Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Anyone notice the new impossible Captcha?

This new Captcha which is monopolizing the market now, with the street signs, mountains, and rivers.

I was just on a site and after 40 passes has to give up. My hand was too tired.

I then did the contact webmaster to ask if he could sign me up manually, but the captcha was there too, and I could not beat it again. What is this..??

Give a link so we can see the same issue.....

Here's a link to Problem with Captchas, in which kevs has already raised the same issue.

I run into these new Captchas more frequently than I like, but I can't think of where I've seen one recently to post a link. Sorry.

Count yourself lucky that you've never run into one.

What's easy to miss, which makes the exercise difficult, is that the pane is dynamic, i.e. as you click on correct pics they're replaced by new ones, and you're not finished until there are no applicable pics left on which to click.

I dunno; it seems like overkill, but maybe bots have gotten that smart.

Silas, good so someone else see and has suffered too. What is this company, how have they come to dominate the Captcha market?

I have a Mailchimp newsletter and Chimp forces the Captcha for sign ins and I wonder how many people bail.

I'm not looking at a Captcha example at the moment, but my recollection is there is an icon for a sound option (for the visually impaired). Give that a try and see if it is easier.

Since I realized that the panes are dynamic I've had no problems with them other than the amount of time it takes to get past them, and I think that's the key for everybody: the confounding trap is clicking through a pane once and thinking that you're ready to move on when, in fact, you've still got more or less of a fresh, unclicked pane in front of you.

I got hit yesterday with "Apartment Buildings" among pictures of stores and office buildings. I couldn't figure out how to differentiate between an office and a high rise apartment building. After several trials I decided I didn't need an account on that site.

Have you got an opinion about my speculation that bots have gotten so smart that this "overkill" really isn't overkill...is, in fact, necessary?

I read once that Google's got an algorithm that deciphers the number Captchas, which I guess extends to the address signs, and what Google can do the bad guys can likely do, so might that be at the root of it?

More: As much of a roadblock as these new Captchas are to bots, they're at least an equal annoyance to legitimate users, and they may ultimately bite their proponents on their butts.

Thanks ARtie and Joe, so glad others are also suffering I thought it was just me.

Thanks Ira, will try audio next round.

Anyone can figure out the name of the company that is behind this? I'd like to know how to reference them when/ if I complain to a website about it. I'm sure some of these sites can choose their captcha solution.

Yeah, this one time, I flubbed, and flubbed again, and it literally never ended, never. I "think" their pattern is if you flub they put you through the grinder even harder as they assume you are a bot.

It's too much, and now I worry as Mailchimp is using it.

These CAPTCHAs are created be ReCAPTCHA, a subsidiary of Google.

The problem is that hackers and spammers are applying increasingly sophisticated machine learning and pattern recognition to traditional CAPTCHAs (the ones that have the distorted, wiggly letters and numbers), and those styles of CAPTCHA can now be broken by cracking software faster than humans can do it. The pane-style is a lot more resistant to machine learning, but the problem is that the panes may contain elements that are easy to overlook. (I saw one recently that said "click all the panes that contain a road sign," and one of them contained a road sign partly obscured by a telephone pole, so it was difficult to see.)

Thanks Tacit, well good to know who it is now. I understand the motivation... but it's a very flawed system, as it often never ends, and is to error prone. It's losing clients for sites.

How do the vision-impaired deal with these new Captcha?

As Ira mentioned, there's an audio option.

It's been awhile since I used one of those, because the stupid captchas that kept coming up when I hit reload were ALL illegible. So I hit the audio option, and was treated to somewhere between three and six different people all speaking different things at the same time. I was somehow magically supposed to know which voice to listen to and type what they were saying, while ignoring the others. I gave up after three or four of them.78=

Since there is an audio option, then why isn't it easy for all to use? Or does that require a braille reader or such?

Please excuse. I don't intend to be argumentative, I'm just confused.

anyone got a link to the "mountain/river/streetsign" captcha-inducing page?

Patience is the key to getting past the new Captchas.

You click on the applicable images, you pay attention to the new ones that appear, you click on the new applicable ones, eventually you've got no more images that require clicking, and...Voila!

More than a time consuming nuisance, it's a major PIA, but it's not the insurmountable problem it's been made out to be.

Second V1's request for a link; we may learn something if a few of us attack the same pane and track our time.