Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy - Hackdot

Re:Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA w... by BoppreH on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @11:58PM (#7601942)

All captchas I have seen were used to stop spam. The problem with spam is that 1) it's noise and 2) appears in large amounts.

Captchas approach the problem 1), by assuring only people can post and then hopefully increase the signal quality. It sucks because it requires mental effort, is hard on people with disabilities, blocks potentially useful bots (see reddit bots) and leads to an arms race.

What if we tried to solve the problem 2)? One possible solution is requiring a proof of work. Some computation that requires a few seconds, easily disguised while the user is typing the comment or filling the fields. It's an old idea but I've never seen an implementation in the wild. (yes, it would fail for mobile devices. fall back to captcha or something)

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Re:Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA w... by michaelt on Thursday April 17, 2014 @06:16AM (#7602798)

Isn't most spamming done by botnets these days, to avoid IP bans? So they have a plentiful supply of CPU cycles?

Also, regular users who visited your site without wouldn't install any software, so they'd be running the proof-of-work as slow javascript, while spammers could use GPU or even ASIC acceleration if proof-of-work became widespread.

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Re:Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA w... by sugarfactory on Thursday April 17, 2014 @02:13AM (#7602212)

A few seconds of googling gave me this WordPress plugin that requres a proof-of-work when posting a comment: http://wordpress-plugins.feifei.us/hashcash/

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