Blogger captchas

[cellio]

Dear Blogger users,

I would like to be able to comment on your posts at times, but the Blogger captcha (the prove-you're-a-human-and-not-a-spambot image with distorted letters) has been getting harder and harder to read over the last several months, such that it usually takes me 3-4 tries and today I failed after 8. I infer that clicking on the little wheelchair icon is supposed to give me an alternative, but it didn't do anything for me.

Does Blogger give you the ability to whitelist IP addresses? Is there some other way to solve this problem? Or do I need to stop believing that I'll be able to comment on posts?

Comments

[jducoeur]

What, do they think bots run the images through OCR software?

Well -- yeah. Actually, as far as I can tell, most of the bots are more sophisticated than most current OCR software. (Note that, for all that the captchas are hard to read, the bots are *still* managing to crack many of them: there was a great do-to recently when the malware started successfully cracking Google's captchas...)

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I thought the popular trick to "cracking" the captchas was to set up a porn site with sufficient keywords (hence traffic), and then relay the latest captcha onto someone trying to login to get free porn.. who would then solve it for you. Social engineering at its finest.

It is possible spammers have higher OCR technology, but if they are so sophisticated, they have not revealed it to me in over a decade. They feel more like script kiddies to me.

[jducoeur]

Well, I think that most of the spammers *are* script kiddies. But it looks like the guys running the botnets are pretty damned savvy technically, and are making a business of selling services to those script kiddies. *They're* the ones to be worried about.

(But interesting point about the captchas: I hadn't heard that, but it's possible...)