The Captcha system is something we have all likely experienced at one point or another in our online lives. The system, a series usually consisting of warped letters and numbers, is used to filter out bots from real users. Captchas may be nearing the point of uselessness.
Standford Researchers have been able to use machine vision algorithms to get past many complex Captchas. 25% of Wikipedia’s Captchas, 66% of Visa’s, and a whopping 70% of Blizzard’s (a gaming company in a constant battle with bots) have been cracked. So far only Google’s ReCaptcha system has been able to get past being cracked.
How long will it be until all Captchas are easily cracked? How long will it be until we need to find another way to protect against bots? It seems that Stanford Researcher’s Captcha readers are working at a higher success rate than many humans due to a Captcha’s often confusing appearance.
My only real question is why are people trying to create something to break a security system that makes website administrator's lives easier? Sounds quite counter intuitive to me. The captcha system was invented on the basis that bots (or non-human controlled computer systems) were unable to read the code and so were unable to proceed. It cut down on amounts of spam emails, spam forum posts, and spam user registrations on sites. So I ask again, why are they inventing these algorithms?
