Comments on: Google’s new Captchas: Users to rotate images upright to prove they are humans

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:45:33 +0000

Which way is up in sample C? The pictures look like headache pills with no obvious upright position. A and B are easy.

By: Sardar Mohkim Khan

Sardar Mohkim Khan — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:41:26 +0000

You are right, most of the times they just appear too compressed and it becomes impossible to differ when one letter ends and the other begins

By: etihw2

etihw2 — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:44:01 +0000

This is alot better than the horrible blurry warped text that is commonly used.

By: brody

brody — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:34:33 +0000

what is c supposed to be?

By: UKBoy

UKBoy — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:08:23 +0000

@Sonsum: it won’t be your computer at all to do the processing, they’ll just serve you 2 pics rotated server-side. And anyways you can do that with 2 lines of javascript, no need for flash.
The point is that if you do it client-side, a bot can easily understand which way to put it upright, that’s why it’s certainly server-side.

@Spuffler: if you hate the internet so much, just get off it, instead of leaving pathetic anti-tech comments on this ‘yet another better idea’ blog.

By: mjcpk

mjcpk — Mon, 25 May 2009 13:01:42 +0000

The real problem with this idea is that there aren’t that many possible solutions and a bot would have a good chance of success through guesswork alone.

The CAPTCHA would have to accept a certain range of values as being correct. If accepts a range of 10 degrees then there are only 36 possible answers to each image. Odds of 1 in 36 are far to low to keep the bots at bay.

By: spuffler

spuffler — Sun, 24 May 2009 00:41:50 +0000

Me, I’m VERY tired of all the horsepuckey that I already need to go through just to give my human opinion:
-joining each and every ‘yet another better idea’ blog and being forced to create a membership and then retaining all the hundreds of membership records,
-having to properly retype some severely distorted random text,
-now we have the wonderful, but not quite better, idea of ‘image rotating’ to prove I’m human.
Too many ‘yet another better ideas’.
All this because money is involved. The free exchange of ideas has a negative impact on society, and complicating the information exchange is only part of the picture: just wait until there are more cyberlaws.

I agree with Sonsum: soon enough, there will be mandatory requirements for a browser to have installed Flash, then Silverlight, then Greenlip, then Halftree, then Spudtruck, then Andromeda, then….. too many possible, too many endless and too many seemingly likely options for my needs. I can personally leave the internet, if this keeps up. Yeah, you’ll miss me. Totally fed up.

By: Sonsum

Sonsum — Sat, 23 May 2009 05:43:53 +0000

I could see this kind of captcha needing flash or Java or something of that sort which would cause it to perform poorly on older hardware. My Pentium II, 366 MHz laptop works fine for normal web browsing but absolutely crawls with Flash Player. This kind of captcha would prevent me (and others) from using Google’s services and would cause us to switch to an online service that does not require this CPU-intensive process.