Comments on: A gallery of indecipherable Captchas

By: Retina Post

Retina Post — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:41:00 +0000

Annoyed by Captcha, try an alternative: http://blog.retinapost.com/2011/introduction/

It works with feeds and custom text. This brings an advantage: it can be used to deliver messages to users.

By: Kaleberg

Kaleberg — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 04:55:00 +0000

I’ve had trouble with some captchas as well. Is there a web site that will translate them for you? They are sometimes so messed up that only a computer could unscramble them.

By: Sparrow

Sparrow — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:31:00 +0000

I just type the more readable word as it is and substitute a random invective for the other. It always works.

By: Spencer Cross

Spencer Cross — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:06:00 +0000

Ha! About five minutes after reading this I was registering on a website and it presented me with a stream of similarly indecipherable Captchas like the two attached. I suppose the first is actually not terribly hard to read, but I’m guessing most users wouldn’t know the key combination to type a pi symbol.

By: Tadas Jelinek

Tadas Jelinek — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:50:00 +0000

Try listening gmail audio captcha.. Can’t they make it a bit brighter? Now it’s like a something from a horror movie.

By: David McKee

David McKee — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:41:00 +0000

RECaptchas are made from two parts: a scanned word and a computer generated one.

Scanned words:
* Are often proper English words
* Are seldom crossed out
* Are occasionally not a sequence of simple letters (numbers, arabic, greek…)
* Come in a variety of fonts

Computer generated words:
* Are seldom proper English words
* Are nearly always crossed out
* Always are made of simple letters
* Are always in the same font.

So long as you get the computer generated word right (and in the right place, first or last*) it doesn’t matter what you put for the scanned word: RECaptcha don’t know; so even if you type ‘penis’ it’ll work.

*: untested, might not matter.

By: notanonymousanymoar

notanonymousanymoar — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:00:00 +0000

you forgot the overline and im pretty sure thats a chi

By: notanonymousanymoar

notanonymousanymoar — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:59:00 +0000

no, the trick is you can enter a letter that looks like ANY letter, because recaptcha doesn’t care, the cyrillic part is just for “shits ‘n giggles”, as you americans would say.

By: MikeRich

MikeRich — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:09:00 +0000

Shhhhh! You know those are the words that open up the Eternal Bottomless Pit in which lurk They Who Shall Not Be Named.

By: scav

scav — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 09:41:00 +0000

What is this, the 1990′s? Just open up your unicode character picker, copy out some characters that look like the ones in the captcha and paste them in. Nobody’s expecting you to understand them.
It helps if you know they are probably greek or chinese or arabic so you know where to look, and it helps more if you have the kind of multi-cultural literacy that you can make a definite identification of the characters when comparing them with a unicode font on your computer, but even if not, it should be embarrassing to admit defeat-by-ignorance so readily.

By: Soul Cake Duck

Soul Cake Duck — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 08:17:00 +0000

inglip will not tolerate such mockery!

By: Paul Cowan

Paul Cowan — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 06:53:00 +0000

Not sure why this answer wasn’t accepted…

http://i.imgur.com/a5LDe.png

By: TooGoodToCheck

TooGoodToCheck — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 05:40:00 +0000

IPA/DIPA should be pretty easy if you’re in to beer (although personally I find IPAs a bit overhopped, and DIPAs are just madness)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_Pale_Ale#Double_India_Pale_Ale

By: andy

andy — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 04:24:00 +0000

Captcha Drives me crazy. I have screenshots of capthas worse than these. Drives me up the wall banannas. I’ve even bugged the admin of this sight and was sent to captha tech support and everyone kinda just shrugged. Some of the words I get are from the Crab Nebula light years away. I’m tired of it. Make it numbers or something. It’s like taking shoes off at the airport. I rather take the risk, the check is too annoying.

By: Nihilist

Nihilist — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 04:14:00 +0000

you need a rosetta stone to decipher some of those damn characters…. and if your screen is small, fugettaboutit….

By: Palomino

Palomino — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:31:00 +0000

The only time I ever had trouble with one of these was when I tried deleting my Facebook account, I couldn’t get the code correct so I just left it alone. It worked, I still have my Facebook account.

By: Coal Miki-Restall

Coal Miki-Restall — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:03:00 +0000

Had one like that the other day, complete with the omicron mark, and utterly indecipherable text. I could make out a total of 4 letters.

By: 〠

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:02:00 +0000

If you ever get the same Captcha again, the part on the right says 道教と佛敎 (dōkyō to bukkyō), or Taoism and Buddhism

By: Simper

Simper — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:46:00 +0000

I’m dyslexic. No joke, the stupid make sure I’m not a computer methods have locked me out of more than one website. It is pretty embarrassing to have to go get someone to read one for you.

By: Eark_the_Bunny

Eark_the_Bunny — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:14:00 +0000

@#$%&!!!

By: mattcornell

mattcornell — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:14:00 +0000

I feel your pain. This one nearly broke me.

https://plus.google.com/111505475754385566447/posts/S4Cg9cpLV6L

By: dagfooyo

dagfooyo — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:13:00 +0000

I don’t see any issue with any of these, they’re all perfectly readable. You all must be bots.

By: Graysmith

Graysmith — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:11:00 +0000

Those aren’t even close to some I’ve been getting recently. A few times I’ve gotten “words” that appear to be arabic script, and there’s quite literally no way to decipher them.

By: Harold

Harold — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:11:00 +0000

My pet theory for a while has been that ReCaptcha has solved all of the easy words and now we humans are trying to solve the words that made the computer go WTF. You know, backwards words, stuff that’s written perpendicular to the page, and scientific symbols.

By: tinyinkling

tinyinkling — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:09:00 +0000

I particularly like how reCaptcha occasionally uses letter sets not installed on the computer. I don’t know if the user had Greek mappings available, but I know I didn’t have Arabic mappings for the one I got.

By: Donald Petersen

Donald Petersen — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:56:00 +0000

Thank you, Fex. You did explain it very well, and in fact I did know what the recaptcha project was for. I’m not a particularly big fan of the overall goal, but what the hell; it’ll outlive me.

Just struck me as a funny motto: stop spam. read books.

If I were actually reading a book right now I wouldn’t have to stop to puzzle out a damned captcha. ”Help us digitize the library of humanity” might be a more honest plea, and even with that added honesty, I wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to help.

By: Lukezor

Lukezor — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:55:00 +0000

Well that first one isn’t too bad. I regularly sign off my sms messages to my girlfriend with lambda-oxo.

By: David Barak

David Barak — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:52:00 +0000

I once had one that said “have semtex.” Thankfully I didn’t.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semtex

By: coffeecoffee

coffeecoffee — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:45:00 +0000

Does this make you more human than me?

By: Oskar

Oskar — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:44:00 +0000

What’s so hard about “ionalion λ0χ0″?