Thread: [Solved] reCaptcha [International]
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Old 25.08.2010, 01:45
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drbits drbits is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Physically in Los Angeles, CA, USA
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@ remi,

As I told you privately, that discussion was deleted because it included insulting other members. I moved the discussion here to give you more flexibility.

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Please e-mail PSP with the URLs of the posts. He will try to find improvements to the spam filter for the specific spammers. I have not seen these posts, so I cannot report them.

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Except as Spiced Pork And Ham, spam has no official definition. Wikipedia.com never claims to be the authority on anything and they are a poor source to use as a reference.

In the context of this forum, spam is defined in the rules. Off-topic or repeated messages are spam under our rules (as it is for almost all boards).

You would be better off arguing your point. Referring to other people in a negative way is not productive.

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Observation tells me that there is nothing special about reCaptcha, except that the challenges are graphic, handwritten by several people, and obfuscated, not textual and there are enough different challenges to make an automated approach much more complex (specific countermeasures are in a different thread).

Google's self aggrandizing announcement about using reCaptcha for improving their OCR of old books was probably part of the initial plan. However, when they increase the obfuscation, they decrease the utility of the results for OCR. At this point, many of the challenge "words" are meaningless gibberish, not real words the OCR could not recognize.

Google is not alone in CAPTCHA. Reread the CAPTCHA list again. uGotFile changed their CAPTCHA challenges to do nasty things to recognition programs (not just fool them, but possibly damage hardware). They are not part of the Google crowd.

Any CAPTCHA is a "No Bots Allowed" sign. JD's browse capability is a Bot. JD can solve some of the riddles and force its way into No Bot territory, but any site that is serious about the No Bots policy can make things hard for JD.

Hotfile, uGotFile, MediaFire, and others have decided they are serious about keeping Bots out of free downloading. It is their right to set standards for use of their site. These storage hosts are not raking in cash. Some of the decryption advertising intermediaries might be making money, but most other companies are not.

I just do not see a conspiracy.