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

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

I have had the same problem. What, do they think bots run the images through OCR software?

More irritating, on some sites (dailyping.com) the captcha simply does not work under Safari or Opera, meaning I would have to use IE or FF. I can't fathom why something as simple as an image and a text box would be browser-specific, but it is.

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

Normally, you won't see the capcha if you are signed into Blogger with a Google/Blogger/OpenID account

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm glad it's not just me! (I'm sorry you're having trouble too, but I was beginning to think I was just being stupid...)

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

Use OpenID, and sign in with your livejournal id.

[byronhaverford.livejournal.com]

Perhaps they have a new supplier. I've found the known half of reCAPTCHA to be more difficult than the usual CAPTCHAs.

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

The handicapped image is supposed to produce a sound, which can then be typed or something. So perhaps turn sound on, then click on wheelchair?

OpenID & Google mail should both be viable options.

[fauxklore]

I haven't had a problem with blogger, but I have had some from Ticketmaster or tickets.com that took me a few tries because downstrokes lined up with the grid pattern they superimpose the characters on.

[cellio]

More irritating, on some sites (dailyping.com) the captcha simply does not work under Safari or Opera

Gah. Yeah, that seems pretty lame. What in the implementation is browser-dependant?

[cellio]

Aha. Thanks.

[cellio]

Thanks. If I use OpenID, am I giving a third party my LJ password? (I presume not, but I haven't used that before.)

[cellio]

I hadn't heard of reCAPTCHA before. Cool idea; too bad the implementation is giving you difficulty.

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

Honestly, I have no idea. I've been doing web development since before AOL knew of the internet, and can't imagine how that could happen. IE-specific ActiveX things, sure, but with it working in FireFox as well?

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

No, you actually log into LJ, and it just sends a verification that you successfully authenticated there.
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[cellio]

Sound is turned on. After about two minutes I heard three beeps, but nothing else. So I don't know what I was supposed to do, but I assume I didn't get what I was supposed to get.

[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...)