Has CAPTCHA Been Broken?

I've never understood people like this; the ones that spend untold hours writing virus code, etc., for no other reason than to create problems.

The worst part, is that when they do things like this, they are creating more and more reasons for government to snake it's way into the internet.

They love excuses to protect us and keep us safe.

Gotcha....

Was it ever in one piece ?

Lost count of how many times I've entered the wrong characters (so to speak) when setting up an account that uses it.

How easy would it be to set up a cyber sweat-shop. If I'm some nasty jerk trying to infiltrate a system, I get a dozen people to work at it. A program tries to create new accounts wherever, send the Captcha to a human, who then replies with a genuine human responce which is then fed back. My sweatshoppers can do maybe one every 5 seconds.....Gotta bung in a few deliberate mistakes to make it look real, maybe use some IP spoofing.

Don't think this chat will go far - people in the know are hardly going to elaborate on how they trap anyone using methods to defeat CAPTCHA.

About the only use I can see for the whole thing is reCaptcha for digitizing handwritten books.

This is what happens on a Saturday night when there's nothing on TV .

I think the article should be read to the end where it quotes the owner of the company as saying, "...Vicarious notes that it is not releasing its software publicly. "Security companies won't have to replace text-based CAPTCHAs with something different,"..."

This was simply a demonstration of an advance in the area of artificial intelligence, not a malicious attack to crack the CAPTCHA system. White Hat cracking forces weaker code to be rewritten or supplanted, it is not for the purpose of criminal gain. As a matter of practice really good security code is open sourced for the explicit purpose of allowing others to see how it works, discover its vulnerabilities, and therefore prove its usefulness.

Yeah, but if they're working on AI, there are plenty of things they could have picked besides CAPTCHA. Now that the cat's out of the bag, it's only a matter of time until the bad guys have it figured out.

I guess it's just the nature of the beast.

Much more easier for criminals would be to let the spam bot copy the image of the captcha and send it to his master and get the answers back. Then the bot can scavenge 100 sites and only thing the scammers had to do is solve the captcha.