Friday 8 August 2014

type the two words you see in the picture below

I was registering for on-line access to my water bill.  Part of the registration process has a Captcha.  I saw:


“Oh, that won’t work.”  I clicked the refresh button.


“Oh. So what are the chances of that?”  I clicked the refresh button.


“Oh.  There seems to be a pattern here.”  So I typed “200” into the text box.  And got through to the next screen.

Well, I suppose that “two hundred” is, after all, two words!

1 comment:

  1. Haha ! Developers didnt update the text of the widget probably. I think this is due to historical reasons, and due to the laziness of developers (after all, isn't a good developer a lazy developer ?)

    First, recaptcha was used with 2 words : one was a computer-generated word (with some distortions/noise to harden a OCR bot), and the other one was... a word from a book that google algorithms were not sure to recognize. And so, users are massively used as OCR algorithms.

    Then, google used this algorithm by mixing words and parts of a photo, which were taken with a streetview car. to improve their OCR algorithms (they assume that when 90% of 3 hundred people are saying "this is 200", the answer is correct).

    It seems that now, they only use images, I assume because most of OCR bots are not able to decipher those kind of picture, and as long as google is now sure about what is written on some pictures, they use it for their captcha test.

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