Tag Archives: captcha

PlayThru CAPTCHA Alternative: Achievement Unlocked: You’re a Human!

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I don’t sign up for a lot of things – one of the many benefits of being antisocial and reclusive! – but when I do, I hate the CAPTCHA part. I know that accomplishing it is very simple, but there are just times when the text it wants me to spell is so mangled that I couldn’t possibly guess it right, making me doubt if I am indeed a person. I’m sure that I’m a gamer though, which is why I like PlayThru.

playthru captcha alternativeInstead of requiring users to type distorted text, PlayThru involves playing simple drag-and-drop games like the ones in the picture above. Even if you’re not a gamer, I think PlayThru is still easier and much more fun to figure out than CAPTCHA’s wavy or blurry characters. And if you can’t figure them out, I’m sure someone will make a walkthrough on GameFAQs. PlayThru is easy to install on popular platforms like WordPress, Drupal, phpBB, vBulletin, and there are also libraries available for PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python and .NET, so you have no excuse not to install it on your website if you have one.

You can try out PlayThru on its official website.

[via Ubergizmo]


Google Uses Street View Images in reCaptcha

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I never thought of Google's reCaptcha process as anything more than a way to catch spamming robots and prevent them from getting on forums and other Internet resources. Apparently, Google also uses...

Google reCAPTCHAs now featuring Street View addresses, 221b Baker St. to get even more famous

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If you've enjoyed decrypting the often frustratingly skewed (and occasionally humorously juxtaposed) reCAPTCHAs, you might be a bit sad to learn that Google is mixing things up with some rather more boring numerals. The combinations of two words are typically used as part of a registration form to ensure the registrant is, indeed, human. Google is now replacing one of the words in some of its reCAPTCHA forms with photos gleaned from Street View service. Google says it uses these numbers internally to improve the accuracy of Street View and that pulling them into reCAPTCHAs is part of an "experiment" to "determine if using imagery might also be an effective way to further refine our tools for fighting machine and bot-related abuse online."

In other words, Google's bots are already capable of decoding these numbers, which makes this all sound like a bit of a challenge to the rest of the OCR-loving coders in the world. Any takers?

[Image Credit: dirtbag]

Google reCAPTCHAs now featuring Street View addresses, 221b Baker St. to get even more famous originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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