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Previous: Lexar EULA | Main | Next: Recycle Bin message
May 30, 2005 12:03 AM
Broken: Yahoo word verification
Connor Broaddus's submission also appeared in a recent Popular Science. Nice work, Connor!
Connor writes: "This is a Yahoo word verification, but what does it say?"
Yeah, whenever I join all those "logo surprise" groups on Yahoo!, I sometimes have a hard-as-heck time figuring out that word verification thingy!
Does it really matter? If you type in the wrong letter or number, most of the time you will get a new word for verification.
Uh, people pardon my accent but I thought the idea was to give a set of letters that a human can read but a computer(autoamted responce cannot.
heh, i had one that said shit one time, it was pretty cool, i wish i had done a screen shot but i forgot about it. that is pretty broken, i thought it said UL7rW BTW
Bob yes if you type it incorrectly it gives you another chance with a different code.
What I don't understand is the need to have those extra lines most of the time it makes the given code look different.other companies use this similar procedure without the trouble I have with yahoo i.e.ticketmaster.
So far we've had 3 distinct interpretations of this pattern. I also could see uU7rW, uLS7rW, and maybe even all of the above with a small w at the end. That's pretty ambiguous.
I'm sure this does prevent most automated systems from getting through, but how many humans does it prevent? Even if it offers you a second and third chance, it wouldn't take too many examples like this to make me just give up entirely. Bad customer experience.
The ironic thing is, spammers aren't using AIs to crack these CAPTCHAs, they're using human beings.
For example, they will download all the GIFs, feature them as a login requirement on some X-rated sites, and let the lonely Internet denizens do all the hard work for them.
Umm, last time I checked UL3rW isn't a word. Yahoo calls their program Word Verification, and then asks you to enter the text, but the text you enter in isn't a word.
Not only that but these things don't stop automated programs. I've seen a couple research projects where they are able to crack these on the first time 80%-90% of the time.
The only things these enter text to verify you're a person do is discriminate against those who are blind and use adaptive technology to view the web (screen readers), or anoy normally sighted visitors. Network solutions used to have this same sort of thing running when you'd try and do a whois on a domain, but they have abandoned it becasue of the user issues and frustration. When I am confronted by one of these find the hidden message id's, I just leave.
Word verification on some sites, and i think Yahoo offers it, has an option where it will read off what is in the box via a wav file. I have had to use it many occasions because of the fact that i can not read what is in the box and it is very useful.
So if you're deaf and blind and just access it through a braille interface, do they provide a plain-text option? :P
slashdot's is worse. Most of them are in all uppercase but it only accepts the lowercase version as correct.
that is pretty broken. i hate those things. couldnt they do something more simple like answering a question (i.e: The name of this website is:________ [yahoo])
BriZokEd
Hm. I thought it was either ULTTW, ULTrW, or ULTYW. Although come to think of it, maybe that is a 7 rather than a T. At least they could use characters that aren't ambiguous and that actually come with some context!
And Yahoo doesn't have the audio clip option, either. I've found, incidentally, that I can usually decipher the audio ones better than the visuals despite my rather dodgy hearing, which should say something about these things.
Not to mention that I have a hard enough time entering random strings of characters without any distortion applied to them, as I imagine is the case with many dyslexics...
The biggest problem with this type of challenge to distinguish automated singn-ups from a human being is that software recognition algorithms continue to improve. To defeat the software, the letters and numbers in the puzzle need to be distorted and obscured to a degree that even humans have trouble recognizing them.
What's so bad about automated registration that they have to make it impossible for normal people to sign in? Seriously, the tech guys who wrote that are broken, as is the person who allowed it to be on Yahoo.
And JW- How is this discriminatory? How are blind people using Yahoo anyway? Aren't computers visual interfaces? Hard for blind people to use anyway.
You should have seen me try to do that for an MSN passport thingie. Ugh. It took me 10 minutes because there were some letters that looked like the little swishy lines that I thought meant nothing.
i think it is some kind of video to brail machine. Like the old dot matrix printers that had pins that moved. Or it could be a piece of software that reads every word on the screen
i think it is some kind of video to brail machine. Like the old dot matrix printers that had pins that moved. Or it could be a piece of software that reads every word on the screen
Hmmm... Interesting point. It is called so why can no one understand a so-called . It's true, they are hard to read and aren't very secure. Heck, I'v had websites I couldn't access because of this recognition.
Here is the link to one of the research projects Joshua Wood mentioned: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mori/gimpy/gimpy.html
I have a blind friend who uses a screen reader that turns text on the screen into an auditory interface...
That's interesting. I'll bet it mangles the pronunciation of a lot of words, though. How does your blind friend click on links & stuff?
The computer game, America's Army (Commissioned and distributed for free by the US Army) requires similar verification to set up an account. Trouble is, most of the screens are totally incomprehensible, with Os and 0s looking the same, as well as Is, Ls, and 1s, among other things. Worse still, the pattern changes after each attempt....
I never got the word varification abstractness. most graphics programs i have used have a "text" option, that produces legit, readable text so can't they use that so we can read it?
The worst thing about this is that it isnt just for signing up.. I got one of these the other day when I went to send an email out of a Yahoo act I've had for ages.
"I never got the word varification abstractness. most graphics programs i have used have a "text" option, that produces legit, readable text so can't they use that so we can read it?"
But then an automated process could easily read the text (Google for OCR). The whole point is to prevent computers from understanding the images, and still allow humans to read them.
You might look up the definition of "word" again sometime. You might be sure to realize that its presence in any dictionary nary qualifies it as a word, because a dictionary is only one list of words, not the filter through which all bunches of letters must pass in order to be consider words or not words. A sound, group of sounds, symbol or group of symbols is the minimal requirements for a word. Likewise, just because Scrabble doesn't consider proper names and contractions as words according to its rules, they are still words. If I assert that uL7rW is a word that means "the word that must be typed in order for you to gain access", then it is unquestionanly a word by the purest definition. A dictionary is not the fliter for determining whether a word is a word, it is a listing of words in current, common use and their definitions. A colloquialism is a word used by a group of people that may not be present in a dictionary, such as the pronunciation of "ask" like "axe". This makes the pronunciation "axe" correct, as a colloquialism because it fits the defintion of a word, and is effective within that group to represent its intended concept, regardless of someone says that it "isn't" a word. Etymology books, or those listing the origins/histories of words, often list simply first appearances of such words in published media. The fact that uL7rW has now appeared in this remark with a suggested definition, makes it eligible for inclusion in a future word origin study. Your act of declaring uL7rW as not-a-word makes it a word. Booyah.
I’m amazed that “word verification” has become a phenomena. This is something of a late entry to the WV party but I thought it was nice to see someone have some fun with it: http://www.word-verification.com/
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Previous: Lexar EULA | Main | Next: Recycle Bin message
Ul7RW. That is one of the bad ones but i have seen much worse.
Posted by: unknown at May 30, 2005 12:21 AM