Controversy flares over ReCaptcha's effectiveness
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Security researcher BitLand has said in a report that the ReCaptcha technology used by Google to secure itself against logins by bots is flawed, but Google says that it is BitLand's analysis that is defective.
In the report, BitLand researchers used optical character recognition (OCR) technology to break the Captchas from various sources, including those provided by ReCaptcha. The team demonstrated the general ineffectiveness of many of the techniques used to distort the characters in a Captcha, and showed that modern OCR software could easily recognize the letters and numbers in many Captchas previously thought to be safe from such tactics.
However, Google disputes the methodology used in the BitLand study, saying that it uses outdated Captcha's to make it seem as though the machine solvers were more effective than they actually were, and that there had been advances in technology since then.
Captchas have been in use for many years in the internet, keeping automatic processes out of message boards and webmail services. Their name is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
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