see how people do. If everyone rotates it the same way, it is a keeper. If there is a lot of variation, we discard it.

Well ...
There are almost 20,000 new computer viruses being created every day.
There are approximately 250,000 new computers infected everyday that are used by these criminals.

That mass of "fake humans" could intentionally incorrectly solve these new images so that none are ever kept.

These criminals are far from stupid as my above post clearly demonstrates.

I hate long and complicated captchas. Max 4 letters should be enaugh.